Liberals: Take the Gloves Off

The looming defeat of a progressive health care bill is a much greater disaster than meets the eye. The right wing will learn, as they already surmised from previous skirmishes, that they can blow the Democrats out of the water. They will use the same smear tactics, emotional lies, and talk radio campaigns to defeat whatever other progressive moves of any significance are left on the diluted and impoverished Obama agenda. And they will further water down whatever laws have been passed, the weak cap and trade bill for instance. Moreover, the right wing will use the same tactics during the forthcoming mid-term elections, as a dry run for 2012. By that time they will have convinced the masses that Obama was born on Mars, is a Soviet agent, and will take away the people’s right to shoot each other.

The liberals in response have been lame beyond belief. They have set up web pages that clarify the facts and provide corrections to misinformation—as if this was some kind of scholarly debate and the right and its followers will yield to the kind of corrections editors of scientific publications are prone to make. Liberals have called for a “stable, quality care” system, a phrase which has less appeal than last week’s dish water. They favor “evidence based policies,” a term that may excite a handful of policy wonks in a handful of think tanks. And they have been “negotiating”: making grand concessions to the other side without getting anything in return, just to show how conciliatory, bipartisan, and reasonable liberals can be.

The time has come for liberals to take off their gloves. A good place to start is to conduct hearings (Henry Waxman, where are you when we need you?) and town hall meetings fully dedicated to the ill doings of the private, profit-making sector. Lets hear about the sick who were denied care by insurance companies using one technicality or another; about private hospitals and clinics that pay recruiters to bring in patients from across the country in order to subject them to surgeries they do not need;  about the health care dollars that are pocked by high salaried executives, their mistresses and sons in law, and back room backers; about elders allowed to wallow in their own waste to increase profits at nursing homes, and about other senior citizens who were refused treatments in order to hasten their deaths after they paid the assisted living facility’s high entrance fees. In short, liberals need to show that the private, profit-making sector is riddled with abuse, corruption, and malpractice. Only then will a public option shine.

If you feel at this point that such accusations are unfair, that one cannot generalize, that there are good people in the private sector, that public institutions also have some failings – then you should look in the mirror and see one reason the right wing is winning.  This is not a theoretical debate which can be settled by checking the decimal points.  At issue are overarching conclusions and basic sensibilities: is the profit-making sector a more trustworthy provider of health care than the public one? Should it at least face some public competition? The debate has to focus on this level and employ a language most people can be affected by—or we may as well wave another white liberal flag and not bother to join the fight. And a fight it is, with much more than the future of health care at stake.

Comments

[Tony]

Yes, liberals need to buck up. As an aside, this is not a new problem. The Framers were liberals, and yet now illiberals who shout the loudest claim to truly represent the Founders, rather than *actual* liberals. How bizarre the "liberal," the very foundation of our republican, has become a dirty word. To see Glen Beck base his book on Thomas Paine while denouncing ideas and policies that Paine actually endorsed is strange, but typical. The point is that Enlightenment thinkers, as liberals today, had a blind-spot in their faith in the power of rational thinking. I'm not a Freudian per se, but I do think emotion is a much more powerful force on the psyche. To assume that logic and evidence alone will win the day, even as a moral victory, is naive and causing liberals to lose again and again. Intellectual education alone is insufficient. And frankly, liberals should stop being thin-skinned. Yes, if they do the same kind of negative campaigning that today's "conservative" pundits specialize in, the right will scream that they're "shrill," "unpratriotic," "unAmerican," "angry," "hateful," etc. Who cares what they think of us? They already toss around "Marxism" and "Nazism" wantonly with no bearing on reality (never mind the incompatibility of those two terms!) The right can act childish, hypocritical, and name-call all they want - liberals shouldn't let it faze them and should keep reaching out, as effectively as possible, to the American people without hesitation or high-minded guilt, or whatever it is that holds them back.

[Isher]

In the middle of a red state you can hear invocations of "Nazi" in reference to our President - down the office hall, in supermarkets, and elsewhere. Our foundational problem is revisionist history. Paternalistic, autocratic governments have typically come into being as a backlash against perceived (and in some cases real but certainly over-emphasized) political threats:

"This is the beginning of the Communist revolution! We must not wait a minute. We will show no mercy. Every Communist official must be shot, where he is found. Every Communist deputy must this very day be strung up."
-Goering

Meanwhile Stalin's Great Purge was justified as a reaction to suspected German spies and saboteurs.

And who stood against these autocrats? Democratic socialist (capitalist!) states; but don't say socialist in this day and age! Nazi stands for national socialism! That's what we hated about the Nazis, the booming industries and the fancy technology! The economic control! Not the social control so espoused by the right: it was neither the racism and genocide, nor the book burnings and glorification of violence in defense (or offense) of the motherland! (forgive me for my overly rude sarcasm here)

Our only recourse to counter ignorance is to go straight to the truth and put history at the forefront of our argument. Leave the "Nazi" epithets alone for now, but remind Americans instead that HMOs were established as non-profits (under Nixon!), and their corruption into for-profit organizations has led to a rise in health-care related bankruptcies from 8% in 1981 to 62% in 2007. Don't throw the statistics out there, of course, but sum them up with, as you say, relevant examples.

Remind Americans that their coffers are being robbed in the name of profit-motive, but where profit can only be gained as our system stands now by profiteering rather than by providing better services.

And above all, when epithets such as "communist" begin to be launched at Jones and others, and congressmen begin to call for his resignation, our rational congressmen should respond by calling for the resignation of those who spout insanity and back it by claiming that they are standing by the will of the people - when those people they stand by are the same "nativist" fringe elements that have served as a groundspring for the great wars and atrocities of the past.

[Mike M.]

"If you feel at this point that such accusations are unfair, that one cannot generalize, that there are good people in the private sector, that public institutions also have some failings – then you should look in the mirror and see one reason the right wing is winning."

Who appointed you the arbiter of what it's proper for liberals to think or believe? I even agree with you about the need for a robust public option but I won't tell my brethren what is open for debate and discussion and what isn't.