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The Moderate Left
By Jeff Fecke | December 15, 2009
This blog has been around for eight years, and for most of those eight years, people have complained about its name.
“Why do you call yourself moderate?” they complain. “You’re not moderate! You’re just a liberal communist pinko liberal liberal. So there.”
Okay, sometimes they’re less coherent than that. But still, there have been many times over the past five or six years where I’ve kind of agreed with them. I’m not really all that moderate. Policy-wise, I’m firmly ensconced in the mainstream of the Democratic Party, much closer to Russ Feingold or Barbara Boxer than Ben Nelson or Joe Lieberman. When Barack Obama has annoyed me, it has been for being too conservative. Clearly, my blog is misnamed.
But the health care debate has reminded me of exactly why I considered myself a moderate in the first place — because I simply do not agree that ideological purity in pursuit of failure is better than compromise and concession in pursuit of success.
All political parties are conglomerations of a large group of disparate interests, but all political parties have a division between the pragmatists and activists. Both are vital to success; a party of all activists would have ideas aplenty, brilliant, coherent ideas that they could articulate clearly and concisely — ideas that would never get enacted in any form. A party of all pragmatists, contrawise, would Get Things Done — those things being whatever happened to be doable, with little regard for core principles.
There are times when the activists need to be the clarion voice of the party. For Democrats, the Bush Administration was one of those times — a period when lines needed to be drawn in the sand, the party needed to move in lockstep opposition, and Democrats needed to articulate a clear vision for the country. And for the most part, activists did lead the Democrats during that time — and led Democrats, eventually, to large majorities in Congress, and to the White House.
But when a party is in charge, purity becomes harder to maintain. Because a minority party is able to say no, often, with little penalty. A majority party, however, has to say yes, if they want to get anything done.
And ultimately, this is why I originally defined myself as a moderate. Because I see the value in getting imperfect things done. Yes, there does hit a point where legislation becomes so imperfect as to be actively negative. But while legislation has the opportunity to do good, and to improve lives, it should be passed in whatever its best form can be.
For health care reform, alas, that’s likely to be the public-optionless plan that the Senate looks set to adopt. And the activists are furious, because the bill is incredibly imperfect. Digby’s comments are a pretty accurate reflection of this:
And Obama can say that you’re getting a lot, but also saying that it “covers everyone,” as if there’s a big new benefit is a big stretch. Nothing will have changed on that count except changing the law to force people to buy private insurance if they don’t get it from their employer. I guess you can call that progressive, but that doesn’t make it so. In fact, mandating that all people pay money to a private interest isn’t even conservative, free market or otherwise. It’s some kind of weird corporatism that’s very hard to square with the common good philosophy that Democrats supposedly espouse.
Nobody’s “getting covered” here. After all, people are already “free” to buy private insurance and one must assume they have reasons for not doing it already. Whether those reasons are good or bad won’t make a difference when they are suddenly forced to write big checks to Aetna or Blue Cross that they previously had decided they couldn’t or didn’t want to write. Indeed, it actually looks like the worst caricature of liberals: taking people’s money against their will, saying it’s for their own good. — and doing it without even the cover that FDR wisely insisted upon with social security, by having it withdrawn from paychecks. People don’t miss the money as much when they never see it.
And as for the idea that insurance reforms are a huge progressive victory that can only be accomplished once in a generation, well that’s a pretty sad comment on our country — and progressivism.
Very passionate, very well-argued, and not the least bit reflective of reality, starting with the fact that this bill does quite a bit more than simply force people to buy insurance. As Nate Silver notes, in 2016 the bill in the Senate would save a middle-class family of four $4,690 a year over what the status quo plus S-CHIP provides, and $10,576 over the status quo alone. Considering said hypothetical family would be earning $54,000, I’d say saving them 10 to 20 percent of their annual income every year is quite something. Probably the difference between owning a home and renting, possibly the difference between success and bankruptcy.
Moreover, Digby completely elides the fact that many, if not most, of the people who aren’t insured would dearly love to be insured, if they could only find an insurance company to take them. But they can’t, because they take antidepressants, or once had gall bladder surgery, or because they’re too fat. Or all three, in my case — because I’ve been turned down from purchasing private insurance for those very reasons. I am not now “‘free’ to buy private insurance.” Indeed, I am quite un-free to do so. This bill would end those restrictions, and allow me to be insured privately. That is not nothing. That is quite something.The fact that the bill also would provide significant subsidies that would cover the vast majority of non-insured individuals also cannot be ignored.
This is the point at which the activists in a party begin cutting off their noses to spite their own faces. Howard Dean has called for the bill to be killed, so we can start over on a bill that gets through reconcilliation. Now, I’m all for using parliamentary tricks to get around parliamentary tricks. But reconcilliation contains a number of restrictions that would make it much easier for Republicans to water down health care reform in the future. You know how the Bush tax cuts are slated to expire shortly? Yeah, that’s because they were passed under reconcilliation, which requires sunset clauses as part of legislation. Do you trust that a GOP congress in 2019 would re-up this health care plan if we needed them to? No? Me either, which is why it’s probably wise not to put it into their hands.
Ezra Klein noted weeks ago that the negotiations in the Senate aren’t really negotiations, but that they’re more hostage negotiations. Joe Lieberman doesn’t care if the bill passes or fails. Neither does Ben Nelson. Neither do any of the Republicans. So while it’s tempting to say, “Well, where is Lieberman’s concession?” the answer is that he’s willing to vote for any bill at all. Since he’s happy with absolutely nothing, he’s in the best negotiating position here. It sucks, but it’s life in the government we have.
So we can go back to the drawing board and try to get something done through reconcilliation — which gives us more time for the sausage grinder to grind on, and gets us a bill that’s as likely to be worse than what we have now as it is to be better — or we can pass what’s on the table now and revisit other issues in the future.
Before you say it’s time to kill the bill and get something better, remember that we tried that before. The year was 1994, and we haven’t had another shot since. Are you willing to wait for 2026 to try again?
If the reform bill on the table really was worse than nothing — if it mandated coverage with no subsidies, if it did not end the practice of pre-existing condition bans, if it was truly just a give-away to the insurance companies — then I’d agree, we shouldn’t pass it. There’s taking a quarter-loaf, and then there’s simply passing something to pass something.
But that’s not what’s happening here. This bill is better than nothing. It’s quite a bit better than nothing. It will save lives. It will help families with financial burdens. And it will provide a foundation for future reforms. I understand why activists are frustrated — because the bill is a long way from perfect. But I am not an activist. I’m a pragmatist. The perfect is the enemy of the good. And so long as this bill does good, I will be in favor of it.
Topics: Blog Navel-Gazing, Health Care | 6 Comments »
December 15th, 2009 at 4:32 pm
If it’s any comfort, my sweet, I’ve always considered you a moderate.
Not that there’s anything wrong with that.
~C~*
*self-proclaimed commie pinko liberal liberal.
December 15th, 2009 at 8:42 pm
I agree with pretty much everything you said above (I think you took it a little bit too easy on Digby, who apparently has never met someone who doesn’t have insurance because they can’t afford it), but I have one minor nit to pick:
“You know how the Bush tax cuts are slated to expire shortly? Yeah, that’s because they were passed under reconcilliation, which requires sunset clauses as part of legislation. ”
Actually, reconcilliation rules only require sunset clauses in the event a proposal increases the deficit outside of the 10 year budgetary window. If the provision is deficit neutral or deficit reducing, it doesn’t have to expire in 10 years.
December 15th, 2009 at 9:11 pm
Couldn’t they pass a Lieberman-acceptable bill first and then turn around and pass the public option through reconciliation? I like how that would stab the back-stabbers in the back.
December 15th, 2009 at 9:53 pm
“Couldn’t they pass a Lieberman-acceptable bill first and then turn around and pass the public option through reconciliation? I like how that would stab the back-stabbers in the back.”
Absolutely.
December 15th, 2009 at 11:11 pm
“Couldn’t they pass a Lieberman-acceptable bill first and then turn around and pass the public option through reconciliation? I like how that would stab the back-stabbers in the back.”
That would be the sort of brilliant parliamentary maneuver that I doubt Harry Reid capable of, but yes, there’s no reason they couldn’t do it, and I would strongly support it.
December 16th, 2009 at 7:55 am
I was going to suggest the opposite of what Tom did: keep the public option and hope that the Senator from Connecticut (we have the same surname, and I refuse to dishonor it) or some Republican will say “hey, I don’t want to be the one who blocked reform” and vote for cloture, or better doesn’t allow a filibuster to start in the first place. But I suppose every Republican to the left of the Wall Street Journal either lost in 2006, lost in 2008, or switched parties.