Mitt Romney has distressed progressives all over again by mainstreaming a far-right ideologue, Rep. Paul Ryan, with the appointment as his vice-presidential candidate. It's clear from the early reviews that there's a confidence gap on the left in the vacuum created by Barack Obama's non-leadership on the relevant issues. The progressives' problem is psychological rather than political, and an effective response to the Romney-Ryan ticket needs to consider these.
It's worth pointing out at the start that the Republicans' winning strategy since 1980 has been not to move the ideologue to the center but to move the center to the ideologue. Romney's "bold" move is "Politics 101" according to Reagan-Atwater-Rove: make fringe ideas common sense through saturation media exposure from the pundit legion of America -- even bad coverage is good because through endless pseudo-pondering it makes silly beliefs seem weighty and important. Hugely unpopular ideas can in this way become hard truths whose acceptance proves the adherent's toughmindedness, rather than, as in their first appearance, his obvious lunacy.
Exhibit A is Paul Ryan's obsessive desire to convert the country's existing public health insurance system -- known as Medicare, limited to senior citizens -- into a voucher system for purchasing private insurance. This is an absurd idea, since it takes a popular, administratively efficient, and humane program and gives it to a distrusted and inefficient private insurance system that delivers the world's most expensive health care at a mediocre level of quality. Americans are ambivalent and confused about many aspects of health care but not about preserving Medicare. But the whole country must take this bad idea seriously because the top of the Republican ticket advocates it.
Progressives generally have two reactions to the way the two-party system and the monopolized MSM legitimate one regressive right-wing talking point after another. They split between anger and depression, which leads, respectively, to denunciation of the right and denunciation of progressives themselves. For the first, here's Joan Walsh's blast at Salon right after the announcement: ""Paul Ryan: Randian Poseur":
Paul Ryan was born into a well-to-do Janesville, Wisc. family, part of the so-called "Irish mafia" that's run the city's construction industry since the 19th century. When his lawyer father died young, sadly, the high-school aged Ryan received Social Security survivor benefits. But they didn't go directly to supporting his family; by his own account, he banked them for college. He went to Miami University of Ohio, paying twice as much tuition as an Ohio resident would have; the in-state University of Wisconsin system (which I attended) apparently wasn't good enough for Ryan. After his government-subsidized out-of-state education, the pride of Janesville left college and went to work for government, where he's spent his entire career, first serving Republican legislators and then in his own Congressional seat, with occasional stints at his family-owned construction business when he needed a job (reportedly he also drove an Oscar Mayer Wiener Mobile for a while).Ironically, Ryan came to national attention trying to dismantle the very program that helped him go to the college of his choice, pushing an even more radical version of President Bush's Social Security privatization plan, which failed. He has since become the scourge of the welfare state, a man wholly supported by government who preaches against the evils of government support. He could be the poster boy for President Obama's supposedly controversial oration about how we all owe our success to some combination of our own hard work, family backing and government support. Let's say it together: You didn't build that career by yourself, Congressman Ryan.
Glenn Greenwald offered a parallel exposé of Ryan's hypocrisy and generalizes it to the Republican Party:
The American Right seems to have a particular need to inflate their leaders into beacons of courage, self-sufficiency and virtue, even when their lives are completely devoid of those traits. Paul Ryan is a perfect symbol of America's political class. He is directly responsible for the large deficits and debt which America has compiled, and now seeks to exploit what he himself helped create in order to deny to others the very benefits that were responsible for almost every opportunity and success he has had in his life, with the burden falling most harshly on those who need those benefits the most to have any remnant of fair opportunity. That's the crux of the American elite: making massive mistakes and engaging in destructive behavior and then demanding that everyone -- except them -- bear the brunt of the consequences.
Greenwald and Walsh are excellent critics and writers, but their material inspires while also isolating many progressives who can't imagine it having an impact on the American voter.
This gets us to progressive option #2, which appears in the also excellent commentator James Kwak at The Baseline Scenario. The Right, Kwak wrote in a recent post, has a great rhetorical claim: "Government infringes on individual liberty. Cut down the government and we will have (a) more liberty, (b) more economic growth, and (c) lower taxes." To respond to that the Left has, he says, well, nothing. Democrats need to create "some kind of understanding of what the federal government actually is and does," which they apparently haven't done. Kwak ended the post in muffled despair: "President Obama needs to come up with a vision of what the government is for--one that he hasn't already compromised away. Isn't he supposed to be good at that sort of thing?"
Politics 101 does say that the angry denunciation, whether it's Walsh and Greenwald's columns or Henry Rollins singing "Liar," shocks, alienates, and offends the fence sitters one needs to win over. On the other hand, Politics 101 also says arguments don't change voters minds. Affirming this point, Kwak's best line is a morose denunciation of the dimwit middle:"This election will be just like every other one: it will turn on a handful of independent voters' inchoate, irrational perceptions of which candidate better fits their inchoate, irrational notion of what the president should look like." Depression is anger turned against the self -- the progressive self in Kwak's case -- and within progressive psychological dynamics both responses are doomed: attacking is wrong, arguing is wrong, so the Right wins again.
But Kwak's low esteem for the American decider in fact supports the Greenwald-Walsh method of denunciation, and it is supported by three generations of successful Republican anger politics. It's true, as Kwak says, that most people don't pick the candidate on the basis of "a considered reflection on the proper size of government." They respond instead to drama, story, passion, feeling, critique, and anger in a package that enlightens people while firing them up against a clearly-defined opposition. Greenwald and Walsh are already masters of the genre of linking a threat to a face and name attached to it, which is one of the few things that galvanizes humans in general and Americans in particular.
The goal with Ryan should be to show that he personally adds a new level of delusion about people's lives starting with the voters in his district, that he is a calloused ideologue, that he is a Simple Simon and therefore dishonest, and that his ideas about privatizing Medicare or whatever, because they are his ideas, cannot be trusted. This would include the kind of analysis at which Kwak, Paul Krugman, and others excel, like showing that lower taxes don't produce higher growth or that falling government employment is hurting the recovery. Getting there doesn't mean a smear campaign. It requires impassioned and relentless critique, escalating throughout the campaign. In Ryan's case this started happening years ago (e.g Krugman's "Ludicrous and Cruel" in 2011) -- there's plenty to work with here.
On to Kwak's other point, which is that progressives don't have a message about government. This isn't true, and Greenwald and Walsh, to stick with our two examples, demonstrate two of them.
First, for Greenwald, government needs to be honest. It needs to be honest in the specific sense of treating everyone via the same rules, equally and fairly. In health care, the obvious contrast is between private insurance companies that deny coverage to clients that are likely to be more expensive, and Medicare or Medicaid, which pays for everyone regardless of cost. Ryan fully intends to ration Medicare, and he worships the private sector model of cutting costs via denying coverage and this damages the welfare of millions of people in ways Ryan refuses to admit. Government rejects hypocrisy in the sense of double standards of the kind that, via private insurance, have divided Americans into 1st-, 2nd-, and 3rd-class citizens in the realm of health care.
Walsh's progressive value is that individual success depends in part on the quality of the public sector. Kwak for some reason thinks this idea sounds "offensive as soon as you say it, even if it's true? But why? It is very true, as proven by endless data about the benefits of easy access to public goods show (roads, hospitals, universities, and universal health care). The "rise" of the "West' out of the depths of generally violent, authoritarian cultures riven with religious fanaticism and planted on top of mediocre physical resources -- Britain, Germany, Sweden, etc. -- hinged on their early discovery that large-scale "improvements" in public infrastructure, coordinated by government but built from the bottom-up, made all the difference in a society's success or failure. Germans, for example, can't believe that Americans only dimly understand the principle of an insurance community whereby only a mandate that pools the premiums of sick and healthy alike allows affordable access for everyone. Sometimes it seems that progressives are the only political faction capable of preparing Americans to be competitive in the 21st century.
Kwak is right that the Democrats' arguments for government are underdeveloped. But these arguments are correct, and the compelling drama is this: Government-funded social development is the difference between plutocracy and democracy. Progressives need to tell the stories so we can address our real problems rather than bat at the demons Romney and Ryan conjure up to get elected.
Follow Christopher Newfield on Twitter: www.twitter.com/@cnewf
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 |
|
| Obama | Romney | |
|---|---|---|
| Electoral Votes (270 to win) |
332 | 206 |
| Obama | Romney | |
|---|---|---|
| Total | 65,899,660 | 60,932,152 |
| Percent | 51.1% | 47.2% |
| Democrats* | Republicans | |
|---|---|---|
| Current Senate | 53 | 47 |
| Seats gained or lost | +2 | -2 |
| New Total | 55 | 45 |
| Democrats | Republicans | |
|---|---|---|
| Seats won | 201 | 234 |
I think there are certain necessities that citizens of a wealthy country should be protected.
1. Safety. Not just from an outsied enemy, but in our homes, streets etc. Safe water, food and drugs etc
2. Basic food,shelter and clothing
3. Education
4. Healthcare
5. Decent wages and an opportunity to work
6.safe environment
All other things can be privatized or be in a free market.
The government should have a role if any of the above items is being jeopardized by private industry or "for profit"
example. Fracking . If fracking is in fact poisoning our water supply and causing earthquakes (arkansas and Texas) the government needs to step in to protect its citizens no matter how much the fossil fuel industry wants to continue.
Once we all agree on the role of government and where it has a place in our lives we can move forward.
I am a capitolist and believe in markets and profit as long is the product or service does not hurt or affect the basic items we as Americans believe we all deserve. I have worked all my life and expect others to work if there are jobs and if they are not disabled, but right now we have a huge jobs deficit that Government needs to work on.
What other things? There isn't much left.
"I am a capitolist and believe in markets and profit "
And I'm the Archbishop of Managua.
IE Health insurance companies cutting off people with existing problems or who get too sick or charge too much so that many citizens can't afford it.
I don't expect a hand out or free ride.
As for being a capitalist...I'm sure you'll LOVE working for Chinese and Indian wages!
First of all Medicare is fraught with fraud -- if it wasn't then how does Obama plan get 716 billion from the system. So it's hardly administratively efficient. Second - how is humane to have a system that create trillion in debt and already will ensure that every newborn child starts out at least 50,000 in debt (and this is based on 2012 figures)
good luck when you need health care
In the meantime, the best take away sentences were these, which should be featured in Obama and SuperPac ads:
"Exhibit A is Paul Ryan's obsessive desire to convert the country's existing public health insurance system -- known as Medicare, limited to senior citizens -- into a voucher system for purchasing private insurance. This is an absurd idea, since it takes a popular, administratively efficient, and humane program and gives it to a distrusted and inefficient private insurance system that delivers the world's most expensive health care at a mediocre level of quality."
In the Medicare case the debate needs to be about how to provide better more affordable medicine over time. The left focuses on coverage. They claim that spreading the cost of medicine across the entire population and providing treatment at little or no cost to the health care consumer is the way to assure coverage. Unfortunately it does nothing to contain costs. The only way to contain costs in a system with no prices is to ration care, either by setting payments to providers below the costs or by denying treatment.
In a free market health care system instead, services are rationed by cost. People decide on a daily basis what they can afford in healthcare vs other priorities. This includes how much health insurance to carry for catastrophic coverage.
So health care will be rationed in either system. The question is which will best drive down costs and increase quality over time.
I believe that markets have proven themselves even in life critical areas like food and shelter others disagree, but this is the debate we need to have.
*You* may want to shop for health care the way we shop for cell phones or cars (horrible that is, too), but it's dreadful. We'd rather not do that with doctors, hospitals,surgeries, etc. When someone gets ill, consumer shopping is the last thing one wants to engage in. Even when one is healthy, one hardly wants to pore over the fine print print about deductibles, co-pays, in-provider, out of provide MDs, etc. Or, obscure, fudged stats on efficacy! Or, figure out the bizarre accounting schemes that hospitals, doctors, and insurance companies use. It's a nightmare!
Plus, what do you think we've had for more than a century? That's right! a free market health care system that hasn't worked!
If the private sector is so good, then explain why publically owned utility companies proved energy at much lower costs tha private ones?! Explain why Medicare is far more efficient, with much less administrative overhead than private health insurance companies?!
I'd much rather have a single payer system administered by civil servants who put the public's interests first than one run by greedy, profit-seeking private insurers whose main purpose is to deny people coverage and wrack up profits. This is really a no-brainier!
So what will insurance companies do with programs that require extensive and expensive administration? They will drop those plans. What plans tend to have the highest administration costs? The least expensive plans. So as low cost plans are withdrawn from the market more people will be unable to afford insurance and will go on the public plan. The same circle has been repeated for decades preventing private insurance from offering the plans that consumers want and need.
To you second point about the need to shop around. I don't enjoy car shopping and little about investing. That is why consumer reports, investment services and even Angie's list emerged.
"what do you think we've had for more than a century?"
Publically funded health care and insurance! If you include tax breaks, Medicare & Medicaid the US government pays over 50% of health care costs. (A higher % than France) Second: States restrict competiton in the insurance market to a few players in each state and require the coverage of any services provided by an interest group in the state.
Medicare efficency. The government restricts payments to doctors, consequently the number of doctors that are
To enforce these beliefs they have packed the public schools and passed laws requiring everyone to pay for the propaganda. They have attempted to limit free political speech by limiting spending. Demonize any proposal to limit government spending or power as an attack on society.
They publically abused anyone that makes the simple claim, I earned this and you have no right to take it from me.
What network,magazine,radio ,newspaper is not an instigator and beneficiary of the mud slinging status quo?
sound bite. calling out differences is not mud slinging. calling a candidate unamerican, anti-american, in league with the enemy - now that's mud slinging.
think tanks(Heritage ,AEI,Brookings,Americans For Prosperity,Club For Growth
Business Roundtable) and the American Corporate Media/University system who work to maintain status quo for the top 10 %socio/economically.
Prof.Newman doesn*t explain how to get the progressive message out,or he points to a if a Paul Krugman column as if Krugman or the NY Timesis going to shift the debate to a reasonable reality.
Yes,Government has done many of the things that make us a modern ,developed country.The Railroads,Highway System,Nuclear Power,Satellite Communication,Internet,Medical advances,The Military,and Education are all the result of the government. Where do you hear those arguments? MSNBC and Huffpo spend far more time on Repubs as bad,scary,and dangerous.That is was get the eyeballs watching.
That is what brings in revenue and makes careers.That is our country.
People on the left want quick and easy solutions to lifes problems. Like small children they stomp their feet and claim life is not fair.
There's little doubt that our system of capitalism is a zero sum game, but I haven't seen people on the left waving a magic wand thinking that everything will be OK if one or two simple changes are made.
The main reason why progressive politics struggles in this country, aside from moneyed corporate interests, is the fact that there are so many disparate viewpoints advocating a panoply of issues, as opposed to the homogeneity of voices from the echo chamber on the Right.
Recent studies of our neurology support this, as individuals who are politically conservative tend to favor simplicity and fear change, whereas those who are more liberal invite and enjoy complexity and difference.
What you state is easily turned around and pointed the other political direction.
The real problem is (IMO) that we as a society have been systematically dumbed-down since my generation was young. We are rarely taught critical thinking skills. We are spoon-fed sound bites instead of actual news. Television has become a cesspool of mostly bland comedies, reality shows, sporting events, and infotainment designed to entertain, but not education the peons.
There are no simple solutions to the problems that we face. Looking for simple answers from either the Right or the Left of our corporatist political system is the height of insanity.
Well, if they want to preserve it then it needs to be fixed.
"To grasp total Medicare finances one can’t look only to the solvency projection but must understand cost/income trends for Medicare as a whole. In the near term population aging will drive rising Medicare costs as it does Social Security’s. In the long-run Medicare becomes an even bigger financing problem because of health cost inflation.
Medicare is straining the federal budget. In 2012, $217 billion in general revenues will be needed for its SMI program while HI costs will exceed tax/premium income by a further $38 billion. HI costs have exceeded tax/premium collections since 2008 and are projected to do so in every future year. Because total general revenue needs exceed 45% of Medicare costs in 2012, a statutory “funding warning” has been triggered. This warning is designed to precipitate various responses from elected officials, but no legislation has yet been enacted in response to the funding warnings in the last five consecutive reports.
In sum, the Medicare trustees’ report continues to show a financially troubled program. In the near-term the qualitative picture looks much like it did last year, but the long-term picture has appeared to worsen."
http://www.economics21.org/commentary/guide-2012-medicare-trustees-report
Create Big Change.
I'm Little.
But LOUD.
We Can Do This.
Together.
That means hard work, not just writing some essay on wonky policy. Organize with your friends and reach out to people. Knock on doors. Take to the streets. Come up with the priorities most important to you and make as many people as possible know about them.
Glenn Greenwald is a great writer, intellectually honest, and curiously enough, now departing Salon for the Guardian. A big critic for Barack Obama and a huge loss for Salon.
But Salon does get to keep the intellectually lightweight and dishonest phony outrage machine Joan Walsh, who is a dreadful writer and pure tribalist shill for the Democratic Party.
As Bob Somerby at the Daily Howler points out regularly, Joan Walsh's mission in life is spreading shrill outrage and resentment through her tribe. Her appearances on MSNBC serves the same worthless function as conservative zombies on Fox's Hannity.
Greenwald probably seems on the surface more "radical" than Walsh (e.g. he tries to hold the powerful accountability on both sides, unlike her myopia), but his arguments have greater appeal to moderates and independents, simply because he refuses to play Village Idiot like Joan Walsh.