The Long Battle

The current battle for healthcare reform has brought American progressives no amount of frustration and disappointment. Endless compromises have been made with corporate interests in an effort to make the Senate version of healthcare reform more acceptable to the insurance industry and their armies of lobbyists bent on price-gouging the public for another century. Ben Nelson (Corporate Shill-Nebraska) wants an amendment banning access to abortions because forcing poor people to have children that they can’t afford to provide for is obviously good policy. Blanche Lincoln (Corporate Shill-Arkansas) is deeply concerned about healthcare reform being deficit-neutral (although she wasn’t quite as concerned about deficit neutrality when she voted for George W. Bush’s tax cuts in the neighborhood of 2.1 trillion dollars that bankrupted America along with two wars that were paid for entirely with deficit spending as well). Joe Lieberman (Corporate Shill-Connecticut) doesn’t like the public option or the Medicare buy-in proposal because both mechanisms might provide competition with the health insurance companies (his wife Hadassah is a well-known beneficiary of corporate health insurance money in her public relations work) and drive down long-term costs for American consumers. Allowing people to buy affordable health insurance through the public option or Medicare is just too offensive for health insurance executives. This sort of corporate protectionism from certain lobbyist-friendly senators was entirely foreseeable. Achieving a victory (healthcare reform) in this legislative battle was never going to be easy. Corporate, for-profit health insurance has been and is well-protected by conservative Democrats and Republicans in Congress hell-bent on maintaining the destructive status-quo. Gridlock and set-backs were inevitable. I am just as disappointed as the next Huffington Post/New York Times reader with the current quagmire.

In acknowledging our collective disappointment with the current course of healthcare reform, progressives/liberals should exercise historical perspective. Our policy victories have always been harder to achieve (and always will be harder to achieve) as a matter of history. Conservatives defend the status-quo, usually in the face of overwhelming evidence that the status-quo is detrimental to the majority of the American public. Their goals are, by nature, easier to achieve. Doing nothing to improve the quality of life for a majority of Americans is a conservative specialty. American conservatives have always been the voice of inertia or outright regression in major policy battles, and 2009 is no exception. Conservatives have been the most vocal opponents of healthcare reform for the past year because that’s what conservatives do best-disregard facts, evidence and reality. The conservative war against reality takes various forms, all with the same end goal in mind-enriching a tiny minority at the expense of the majority. One obvious example-tax cuts and de-regulation are the current conservative answers for every economic policy question. Never mind that tax cuts and de-regulation bankrupted the American treasury and sent the economy into a fiery tailspin under the incompetent leadership of George W. Bush. That sort of fact-based reality hasn’t stopped conservatives from asserting that tax cuts and de-regulation will make healthcare more affordable in 2009. That has been the conservative alternative in the healthcare reform debate. I know…the whole thing would be funny if it weren’t so powerfully absurd, but that’s the basic conservative mantra. Do nothing or attempt to reverse progress.

The vast majority of legislative accomplishments that make life worth living in America have been progressive/liberal crusades. On that same note, those same accomplishments have been opposed tooth and nail by conservatives. Liberals championed the abolition of slavery. Conservatives fought and lost a war in hopes of preserving their right to oppress people of color. Liberals fought for women’s suffrage. Conservatives asserted that women couldn’t be trusted to make such complex political decisions. Liberals fought to end the exploitation of working people by demanding shorter work days, greater workplace safety, minimum wages, and the right to form unions. Conservatives opposed such efforts as communist-socialist rabble-rousing. Liberals fought for Civil Rights. Conservatives called Martin Luther King Jr. a communist conspirator and denounced the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 as unnecessary government interference. Liberals fought to create Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid as a way of ensuring some measure of comfort and middle-class lifestyle for Americans. Conservatives denounced those institutions as communist-socialist conspiracies designed to kill the elderly. There’s no mysterious pattern. Conservatives have opposed social progress every step of the way, across the spectrum of American history and they have done so without apology. Liberals have always had to fight harder and longer in order to achieve even the most miniscule progress.

When Sarah Palin asserts that healthcare reform is a communist-socialist conspiracy designed to murder the elderly and small children, she is not unique. She is channeling a well-worn conservative strategy, the same strategy that Ronald Reagan employed when he denounced Medicare as a socialist-communist conspiracy in 1961. When a random Fox News commentator accuses healthcare reform proponents of class warfare, he is not voicing an original thought. Progressives/liberals are always waging class warfare according to conservatives, because allowing poor people access to healthcare is class warfare, just like expecting people to pay taxes for public services is class warfare, or enforcing commonsense regulations designed to protect the environment is class warfare. Any policy that aims to protect the welfare of the majority at the minor expense of the wealthy minority is class warfare according to conservatives. The point is that 2009 is no exception to the historical rule. Progressives/liberals are exasperated from fighting what seems to be an endless battle against opponents (conservatives in Congress and the general public) that are completely unconstrained by reality and deeply entrenched in the halls of power. The historical pattern is strong in 2009.

The whole thing is enough to make even the most loyal Jon Stewart fan throw up their hands in disgust, but we and our predecessors have been here before. Joe Lieberman, Sarah Palin, Glenn Beck, Roger Ailes, and armies of corporate lobbyists are tedious opponents, but defeating lunatics, hate-mongers, and greedy plutocrats is a progressive/liberal gift. Before progressives/liberals unfurl the flag of surrender and move to Sweden in 2010, recall that no victory against the forces of anti-reality and the status-quo has ever been easy.

I’m not pleased with the Senate version of healthcare reform. There have been far too many compromises with the forces of corporate greed for my taste. Reconciliation should have been used from the very beginning. This first year of Barack Obama’s presidency has been difficult to say the least. I get it. We’re tired and angry. That doesn’t mean that we should put down our metaphorical swords and battle armor in a giant sigh of exhaustion. Remember those that came before us. Healthcare reform won’t be easy to swallow in its current form, with its lack of cost-control and lack of competition for the health insurance monopoly, but it’s another small step towards better policy institutions. That’s the real gift of American progressives/liberals-our ability to create lasting institutions that improve the quality of life for the majority Americans. If you get the feeling that conservatives aren’t particularly good at creating such institutions, you’re right. Conservatives are much better at creating mythology and fantasy. With such a strong distaste for fact-based reality, conservatives depend heavily on their comforting fantasies to justify otherwise absurd positions. Ronald Reagan won the Cold War single-handedly. Tax cuts for the wealthy will create balanced budgets. De-regulation creates widespread prosperity. Global warming is a conspiracy. Christian prayer (CHRISTIAN prayer, no Muslims or Jews) will solve major social ills like poverty, lack of access to healthcare, and lack of education. These are all popular American conservative policy positions. All of them are demonstrably untrue, but again, truth and reality have never been popular with conservatives. The Fox News viewers don’t need any help creating fantasy. Believe me; they have that entirely under control. In this time of momentary disappointment with the collective political environment, progressives/liberals need to re-focus on building more institutions that create widespread benefit, even if we are disheartened at the moment. The battle of healthcare reform 2009 isn’t over yet, and when it does reach a conclusion, the final product will serve as another marker on the path to social progress in America. Gather your swords and armor. We have a long march ahead of us.