America's Political Nightmare in One Paragraph

My god this may be the finest paragraph Paul Rosenberg has ever written:

In truth, the Republican party only has three problems: its policies are unpopular, its policies do not work, and they hate everybody who does not agree with them. In contrast, the Democratic party has only one problem: it wants to be more like the Republicans. 

Don't look to me for the bog standard two party "duopoly" rant because I think adding more parties to a corrupted system is like asking the staff for a new set of dice at a crooked casino - the new dice will be loaded too.  Whatever forces are corrupting the two parties would almost certainly corrupt any new party that emerged absent some kind of deeper understanding of those forces of corruption and real means to defeat them.

Rosenberg's apt synopsis of the Republican party's problems is actually the less important part of his thesis, which is: What the hell is wrong with the Democratic party?  To wit:

But the Democrats have it even worse. They have won the popular vote in every presidential election since 1992 except for 2004, and yet they have been playing defence - rather badly - throughout most of this period. They do not have the means to even consider what it might look like to go on offence, except as a kabuki theatre to rev up their base come election time. 

Examples of this really are legion, from the failure to enact Hillarycare in 1993, triangulating through the rest of the Clinton presidency, failing to end the Iraq War in 2007 with control of Congress, failing to kill the filibuster in 2009, 2011 and now in 2013, the too-small stimulus, voluntarily killing ACORN under a nonsense trumped up non-scandal, falling over themselves to condemn Move On for actually opposing right wing warmongers like Bush, Cheney and Petraeus, failing to get prosecute corrupt bankers and financiers, and we can add stripping the Public Option from Obamacare.  Yes, there were a variety of villains to blame for each of these failures from Liberman to Nelson to the Blue Dogs to Obama himself but the core of it a party unwilling to really grasp the rusty levers of power and effect significant change when it counts.  Keeping the stupid filibuster in place was probably the most obvious sign that at some level, they're happy to have the excuse not act.  Not necessarily because they're "corrupt" in the sense of consciously being bought out to not do what voters sent them to do (though some no doubt are) but in not really wanting to, or being afraid to.

The Republicans are the party that won't take "no" for an answer from the voters, returning with the same bad enrich-the-rich policies over and over, year after year, but the Democrats are the party that won't take "yes" for an answer and give the voters what they want: sound liberal economic policy.  Jobs,  economic security, schools that work, a clean environment.  The Democrats had two chances in 1992 and 2008 where they controlled the trifecta of both houses of Congress and the Presidency and in both cases failed to deliver bold liberal policy that would measurably improve people's lives quickly and noticeably.  That's the big secret of what FDR did to achieve the amazing political success of the 1932-1994 Democratic coalition.  He/They (Democrats) enacted policies that made their lives better.  Not some arcane neoliberal tax credit to employers that only economists can detect any impact from, the government started mailing seniors actual cheques.  They hired people who needed work.  They built stuff that needed building and would be useful anyway - bridges, libraries, schools.  It wasn't complicated, and it worked. People felt things improving, and in 1934 and 1936 gave FDR historic supermajorities to do more of the same.

These insights don't take political genius to understand, in fact it takes a special kind of political genius for the Democrats to avoid these lessons and try to handwave away these obvious truths.  Right wing ideologues and hacks have obvious motives to ply sophistry and revisionism to deride FDR as they simply don't want to win by implementing liberal policy.  They, ultimately, must trick voters into voting against their own interests.  That's much tougher and it's why they lose the popular vote so often, even with their generally better electoral messaging machinery and rampant voter suppression.

Yes, I know the causes are in some sense obvious, lobbyists and corporate money and so forth.  But all that stuff existed in 1932, but Rosenberg suggests a deeper problem, that the leadership of the Democratic party simply don't really want to implement bold liberal policy because they don't believe in it:

Regardless of your own ideology - conscious or unconscious - you just have to wonder why Obama clings so doggedly to both substantive policies and political strategies that repeatedly fail so profoundly. No doubt there are multiple factors involved, but the most compelling answer, I have come to believe, comes down to a lack of vision: Obama quite simply cannot see any alternative. His politics are drastically confined by the crabbed nature of his neoliberal imagination, formed in the shadows of Reagan and Thatcher.  

I tend to agree.  Despite its rampant failure in the past few years, neoliberalism still has the world's elites in thrall.  They evidently cannot turn from it.  Even the ones who know it is failing can't imagine what could take its place.  I hope democratic politics can find some way to dethrone the lot of them and let some new blood take the reins for a spell, because the alternative ways this ends are not good.

Do read Rosenberg's whole piece.

Conservatves Never Wanted Health Care Reform

The collective conservative/Republican conniption over the US Supreme Court's ratification of most of the Affordable Care Act has brought a fresh round of confused liberals eager to remind everyone that "Obamacare" is essentially the same as "Romneycare" (enacted by Governor Romney in 2006) and that plan was itself based on a plan devised by the very conservative Heritage foundation back in 1994. 

That's fine, I'm all for reminding people that this ridiculous tantrum is not only hypocritical but completely fake on the part of the movement's leaders who used to be all for mandates before they declared conservatives have always been at war with East-Asia some time in 2009.  That said, what's happening here is not so much that they're just mad Obama stole their idea and don't want him to get credit for bi-partisan centrism in implementing the right's own health care reform proposal, what it really says to me is that they were never serious about those proposals.  They needed a health care plan in the 90s to counter Clinton's proposals, but never had any real intention of implementing such a thing.  It all goes back to the infamous Bill Kristol strategy memo from 1993, on how and why to defeat Health Care reform entirely:

But the long-term political effects of a successful Clinton health care bill will be even worse--much worse. It will relegitimize middle-class dependence for "security" on government spending and regulation. It will revive the reputation of the party that spends and regulates, the Democrats, as the generous protector of middle-class interests. And it will at the same time strike a punishing blow against Republican claims to defend the middle class by restraining government.

It's just not in their interests politically.  They've set themselves up to win power on a certain critique of government, and solving the health care coverage crisis completely undercuts that.  Kristol specifies the Clinton health care bill, but I don't see the logic being much different for any bill that ends up with universal or near universal health coverage. 

It's hardly theoretical either.  We can't know whether Dole would have actually tried to implement a version of the Heritage '94 plan if he had won in '96 (with Dole there's reason to think he may have been sincere about wanting to expand health coverage, but even so I'm really skeptical the rest of the Republican/movement Conservative establishment would have gone along) but we can skip ahead to 2000, where we have Gore with some serious proposals to greatly increase coverage (though he shied away from running on UHC), and Bush who waved his hands at various tax cuts and tax credits that might marginally help a few people but would in no way address America's health care coverage crisis.  Then of course Bush took office, and despite having a Republican run Congress for most of his Presidency and plenty of Democrats fully willing to play ball on expanding health care coverage, somehow never got around to Health Care Reform.  If you recall, the 2001 tax cuts were partly premised on Fed Chair Greenspan's warnings that the US debt might get paid off too quickly, well that sounds like a fantastic opportunity to putting some of that surplus into funding health care for the uninsured, but instead it all had to go to tax cuts.

I read some of the most ardent left wing critics of the ACA, like Ian Welsh and I certainly can't dismiss the things they say will go wrong with the plan (like the possibility of Insurance companies just jacking up rates to consume the subsidies) but to the extent I can maintain hope it will be better than the status quo, the ongoing right wing freak out over it makes me think it has a good shot of doing so.  It's costing the right a lot to abandon their own idea and in particular having to cover for Mitt Romney who was in favour of such ideas as late as 2007 can't be part of some long term plan.  Yes, they can usually paper over whatever flip flops or hypocrisy they want to in their stars, but Palin proved there's a limit to their powers of media manipulation in a campaign.  Romney's reputation for flip-flops, inconsistency and so forth is approaching Palin levels of absurd.  It's costing them to deal with this (even if rank and file conservative authoritarians have no problem with the cognitive dissonance, they need another 20-30% of the population to win the election), and I have a hard time believing they're secretly thrilled about the ACA but staging a multi-year fit of apoplexy against it just to sweep in 2012 and then somehow fail to repeal it.  I'll eat my words if I'm proved wrong, but all I see is a plan they proposed back when the American people demanded they have a plan, one they intended to ignore when in office, as they did under Bush.  Whatever local circumstances led Romney to support health reform in Massachusetts aren't replicated nationally.