Progressives (Liberals)

Carrying on the legacy of MLK

One thing most of us hate about politicians is their smarmy double-speak. Warren has been practicing her brand of ‘reading the audience’ and saying what was expedient based on where she is and who she’s talking to.

Progressives are trying to nail her down on M4A and some other policies—not that we’ll believe her when she decides on one.

Niko House
@nikoCSFB
·
19h
Now you’re for Medicare for all again?

Whiplash Warren strikes again. I’m telling you, you’ll break your neck trying to
keep up with her policy positions.
Quote Tweet

Elizabeth Warren
@ewarren
· Jun 13
Health care is a basic human right—and we fight for basic human rights. When I lead the Democratic Party, we will be a party that says: We’re the wealthiest nation in the history of the world, so yes, we can afford #MedicareForAll.

DUBUQUE, Iowa — Art Miller listened patiently as the stranger on his doorstep tried to sell him on the Medicare for All Act of 2019, the single-payer health care bill that has sharply divided Democrats in Congress and on the presidential campaign trail.

The visitor, Steven Meier, was a volunteer canvasser who wanted Mr. Miller to call his congresswoman, Abby Finkenauer, the young Democrat who took a Republican’s seat last year in this closely divided district — and press her to embrace Medicare for all. Beyond congressional politics, there was the familiar role that Iowa plays as the first state to weigh in on the fight for the Democratic presidential nomination.

“I want to know how my grandkids are going to pay for it, O.K.?” Mr. Miller, 71, mused, peering at the flier that Mr. Meier had handed him.

It was a fairly typical encounter for Mr. Meier, 39, who with hundreds of volunteers around the country is working with National Nurses United, the country’s largest nurses’ union, to build grass-roots support for the single-payer bill, a long shot on Capitol Hill and a disruptive force in the party. House Democrats have declared this Saturday and Sunday to be “a weekend of action on health care” — but they are split over whether to embrace extreme change or something closer to the status quo.

A single-payer health care system would more or less scrap private health insurance, including employer-sponsored coverage, for a system like Canada’s in which the government pays for everyone’s health care with tax dollars. Democrats not ready for that big a step are falling back on a “public option,” an alternative in which anyone could buy into Medicare or another public program, or stick with private insurance — a position once a considered firmly on the party’s left wing.

Lawmakers like Ms. Finkenauer, mindful of the delicate political balance in their districts, fear the “socialism” epithet that President Trump and his party are attaching to Medicare for all. On Friday, Mr. Trump called the House bill “socialist health care” that would “crush American workers with higher taxes, long wait times and far worse care.” But even Ms. Finkenauer, who beat the incumbent Republican in November by 16,900 votes, has been pulled left by the debate, embracing the public option, which could not get through Congress when the Affordable Care Act passed in 2010.

“In a divided Congress, I’m focused on what we can do to bring immediate relief to Iowans,” she said in an email.

The nurses’ union and a number of other progressive groups want nothing less than a government system that pays for everyone’s health care, seizing on the issue’s prominence and a round of Medicare for all hearings in the House with canvassing in the districts of many of the 123 House Democrats who have not thrown their support behind a single-payer system.

“Hearings are a moment for us to have a national stage for this campaign,” Jasmine Ruddy, the lead organizer for the nurse union’s Medicare for all campaign, told several dozen new volunteers on a training call last month. “It’s up to us to take advantage of the momentum we already see happening and turn it into political power.”

But building support for a single-payer health care system has been slow going. On Wednesday, the chairman of the Ways and Means Committee, Representative Richard E. Neal of Massachusetts, convening the House’s third Medicare for all hearing, said it was about “exploring ideas.”

Republicans warned darkly of sky-high tax increases, doctor shortages and long waits for care. Representative Kevin Brady of Texas, the senior Republican on the committee, said his constituents were “frightened” about their private coverage being “ripped out from under them.”

The nurses’ union campaign began just after Democrats won the House in November, when the union and several other groups held a strategy call with Representative Pramila Jayapal, Democrat of Washington, the chief author of the Medicare for All Act, and Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, who pushed Medicare for all into the mainstream during his 2016 presidential campaign.

“Rather than try to convince people it’s the right system,” Ms. Ruddy said, “our strategy is to reach the people who are already convinced that health care is a human right, to bring them in and actually make them feel the action they are taking matters.”

In Dubuque, Mr. Meier and his partner, Briana Moss, have knocked on 250 doors and gathered about 50 signatures over the past few months. About 20 volunteers, including a retired nurse and several college students, are also involved. Nationwide, canvassers have knocked on 20,000 doors and collected 14,000 signatures since February.

On a Saturday afternoon, Mr. Miller, a Vietnam veteran, told Mr. Meier about his positive experience with government health care through the Department of Veterans Affairs, saying, “I’ve seen how it can work.”

A few houses down, a woman who owns a cleaning service and would give only her first name, Sharon, and her party affiliation, Republican, said that if the bill covered abortions, “I won’t go for that.”

She added that she would be happy to stop paying $170 a month for supplemental insurance to cover what Medicare does not, but she did not want to see people who do not work receive free care. From the garage, her husband hollered that he agreed. Conceding defeat, Mr. Meier and Ms. Moss moved along.

Both Sanders supporters, they took on the cause in part because Ms. Moss has Type 1 diabetes and has struggled on and off to stay insured, though now she has Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act’s expansion of the program. Ms. Moss, 30, went to see Ms. Finkenauer in her district office this year and asked if she supported a government system that eliminated insurance. Ms. Finkenauer, she said, stated her preference for a public option.

“That’s simply a compromise that leaves the insurance companies still in the game,” said Mr. Meier, who recently started working at John Deere building backhoes and will soon have employer-based coverage after being uninsured for his entire adult life.

The Jayapal and Sanders bills would both expand traditional Medicare to cover all Americans, and change the structure of the program to cover more services and eliminate most deductibles and co-payments. There would effectively be no private health insurance, because the new system would cover almost everything; Mr. Sanders has said private coverage could be sold for extras like cosmetic surgery.

While polling does show that Medicare for all has broad public support, that drops once people learn it would involve raising taxes or eliminating private insurance. That finding bewilders Mr. Meier, given many of the conversations he has on people’s front steps.

Those conversations keep coming. Rick Plowman 66, complained bitterly about how despite having Medicare, he had to pay nearly $500 for inhalers to treat his chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. Still, he was skeptical.

“I just don’t know what it’s going to look like down the road,” Mr. Plowman said. “Even Social Security for kids, you know? Even for you guys?”

“I’m willing to start making that sacrifice right now,” Mr. Meier pushed back. Mr. Plowman signed the petition.

At a white bungalow around the corner, Mr. Meier found — finally — that he was preaching to the choir with Bobby Daniels, 50, and his wife, Andrea, 46. Mr. Daniels, a forklift operator from Waterloo, said their coverage came with a $3,000 deductible and he would “most definitely” support Medicare for all. Ray Edwards, 36, an uninsured barber, also heartily signed on.

At the final stop of the day, Mr. Meier and Ms. Moss encountered Jeremy Shade, 36, a registered Republican who promptly told them his sister lived in Canada and had spent “hours and hours in the hospital, waiting for care” under that country’s single-payer system.

“I get that concern, and it’s something I’m worried about, too,” Mr. Meier said as Mr. Shade’s dog barked. “Would you be interested in maybe just calling Abby Finkenauer and saying, ‘Hey, what are we doing about the health care problem in this country?’”

“My wife would,” Mr. Shade said, explaining that she was a Democrat. “I’m real wary about it.”

Two hours of hot canvassing amid swarms of gnats had yielded six petition signatures and a few pledges to call Ms. Finkenauer. Mr. Meier was determined to end on a positive note. “I really think health care could be the issue that could get people to stop being so on one side or the other,” he said, a point that Mr. Shade accepted, shaking his hand before retreating inside.

[...]
What, then, should we make of Sanders’s decision to embrace a nearly revolutionary label, “democratic socialism,” but define it in terms of American left-liberal politics?

One answer is that as someone who did live and work in left-wing and Marxist circles for much of his adult life, he wants to bring the term itself into the mainstream of American politics. To not just embrace the “socialist” attacks as a badge of honor but to make “democratic socialism” an extension of the New Deal is to make it sound normal, even desirable. More Americans may embrace the label. And because the term still implies a larger set of ideological commitments outside of Democratic Party liberalism, some of Sanders’s followers will become bona fide socialists who want that Debsian transformation of economic relations in the United States. It has already happened, in fact, with the substantial growth of the Democratic Socialists of America since 2016 and an increasing (albeit still small) number of Americans with a positive view of “socialism,” including a bare majority of the youngest adults.

The term does other political work. It distinguishes him from his rivals in the Democratic primary and suggests he wants to go further than his stated views — that he’s also interested in fundamental transformation, even if his program isn’t more meaningfully progressive than that of his closest ideological rival, Elizabeth Warren.

There’s another way to understand Sanders’s rhetoric around “democratic socialism.” For Harold Meyerson of The American Prospect, Sanders embodies the not-always-clear divide between liberals and the left. “In running as a democratic socialist who seeks to complete and update F.D.R.’s agenda,” he writes, “Sanders straddles the very fuzzy border between social democracy and American left liberalism.” In both traditions, democracy is an economic project as well as a political one. Perhaps Sanders is just trying to make that explicit — to once and for all marginalize the centrist Democratic Party politics of the past three decades, in which the economic rights of workers were subordinate to the demands of capital — as well as show Americans how good, effective governance can include left-wing politics. It is the political project of his entire career, from Burlington to the Capitol Building.

One last thought. At the beginning of his speech at George Washington, Sanders took note of the “growing movement toward oligarchy” in the United States and the world at large. He listed the leaders of several governments — Putin in Russia, Xi in China, Mohammed bin Salman in Saudi Arabia, Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines, Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil and Viktor Orban in Hungry — that “meld corporatist economics with xenophobia and authoritarianism.” I think this analysis, which I’ve written about in the past, can also help us make sense of Sanders’s idiosyncratic use of “democratic socialism.

In a 1977 essay for Dissent magazine, “Socialism and Liberalism: Articles of Conciliation?,” the socialist writer Irving Howe addressed the “tacit collaboration of right and left extremes in undermining the social and moral foundations of liberalism,” which he described as “a great intellectual scandal of the age.” Those critics failed, he wrote, “to consider what the consequences might be of their intemperate attacks upon liberalism.” To assault the foundations of liberal democracy, he added, “meant to bring into play social forces the intellectuals of both right and left could not foresee.”

In straddling the two sides of the left-wing divide — in tying “democratic socialism” to the legacy of the most important figure in American liberalism — Sanders might be modeling a kind of pragmatism. Not the colloquial “pragmatism” of do what works, but something from the American philosophical tradition, where the truth of the matter is in the doing, not the definitions. He calls himself a “democratic socialist,” others call themselves “liberals,” but in the United States they’re part of a common project, fighting on a united front.

In straddling the two sides of the left-wing divide — in tying “democratic socialism” to the legacy of the most important figure in American liberalism — Sanders might be modeling a kind of pragmatism. Not the colloquial “pragmatism” of do what works, but something from the American philosophical tradition, where the truth of the matter is in the doing, not the definitions. He calls himself a “democratic socialist,” others call themselves “liberals,” but in the United States they’re part of a common project, fighting on a united front.