The Underlying Divisions in the Health Care Debate
Gandalf Grey
Published on Friday, December 18, 2009 by Salon.com
The Underlying Divisions in the Health Care Debate
by Glenn Greenwald
Ed Kilgore has a very perceptive analysis in The New Republic about the
underlying (and largely unexamined) ideological and strategic differences
among progressives that are at least partially driving the rift over the
health care bill. He argues -- correctly -- that the current debate
"displays a couple of pretty important potential fault lines within the
American center-left" that have manifested in other disputes as well. That
was the principal point of this much-maligned Daily Kos post observing that
many (but not all) of the progressive bloggers most vehemently demanding
passage of the health care bill also supported the Iraq War. As the author
of that post (Jake McIntyre) explicitly said, his intent wasn't to suggest
that those individuals shouldn't be listened to because of their Iraq
position six years ago (that would be an invalid and unfair claim), but
simply that -- as Kilgore says -- there are underlying and significant
differences in strategic and ideological outlook driving the health care
debate that have been present for some time but are typically ignored.
Shared contempt for the Bush administration (at least once Bush and the Iraq
War became discredited) largely obscured these differences when Bush was in
office. The desire to undermine the Bush GOP and dislodge that movement
from power subsumed all other objectives and united people with vastly
different political outlooks and agendas. There is still a shared revulsion
towards the Palin/Limbaugh Right, but that faction is too marginalized and
impotent to serve the same function. With the unifying force of Bush/Cheney
gone, the divisions Kilgore describes are now vibrant and increasingly
potent. In addition to health care and Iraq, roughly the same progressive
fault lines are seen over the bank bailout, escalation in Afghanistan,
Obama's economic team, tolerance for Obama's embrace of Bush/Cheney civil
liberties polices, and even the reaction to Matt Taibbi's recent Rolling
Stone article on Obama's subservience to Wall Street.
There are many reasons for the progressive division on the health care bill.
There are differences over the narrow question of health care policy, with
some believing the bill does more harm than good just on that ground alone.
Some of it has to do with broader questions of political power: if
progressives always announce that they are willing to accept whatever
miniscule benefits are tossed at them (on the ground that it's better than
nothing) and unfailingly support Democratic initiatives (on the ground that
the GOP is worse), then they will (and should) always be ignored when it
comes time to negotiate; nobody takes seriously the demands of those who
announce they'll go along with whatever the final outcome is. But the most
significant underlying division identified by Kilgore is the divergent views
over the rapidly growing corporatism that defines our political system.
Kilgore doesn't call it "corporatism" -- the virtually complete dominance of
government by large corporations, even a merger between the two -- but
that's what he's talking about. He puts it in slightly more palatable
terms:
To put it simply, and perhaps over-simply, on a variety of fronts (most
notably financial restructuring and health care reform, but arguably on
climate change as well), the Obama administration has chosen the strategy of
deploying regulated and subsidized private sector entities to achieve
progressive policy results. This approach was a hallmark of the so-called
Clintonian, "New Democrat" movement, and the broader international movement
sometimes referred to as "the Third Way," which often defended the use of
private means for public ends.
As I've written for quite some time, I've honestly never understood how
anyone could think that Obama was going to bring about some sort of "new"
political approach or governing method when, as Kilgore notes, what he
practices -- politically and substantively -- is the Third Way, DLC,
triangulating corporatism of the Clinton era, just re-packaged with some
sleeker and more updated marketing. At its core, it seeks to use government
power not to regulate, but to benefit and even merge with, large corporate
interests, both for political power (those corporate interests, in return,
then fund the Party and its campaigns) and for policy ends. It's devoted to
empowering large corporations, letting them always get what they want from
government, and extracting, at best, some very modest concessions in return.
This is the same point Taibbi made about the Democratic Party in the context
of economic policy:
The significance of all of these appointments isn't that the Wall Street
types are now in a position to provide direct favors to their former
employers. It's that, with one or two exceptions, they collectively offer a
microcosm of what the Democratic Party has come to stand for in the 21st
century. Virtually all of the Rubinites brought in to manage the economy
under Obama share the same fundamental political philosophy carefully
articulated for years by the Hamilton Project: Expand the safety net to
protect the poor, but let Wall Street do whatever it wants.
One finds this in far more than just economic policy, and it's about more
than just letting corporations do what they want. It's about affirmatively
harnessing government power in order to benefit and strengthen those
corporate interests and even merging government and the private sector. In
the intelligence and surveillance realms, for instance, the line between
government agencies and private corporations barely exists. Military policy
is carried out almost as much by private contractors as by our state's armed
forces. Corporate executives and lobbyists can shuffle between the public
and private sectors so seamlessly because the divisions have been so eroded.
Our laws are written not by elected representatives but, literally, by the
largest and richest corporations. At the level of the most concentrated
power, large corporate interests and government actions are basically
inseparable.
The health care bill is one of the most flagrant advancements of this
corporatism yet, as it bizarrely forces millions of people to buy extremely
inadequate products from the private health insurance industry -- regardless
of whether they want it or, worse, whether they can afford it (even with
some subsidies). In other words, it uses the power of government, the
force of law, to give the greatest gift imaginable to this industry -- tens
of millions of coerced customers, many of whom will be truly burdened by
having to turn their money over to these corporations -- and is thus a truly
extreme advancement of this corporatist model. It's undeniably true that
the bill will also do some genuine good, as it will help many people who
can't get coverage now to get it (though it will also severely burden many
people with compelled, uncontrolled premiums and will potentially weaken
coverage for millions as well). If one judges the bill purely from the
narrow perspective of coverage, a rational and reasonable (though by no
means conclusive) case can be made in its favor. But if one finds this
creeping corporatism to be a truly disturbing and nefarious trend, then the
bill will seem far less benign.
As I've noted before, this growing opposition to corporatism -- to the
virtually absolute domination of our political process by large
corporations -- is one of the many issues that transcend the trite
left/right drama endlessly used as a distraction. The anger among both the
left and right towards the bank bailout, and towards lobbyist influence in
general, illustrates that. Kilgore says that anger among the left and right
over corporatism is irreconcilable, and this is the point I think he has
mostly wrong:
To put it more bluntly, on a widening range of issues, Obama's critics to
the right say he's engineering a government takeover of the private sector,
while his critics to the left accuse him of promoting a corporate takeover
of the public sector. They can't both be right, of course, and these critics
would take the country in completely different directions if given a chance.
But the tactical convergence is there if they choose to pursue it.
This supposedly irreconcilable difference Kilgore identifies is more
semantics than substance. It's certainly true that health care opponents on
the left want more a expansive plan while opponents on the right want the
opposite. But the objections over the mandate are largely identical -- it's
a coerced gift to the private health insurance industry that underwrites the
Democratic Party. The same was true over opposition to the bailout,
objections to lobbying influence over Washington, and most of all, the
growing anger that Washington serves the interests of financial elites at
the expense of the working class.
Whether you call it "a government takeover of the private sector" or a
"private sector takeover of government," it's the same thing: a merger of
government power and corporate interests which benefits both of the merged
entities (the party in power and the corporations) at everyone else's
expense. Growing anger over that is rooted far more in an insider/outsider
dichotomy over who controls Washington than it is in the standard
conservative/liberal ideological splits from the 1990s. It's true that the
people who are angry enough to attend tea parties are being exploited and
misled by GOP operatives and right-wing polemicists, but many of their
grievences about how Washington is ignoring their interests are valid, and
the Democratic Party has no answers for them because it's dependent upon and
supportive of that corporatist model. That's why they turn to Glenn Beck
and Rush Limbaugh; what could a Democratic Party dependent upon corporate
funding and subservient to its interests possibly have to say to populist
anger?
Even if one grants the arguments made by proponents of the health care bill
about increased coverage, what the bill does is reinforces and bolsters a
radically corrupt and flawed insurance model and and an even more corrupt
and destructive model of "governing." It is a major step forward for the
corporatist model, even a new innovation in propping it up. How one weighs
those benefits and costs -- both in the health care debate and with regard
to many of Obama's other policies -- depends largely upon how devoted one is
to undermining and weakening this corporatist framework (as opposed to
exploiting it for political gain and some policy aims). That's one of the
primary underlying divisions Kilgore identifies, and he's right to call for
greater examination and debate over the role it is playing.
Copyright �2009 Salon Media Group, Inc.
Glenn Greenwald was previously a constitutional law and civil rights
litigator in New York. He is the author of the New York Times Bestselling
book "How Would a Patriot Act?," a critique of the Bush administration's use
of executive power, released in May 2006. His second book, "A Tragic
Legacy", examines the Bush legacy.
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