No, Tea Partiers, you don’t get to own American history

Posted on September 15, 2010 | Comments Off

So, last night, Tea Party types won big when Christine O’Donnell took the Republican party nomination in the U.S. Senate race in Delaware.  That might not work out so well for them, of course, but I’m more interested in something she said during her victory speech:

Don’t ever underestimate the power of We the People!

“We the People”, huh?  I hadn’t even known that she had used this line until my wife pointed it out after hearing it on NPR.  She brought it up because of a pin I wear:

I first saw this pin on a friend’s lapel at a meeting of the Drinking Liberally social group I organize in Peoria, and I had to get one.  Back in the dark, late-Bush, still-possibly-McCain-Palin days, I felt the phrase “We the People” went a long way toward signifying what I felt was at stake.  We the People – all of us, in this together – had a lot to lose if conservative-Republican rule continued. 

So, along come the Tea Partiers and swipe We the People.  They already lay claim to the Gadsden flag, like hardcore religious and economic conservatives don’t want to tread on the rest of us.  They claim the U.S. flag, of course.  They claim freedom.  And of course, they claim the Constitution.

In my experience, liberals and progressives tend to shy away form using American imagery.  That’s a mistake.  American history – with its constant advancement of individual freedoms and quality of life – is our story, not theirs.

Let’s take a quick look at the preamble to the Constitution:

We the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

 Let’s review:

  • Justice – dare I even say social justice?
  • The general welfare – hello, social security and Medicare.
  • Liberty – for everyone, not just the select.

Six goals laid out in the preamble and easily half of them clearly liberal and progressive.  The preamble, remember, spells out why the entire rest of the document exists - to serve those goals.

Now, I understand the liberal and progressive impulse to not overly glorify American history.  There were a lot of mistakes – horrible mistakes – along the way.

But it is no solution to simply concede the words and imagery of American history the Tea Partiers and hardcore conservatives.  Nope.  It’s ours.  And we’re not giving it up without a fight.

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Posted in framing, Liberalism

People are Too Big To Fail

Posted on September 8, 2010 | Comments Off

In a post reviewing President Obama’s new economic proposals, Ezra Klein also goes after the idea that the Obama administraiton is somehow “anti-business”.  He sums it up this way:

The various stimulus measures have been designed to directly support businesses or indirectly support the people who those businesses rely on.

It’s just a variation on the theme of Too Big To Fail – the idea that if we only support companies (especially large ones), we’ll all turn out okay.

Some TBTF might be needed in special circumstances, but how about emphasizing actual, individual humans as being Too Big To Fail for once?

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Posted in Economics

Freedom, freedom, and more freedom

Posted on May 4, 2010 | 1 Comment

And let’s throw in a fourth “freedom” for good measure.

If liberals and progressives want to have any chance of creating long-term and significant change, we need a new approach to our rhetoric, and a great place to start is to reclaim the word “freedom”.  Freedom is fundamental to the American identity and elicits a visceral reaction in people.  No one can be against it.  We need to show that we stand for freedom – that our ideas and policies bolster freedom.

And via Matthew Yglesias, I get a link to an excellent essay by John Schwarz in The Democratic Strategist:

For decades, conservatives hit liberals over the head as uncaring about individual freedom and personal responsibility, given their repeated advocacy of big governmental programs and regulatory planning. The attacks succeeded with such thoroughness that not only were liberals put into a perpetually defensive position, but the word “liberal” itself actually became an unmentionable political pejorative—the “L” word. Unless President Obama and the Democrats learn how to counter the opposition’s call for freedom effectively, it will continue to delimit them and the country in advancing the nation’s agenda over the years to come no differently than it proved able to demonize liberalism, emasculate the public option in the health-care reform bill, and make increasing taxes to finance government practically prohibitive.

Schwarz later writes:

Freedom, today, is often understood to convey a “me-first,“ “self-interest,” or “anything goes” kind of attitude, none of them a transcendent goal. Something morally crucial is missing in the prevailing view. What is lacking is the recognition of our duties and obligations to each other. The prevailing view fails to recognize that freedom, when rooted in the premise that each person has innate dignity and equal worth, carries with it profound moral responsibilities toward others precisely because we are all equals in our right to freedom. Those responsibilities require that we act towards all others with a level of concern that can demand more from us than even the Golden Rule does in asking us to treat others as we would like to be treated ourselves. 

And we must use all the tools we have at our disposal – markets, voluntary organizations, families, and yes, even government – to find ways to create true freedom for everyone.

I urge you to read the whole article.

I’ve been playing with this idea of reclaiming freedom for some time.  Here are a few imperfect samples of what I’ve come up with:

  1. Liberals and progressives are often the defenders of the “welfare” state.  I think we should start calling it the “freedom” state.  (This one would make the hard-core libertarians apoplectic.)  After all, how free can you be if your sick and unable to get treatment?  That’s the essence of Medicare and Medicaid.  How free can you be if your poor and starving in your later years or because of a disability?  That’s the essence of Social Security.
  2. We need to continue to work on reforming our health care system in order to eliminate employer-based insurance.  After all, how free can you truly be if you can’t leave your employer to start a new business or take a risk on a potentially better job if you’re worried about getting medical care?  This idea of “job lock” didn’t get a lot of play in the health care debate, even though it’s been talked about for quite some time.
  3. If taxes paying for the military protect our freedom, well, then, so do tax dollars for education.  An education is the surest ticket to having the ability to do whatever it is you want to with your life.  Without an education, your choices are severely limited.  Public education is one of America’s best freedom-producing expenditures.

Obviously these are first drafts.  Ideas are welcome.

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Posted in framing, freedom

Left-right unity

Posted on February 8, 2010 | Comments Off

Over at the Nation, Christopher Hayes has a good piece identifying what’s going wrong in the country:

There’s a word for a governing philosophy that fuses the power of government and large corporations as a means of providing services and keeping the wheels of industry greased, and it’s a word that has begun to pop up among critics of everything from the TARP bailout to healthcare to cap and trade: corporatism. Since corporatism often merges the worst parts of Big Government and Big Business, it’s an ideal target for both the left and right. The ultimate corporatist moment, the bailout, was initially voted down in the House by an odd-bedfellows coalition of Progressive Caucus members and right-wingers. 

I’ve noticed this, as well.  Many commentators and voters seem to be objecting to the same things, and as Hayes writes, some leading progressive and right libertarian writers and activists have been calling for some sort of political alliance.  But it’s hard to see this coming to pass, based on the sources of the two side’s outrage:

I don’t think that coalition is going to emerge in any meaningful form. The right’s anger is born largely of identity-based alienation, a fear of socialism (whatever that means nowadays) and an age-old Bircher suspicion that “they” are trying to screw “us.” Even in its most sophisticated forms, such as in Carney’s Obamanomics, the basic right-wing argument against corporatism embraces a kind of fatalism about government that assumes it will always devolve into a rat’s nest of rent seekers and cronies and therefore should be kept as small as possible. 

Basically, conservatives and libertarians hate government.  Period.  They see it as an irredeemable institution.  And they hate taxes.  Period.  Taxes are theft.  It’s hard to see how these two sides can come to an agreement.

Still, I think this is valuable to explore.  While in general the right hates government and taxes, I think many who currently identify as conservatives could be persuaded otherwise.  I have this saying, “Many people are liberals.  They just don’t know it.” 

Hayes has more:

(T)he corporatism on display in Washington is itself a symptom of a broader social illness that I noted above, a democracy that is pitched precariously on the tipping point of oligarchy. In an oligarchy, the only way to get change is to convince the oligarchs that it is in their interest–and increasingly, that’s the only kind of change we can get. 

 That argument could be starting point.  Sadly, paying off the oligarchs has been the story of the last year.  And it appears our Master of the Universe are still weighing in.

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Posted in Liberalism

When I can start taking conservatives seriously on health care

Posted on December 10, 2009 | Comments Off

I today declare that I will not take a self-described “conservative” politician seriously on health care until they introduce a bill to abolish Medicare.  Period.  Even if the bill doesn’t get taken up, they can still introduce it.  Go ahead.  Make my day.  See Bob Cesca over at Huffington Post for more on that.  At least right-winger Glenn Beck is willing to admit abolishing Medicare is really what he wants.  Now let’s see how that plays with voters.

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Posted in Health care

"The Future of Liberalism"

Posted on December 9, 2009 | Comments Off

I have some recommended reading: “The Future of Liberalism” by Boston College professor Alan Wolfe.

Liberalism – and by extension its politics, politicians, and causes – have been on the defensive for decades now. I believe we liberals and progressives should shoulder much of the blame for that. We’ve been unable, and maybe unwilling, to articulate and defend what liberalism is, what it stands for, and why it’s important. We might intuitively know what it is, but that only takes us so far. It might be great to commiserate with like-minded people, but we also have to be able to explain liberalism to those who might be hostile to it at first, but remain persuadable. This is the realm of political independents, and it’s the ground on which campaigns and causes are won.

Only in the last few years have I seen more books articulating and defending liberalism. I guess that’s something, in a perverse way, for which we can be thankful for the Bush administration. Wolfe’s book is among the best of those books that I have read.

“The core substantive principle of liberalism is this: As many people as possible should have as much say as is feasible over the direction their lives will take,” he writes on page 10.

True freedom is not just freedom from interference by others. That’s more libertarianism. True freedom is also having the capacities to make something of our lives in ways that we choose. That’s when we get the turn into liberalism, and it’s the principle from which flows many of the initiatives that libertarians and conservatives criticize, like the welfare state, health care for all, income protection, etc. (By the way, I think “welfare” state is a horrible label. “Freedom” state would be better, but more on that in another post.)

Wolfe also writes, “Equality is liberalism’s second substantive goal.” This dedication to equality often gets expressed elsewhere as “equality of opportunity”, which is directly related to the ideas of liberty in the last paragraph. Everyone deserves to have a roughly equal shot to develop their capacities so that they can live the freely chosen life that they pick.

So, for Wolfe, those are the key propositions of liberalism. He goes on to describe some of liberalism’s other features, as well. There is procedural liberalism, which is the system of rights, checks-and-balances, and democratic deliberative politics that’s enshrined in our government to give us all equal protection under the law. And there is the liberal temperament – the open-minded approach to the world – that allows all to find that approach to the world that works for them.

Obviously, I could go on. As I said above, this book is well worth the read in order to understand liberalism, even if you are a liberal.

Wolfe makes clear that liberalism is truly about liberty – true liberty – and as one of the chapters is titled, “The Most Appropriate Political Philosphy for Our Times”.

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Posted in Liberalism, Libertarianism

A Step Toward Medicare-for-All

Posted on December 9, 2009 | Comments Off

I have to admit: I never really was a big fan of the public option in health care reform, especially because of the countless ways in which it was so constrained and complex.

That’s why I’m more encouraged by what seems to be a compromise coming out the U.S. Senate – a limited form of Medicare-for-All. Obviously there are problems with this proposed system, too. For example, right now, it only will apply to people 55 and older, so more work needs to be done. But as I said, encouraging.

That said, let’s remember that Medicare has its own problems. We still don’t have a politically palatable way to bring down costs. The above solution might help with access, but the problem of ever-growing costs is an even bigger headache.

Response elsewhere seems to be pretty positive to the plan, too, although with all sorts of questions about details.

Paul Krugman:

If this is the final plan, it’s better than most of us were expecting — and definitely good enough to go with.

More from Ezra Klein and Howard Dean.

And here’s an article answering the questions, “How can this be? Isn’t it even more pinko than the public option itself?”

Life can be funny sometimes.

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Posted in Health care

Let’s see…there was something I was doing here…oh, yeah… #2

Posted on December 9, 2009 | Comments Off

blogging.

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Posted in Blog

Health care Germanophilia

Posted on July 25, 2009 | Comments Off

I’ll admit. I had to look that word up. It is not a disease.

From the reading I’ve done about other country’s health care systems so far, I’m sure about this – it’s incredibly difficult to understand exactly what they’re like without having lived there. Acknowledging that right up front, I’ll say this:

Canada’s health care system gets plenty of mentions in our national health care debate – positive and negative. I don’t think I would want a Canadian system.

I like the German system better. In it you get national health insurance, but you also get to choose from a couple hundred “sickness funds” so you can tailor your health care plan to your needs.

France also has an excellent system, and I could very easily have been persuaded to write a Francophilia blog post instead. But I’ll go with Germany for now.

Why? I love Canada. I think it’s a great country. But maybe if conservative are going to throw around a national bogeyman in Canada, progressives and liberals could respond not by defending Canada, but instead looking to Germany. First of all, it gets you around all of that nutty anti-French business here in the U.S., and hey, everybody loves German engineering, right? Think BMW, Mercedes…beer.

Now for some links:

NPR had a great series on European health care system a while back.

Here’s Germany, with a bonus story from the New York Times.

Here’s France, with a bonus op-ed about the French system from the Boston Globe.

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Posted in Health care

Health care ironies

Posted on July 24, 2009 | Comments Off

Nobody – not even medical personnel – are immune to our screwball health care system.

First of all, we have the story from the Peoria Journal Star about how OSF Healthcare is cutting compensation for its employees because of the swelling ranks of unemployed – and therefore uninsured – patients using its emergency room.

And then a different story on a more personal note – I’ve talked to a local doctor who was essentially laid off from a local health care system. The biggest concern for this doctor is finding a new job with health insurance coverage for the doctor and the family. Our employer-based health care system strikes again.

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Posted in Health care, Peoria