None of this is untrue. But over here in Britain, Jeremy Corbyn – the UK's Bernie Sanders – gave us Boris Johnson, the UK's Trump. The problem may well be intractable.
The UK's electoral system is also partly to blame. Also 2019 as the "Get Brexit Done" election. Jeremy Corbyn, as much as like him, was also a far more flawed candidate, with a lot more baggage than Sanders. I'm not sure these comparisons are all that useful in understanding what happens.
The US electoral system's partly to blame for Trump, so there's equivalence there. I guess I don't know enough about Sanders and his correspondences to Corbyn but the latter was almost an avatar of the British left, believing what they believed, offering a solidly left-wing programme and he was rejected twice. The second time rejected hard in favour of a proven liar and charismatic speaker who had no clue how to govern and no real interest in doing do, only wanting to be liked. I think it's fair to see similarities even without bringing fucked-up hair into it.
Corbyn was far more vulnerable to personal attacks on his character, notably the attack lines around the IRA, antisemitism, and supposedly having been a spy for Czechoslovakia... I'm sure the press wouldn't have gone easy on Sanders, but Corbyn was more vulnerable even than most other left-wing Labour back benchers. Of course there are similarities, but I just don't think they are all that instructive.
At the same time, the French Socialist Party has completely collapsed, with Macron getting the votes of anyone who is to the left of Le Pen. Anna Hidalgo, who is far from the most toxic person the Socialist Party has ever nominated, got less than 2% of the vote in 2022. Sanders would have been vulnerable to attacks on things like the Sandinistas. The DSA is making life difficult for the likes of AOC on issues like Gaza. While Corbyn isn't a perfectly analogue to Sanders, no one would ever be a perfect 1:1 comparison across countries. Corbyn is the most likely comparison to what a general election result would be for Sanders.
The main left party in France is LFI, since as you rightly point out the socialist party has all but collapsed. And this is basically a direct result of Macron decided to leave the socialist party and form LREM.
Hidalgo got 2%, but Mélenchon got 20%, Roussel another 2.5% and Jadot got another 4%. And after the recent legislative elections, the left-wing grouping NFP is the largest parliamentary bloc. In many ways, the French left is doing far better than the German or British left.
Mind you, French politics and the electoral system make any comparison to the UK or US very difficult.
In 2017, he forced a hung parliament and probably would have won a slim majority if he hadn't been stabbed in the back by the Labour Right, who openly stated they'd rather lose to May than win under Corbyn.
Corbyn had two problems. Blairites who would rather lose to Johnson than win with Corbyn and a media that was ready to whip up hysteria against him.
Were a Sanders ever to get near actual power and threaten Establishment sacred cattle, we'd see something much like the russiagate conspiracy theory being used to keep him in line.
I think it's easy to forget in retrospect how intense the UK media bias against Corbyn was across almost all of the press, including the Guardian. Family members and friends I knew who hated him would basically repeat headlines. Sheer repetition works, especially against those who haven't got time, energy and inclination to be more informed. I agreed with all his policy positions but certainly internalised the idea that he was anti-Semitic.
I suppose there are analogues of both of these things in the states too - I'm sure the press would have had pretty good go at Sanders too, but the vitriol directed at Corbyn and co. really was quite unhinged.
But Jeremy Corbyn's Labor Party, in 2019, got more votes than Kier Starmer did this year, even while gaining the majority of seats. An imploding opposition can do that.
I think more than anything this is an argument in favour of a proportional representation type electoral system.
I think this fact also suggests that social democratic policies are not as unpopular as certain people in the Labour Party would have you believe. However, it doesn't really say much as to what the way forward is for a genuine Left party - any candidate with a policy platform similar to Lab 2017 or Lab 2019 is going to have to contend with an overwhelmingly hostile press and an electoral system that, rightly or wrongly, places them at a significant disadvantage.
I can't say for certain that you're incorrect, but that would surprise me a great deal - especially in 2016. In 2020, he wrote affirmatively about Bernie as part of a larger project Vox did with writers making an affirmative case for each of the 6 leading Dem candidates; I still don't think that's an acknowledgement that he voted for Bernie, rather than an intellectual exercise.
When you’re a communist, everything looks right wing. The problem for Freddie and leftists is only a relatively small small percent of the population sees things the same way.
FYI- the Michael Lewis book “Losers” is a really entertaining perspective of the 96 election from viewpoint of the GOP candidates. I don’t disagree that Clinton found a way to basically steal all the conservative talking points. Similar to what Trump is trying to do now with entitlement spending and tariffs imo.
Does "Losers" include my all-time favorite Michael Lewis phrase, from a TNR article at the time, describing Steve Forbes as having a "special Olympics smile"? That's a one-use-only diss that I'm somewhat ashamed to still remember ~30 years later, but boy was it apt.
I noticed that among my friends from grad school, the Bernie leftists were the ones who had the least cultural interaction with the Midwest and the Rust Belt (often growing up in New England and abroad), while the moderate Democrats were the ones who had actually spent time time in swing states. That helped fuel a delusion that working class people they had never met saw socialism as the answer. It's also the fact that Obama and Clinton have been the most nationally successful Democratic politicians since the end of the Cold War and the only Democratic presidents since FDR to win re-election.
I'm not sure about 2016 but in 2020 the Bernie leftists were in the midwest. The Chapo crew, for example, was out hustling in central Iowa but then about 3/5 of them are midwesterners. We also phone banked for Bernie.
A relatively large percent of the population seems to conflate political analysis with political philosophy or ideology. Clarifying a political situation requires a combined effort of principled dialectics and adhering to rigorous scientific standards of social analysis. Unfortunately, this is not often the case, but my point is that concluding what Freddie has concluded here is not exclusive to a leftist or “communist” perspective.
As some people like to say, facts don’t care about your feelings.
The economy was doing great in 1996. Dole didn't have a chance. Not because he sucked or anything, but it was his turn to run for President under the GOP banner and he walked into a meat grinder.
I'm not a communist, but the American political spectrum on a whole seems pretty right-wing to me as a Canadian. "They want to make us more like the U.S." is frequently used as a boogeyman to scare centrists about the nefarious threats posed by our conservative parties.
I'v seen quite a few polls that suggest that many "left" position are very popular with the American public, among which are healthcare for all, reproductive rightst, and a ceasefire in Gaza. The problem is the candidates and those elected are far more beholden to their donors, than their constituents. One might find it of interest to look up just how frequently members of congress vote according to which of these two group's wishes.
I'll give you reproductive rights but issue orientef polls are misleading because they don't tell you anything about the respondents' prioritization of the issue.
I don't think this is wrong exactly, and I think Freddie is right that the 'socially liberal, fiscally conservative' moderate is much more of a phantom than a reality, especially in the context of the electoral college. However what I think does exist is something closer to the mirror image, that being the 'socially not exactly conservative but not progressive as conventionally understood, fiscal state interventionist.' Freddie has written many, many pieces, touching on this but I think the real issue is that it will be hard to get that sort of vote to the extent it is attached to endorsing various left wing cultural enthusiasms, with mass illegal immigration being the biggest but hardly only albatross. That itself probably also includes meme-ified space Marxism and similar stuff that is nominally about economics but codes as hopelessly entwined with cultural leftism.
I think this is a really good point and this is exactly the kind of voter a class-first Dem candidate could do well with if a campaign was run successfully. And that candidate's platform, aesthetics aside, would look a lot more like Sanders' than it would like Clinton's.
That's the problem for the American left in a two party system where the center-right corporate Democrats represent capital's bulwark against the left.
I don't think think the corporate democrats necessarily pull Sanders or the squad to the right. I think those supposedly left wing politicians genuinely, willingly and voluntarily move in line with their party to be seen to unite against Trump.
That it undermines any leverage they might have to drive left wing policy seems a price they're happy to pay.
The left figured out, and subsequently abandoned, AOC half way through her second term. The dress incident and then her voting present on Iron Dome funding (and literally crying about it) told us she was like any other Democrat.
Everyone seems mad at you, Freddie, so let me just comment on this from your NYT piece: "My favorite comic book run of all time, Frank Miller and Bill Sienkiewicz’s “Elektra: Assassin'..."
in the 80s Sienkiewicz also illustrated the Christic Institute's lawsuit "brought to light" against the US-Costa Rican rancher Ollie North used to run blow for the NSC (Uncle Sam as a rotting bald eagle not-technically-working for the not-technically-CIA) and the "Friendly Dictators" trading cards (archive only now)
This article is such a fascinating insight into leftist psychology.
Most people might assume that in a democracy, parties would attempt to secure votes by advertising positions palatable to the largest number of voters, and thus the parties moving in any particular direction is a sign that they are chasing a move by the populace as a whole. Most people would also assume that in a democracy, any popular position lacking in political representation would be pretty quickly seized upon by politicians who see an opportunity to pick up easy votes.
The leftist thinks that political positions flow downward from parties to voters, rather than the other way around. They think this because on the left, they actually do. This is why Kamala Harris, who was so incredibly unpopular in 2020 that she dropped out of the election even before the primary, is suddenly the most exciting thing to happen to the Democratic Party since Obama. This is how the leftist can maintain a fantasy that communists could actually win public office in America - people who would normally vote for Trump would totally vote for a communist instead, if only you just ordered them to do so out of a sense of party loyalty.
In reality, the idea that there is an enormous number of secret communists out there who vote for Donald Trump because there isn't a real communist on the ballot is deeply insane. People vote for Donald Trump because they like his politics, and there isn't a real communist on the ballot because communism is so unpopular that no politicians want to touch it.
I'm not sure why anybody is talking about communism - that's clearly not on the agenda. The fact is that moderate social democratic policies like single payer healthcare and a robust social safety net, along with protection for workers and unionisation, are broadly speaking popular, even in right-wing countries such as the US. In fact, polling generally depends on how the question is framed, and in the discourse around elections, how these questions are framed is largely determined by politicians and journalists.
I think that's true as far as it goes but there are real complications in the US, based both on race but also history of immigration, maybe even basic psychology and character of the kinds of people whose descendants are here versus those who stayed home. We're fundamentally a lower solidarity society than any other rich country, and it's no coincidence that Europe is experiencing its own various crisis as it 'diversifies' and social solidarity breaks down (I put diversity in quotes because it's still absurdly more homogeneous than the US yet they're in a socio political meltdown) . Which doesn't mean we just give up on the principles, like that everyone in a country as wealthy as ours should have guaranteed access to basic healthcare, but it may mean acknowledging that success here will not ever look like post war European social democracy.
I agree - I'm not saying that the US should emulate Europe. I'm just trying to make the point that the policy proposals of Sanders et al. are neither "communist" in any meaningful sense, nor particularly unpopular.
While I think that saying Europe is in a "sociopolitical meltdown" is a bit of an exaggeration, clearly it's not all rosy here either.
Maybe that's too strong a term. And the exact situation varies. I think it's fair to observe though that at minimum the center in all the big European countries, where there had been a consensus on a lot of this stuff for about 4 generations, is struggling mightily to hold.
This is an absurd claim overall. It’s not a strictly leftist position that voter constituency is influenced by large-scale media and intelligentsia - how do you think political ideology emerges and eventually gets enforced, exactly? Regardless of how grassroots a particular position may be, the whole POINT of politics is to broadly enforce policy interests on a population. That necessarily means political positions flow downwards, the give-and-take of ideological fluidity between individual level voters and elites in positions of power does not discredit this, nor does the fact that what a government and its state apparatuses provide its citizens is exactly the kind of stuff that influences voter interests.
Which puts into question your notion of what we’re even talking about when you mention what a democracy is. In the context of the US, it’s not some childishly conceived direct democracy where politicians pay fealty to the voting masses. Elites pursue their own interests, while the masses squabble within obtuse party apparatuses to vie for their attention. At the risk of losing support from their broader voter base, elites dole out platitudes within the framework of the economic system they’re able to craft and enforce that benefits their class collaborators (it is a fact that we operate in a capitalist economic system that benefits how profit is exploited and distributed, not some leftist conspiracy).
You’re not suggesting anything counter to the point of the essay, and the claim that leftists only view political positions as flowing downward is disingenuous at best.
There maybe aren’t a ton of “secret communists” but there is overlap between right wing populism and left wing populism. I knew a several people in the small Indiana town where I was in 2016 who voted for Bernie sanders in the primary but switched over to voting for trump in the general election.
From a 30,000 foot level, sure. But this is where "left" and right" become simplistic labels, and like magic, it's also where...cough....cough...POLICY comes in. Sanders was, among other things, advocating for universal healthcare and holding Wall Street accountable. I doubt that all or most of the people to whom you are referring would identify as either left "wing" or right "wing." Before or after 2016 or 2020. Trump did an end-around on Hillary from the psuedo-left, more accurately described as "f*ck the elite populism" and Bernie was just pushing his usual socialism-lite. So those voters, at least in 2016, were voting (in primaries presumably) for Bernie's policy and then Trump's vague almost lefty sounding populism about bringing back jobs, ending wars, building infrastructure, etc. Then, of course, the other choice was the exact woman whose party apparatus had just been exposed stealing the nomination from Bernie - or doing everything in their power to, anyway - and who came with a terrible reputation, Neoliberal policies and warmongering.
TL/DR: You're not talking about actual left or right wingers; you're talking about frustrated American working class people who were voting for policies and LOTE.
"It turns out that after Bill Clinton shanked labor by passing NAFTA, casting millions of people into economic devastation in crumbling Rust Belt towns, and Obama spent his presidency doing nothing for those people so that he could better embody the tony cosmopolitanism of advisors like Jon Favreau and Penny Pritzker, the people in those crumbling Rust Belt towns weren’t too keen on rewarding the Democrats with their votes."
BINGO!!!!
And you are so right about Obamacare!!!! Obamacare improved access to (questionably useful) healthcare insurance—but did little to improve access to healthcare. And its other great failure was its refusal to address runaway inflation in the healthcare industry: Since 2000, the cost of medical care has risen by more than 120%.
On the one hand, Obamacare was, at its core, a giant gimme to the insurance industry. No wonder they loved it. On the other hand, in a system so dominated by entrenched interests, it may have been the only politically feasible reform at the time.
Or I may be giving Obama too much credit. I mean, the man entered office with huge majorities in both Houses of Congress, Wall Street begging for rescue on any terms, a public appetite for reform unmatched since maybe 1933, and a national media unironically comparing him to Jesus.
In a town hall meeting I asked De Fazio why Obamacare didn't include dickering with pharmaceutical companies on Medicare. Why the giveaway? He told me the were one vote shy of passage and XXX wouldn't sign unless they gave the pharma what they wanted. I was surprised by his answer.
Biden has pushed back.
Frankly, I'd have been totally sunk without Obamacare. I was getting a stent for a 99% blockage and the cardiologist asked what I was most concerned about: I told him Trump doing away with Obamacare because I'd have no health insurance anymore.
People like to complain about Obamacare, and it has problems that need fixing, but it was a start. I remember what it was like before. My insurance premiums went up 50% or more a year, out of pocket expenses rose...and if anything actually happened to you, it was gone.
If you think that an LBJ or a Huey Long would have thrown up his hands and said that this was all that could be done, but for one vote....
As I wrote, considering the momentum Obama had in 2008, he could have done a lot more. Notice how Obama fought hard for things he actually cared about, like the extension of the so-called "Patriot Act".
Totally open-minded about it and willing to listen to counter-arguments, but total health care spending as a percentage of GDP is at 17.3%, almost exactly what it was pre-pandemic (17.5% in 2019) and pre-Obamacare (17.2% in 2009).
Obamacare has been incredibly successful at reducing the growth of medical care costs. Are you saying that the flattening of the growth in the percentage of GDP spent on healthcare since 2010 was a coincidence??!!
And if you have any data that backs your claim that the vast reduction in the % of uninsured has not led to increased access to healthcare I would love to see it.
--"Obamacare was a disaster in a very direct way: it did not establish a legal right to medical coverage, as is the law in more than half of the world’s countries, and by instead adopting a piecemeal reform it made it even harder to get an actual functioning medical system in place. Almost 30 million Americans still don’t have health insurance."--
I think this is a strange view of the Affordable Care Act.
The ACA has helped tens of millions of people obtain insurance--45 million or so, last time I checked. That's not what I'd call a disaster. Sure, the system has flaws, but let's keep in mind at least one of those flaws is due at least in part to a conservative Supreme Court, which decided that--for whatever reason--the Medicaid expansion was constititional only if it was voluntary. I'll warrant that a good percentage of those 30 million you mention live in states that have stubbornly refused said expansion. If we'd had a better court, we'd have a better law.
Let's also keep in mind that social programs can be, and often are, improved over time. The Social Security Act of 1935 left out many categories of workers--domestic, governmental and agricultural workers, not to mention many women--and over the decades it was expanded to include those. Benefits for surviving children were added later, as were COLAs and SSI, until Social Security became the program contemporary Americans know and love. In other words, just because the act was imperfect at first doesn't mean it wasn't worthwhile, and even revolutionary.
Of course the Affordable Care Act isn't perfect, but it was a) the best that could have been done, given the politics of the moment; and b) a hell of a lot better than the alternative. We can build on the platform the ACA created and get closer to a system that is even more universal. If we let the perfect be the enemy of the good, however, we're going to get nothing instead of something.
It's worth remembering that the whole thing came down to having a momentary 60 vote majority in the Senate that included Arlen Specter switching parties, a few conservative Democrats from the mid west willing to end (or maybe vainly trying to save?) their political careers no matter how hard they tried to compromise, Joe Lieberman, and the loss of that filibuster proof majority midway through the process due to the death of Ted Kennedy and his replacement with a Republican.
The thing that jumped out to me about that quote is that "A legal right to medical coverage" is a downright *wild* way of framing socialized health care. In every other context, a "legal right" implies a freedom from government interference in accessing that right using your own resources. The left holds to this notion of a "legal right" when it comes to mass censorship by social media companies, even as it's outright coordinated by the government. The left definitely would definitely not be on board with the "right to bear arms" requiring the government to provide us all with AR-15s. But health care? Yeah, health care is a human right, and that means it needs to be paid for by the taxpayer. There are no other rights that we think about this way!
Hmm...I suppose many people think of education this way, and public schools work that way. I mean, kids have a right to be educated by the state, at least until they come of age, right?
I'm pretty sure that many if not most state constitutions explicitly define education as a right. I agree that the compulsory nature of school makes it a bit of an odd right--you HAVE to accept it--but if a state constitiution defines something as a right, then it's a right to same as the right to freedom of expression or whatever else that document provides.
Where does the climate left fit into this? I bring it up because the Biden admin could have prioritized making the expanded Child Tax Credit permanent, which would have been a major expansion of redistribution (the temporary expansion cut child poverty by half), but instead they chose to prioritize climate. Is that capitulating to the neoliberals? I dunno, the climate left writ large doesn't really fit cleanly into that camp, what with calls for banning pipelines and so forth. Was it a labor left victory? I mean, maybe, but again, the climate left is really not concerned with losing coal jobs, climate is much more an interest of the educated classes in this country. I just think it's one example of how trying to make this a "pull to the left vs pull to the right" issue obscures more than it clarifies.
It's just deeply inaccurate to call the Democrats a center-right party. The Global Party Survey has them firmly in the center-left (https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EZibQR_WkAM7y4B?format=jpg), and even cursory knowledge of other countries' electoral landscapes would reaffirm that. If you consider the mainstream left equivalents in other liberal democracies (say, Canada, UK, France, Germany, Italy, Ireland, Japan, South Korea, etc), there are only a handful of platform differences, sometimes even favoring Dems. It's only when you look at mainstream *right* parties globally and compare them to the GOP under Trump that you see massive differences in policy and tone.
One more thing:
"But the broader anti-left tendency they represent within the Democratic party leaves the party bereft of direction."
I question the assumption that "direction" is always a good thing, that the center-left needs to always promise movement (incremental or otherwise) towards progressivism. What if the current numbers for, say, minimum wage, taxes, redistribution, etc are all exactly correct? I grant that that's unlikely, but if inaction is as legitimate a choice as action, then so is the whole range of actions in between, some of which might be unsexy to the idealistic left. Transformative change isn't a priori better.
Who exactly participated in the "Global Party Survey", what questions were asked, how were they framed and what definitions were provided to participants?
Yeah, I looked it up earlier and noticed a few things. It's run by some academic woman at Harvard, under the auspices of Harvard's JFK School of Government and in conjunction with (and probably shares funding sources) NGOs like the Electoral Integrity Project.
Basically, it's a survey primarily concerning UN countries, conducted against a pool of about 1,800 "experts" on party politics (paraphrased, but actual phrasing equally fishy, IMO). I didn't do a deep enough dive into how these "experts" are vetted or chosen, but the whole affair smacks of anti-populist neoliberalism and Atlanticism. The reason I say that is the tie-ins with the Electoral Integrity Project and, less so, the Chapel Hill Expert Survey (CHES).
Forgive the tangent, and off the topic of their actual methodology (which I will do some further reading on), any time I see the words "Election" or "Electoral" with the word "Integrity" I immediately think to the various NGO collaborations and crossover with the NED, basically the US's regime change arm. To wit: I would bet money that the EIP (an NGO) has a track record of painting elections in countries like Venezuela, where the socialist candidate wins (and especially when the US government and multinationals like Chevron have a beef with them), as unfair. Again, historically; not just this cycle. As another example, China. Since I haven't read the report, I'm just engaging in educated guesswork here, but I'd also bet money that they classify China as undemocratic, when it's well known that Chinese people feel like their system is actually *more* democratic that ours in the US.
Interestingly, maybe even ironically, and IIRC, the EIP also engaged in some activities that Trump and his supporters cried foul about during the 2020 election cycle, so I guess they've managed to piss off the "populist" right as well.
Also, please forgive my cynicism, but I simply cannot trust these many headed hydra US NGO-NED-CIA-elite institution groups. It's all of a piece with US empire/hegemony and the many tools it uses to define and massage "the narrative" at home and abroad in favor of global arch-neoliberal austerity capitalism.
I think this calls into question the rigor and focus of this project, and I appreciate the thought and detail that went into highlighting something that most people would dismiss as conspiratorial (that would be my intuition too, but still, it deserves a fair hearing). But also, respectfully, it's kind of like conducting a study showing doctors earn more than teachers. Whether the survey you use is methodologically sound or not, what you're proving is trivially true. Similarly, if you pay attention to news about other countries for long enough, you notice that mainstream left parties across liberal democracies are just not that different. In these discussions this usually takes the form of debunking the myth that Europe is a progressive socialist paradise, so I will just skip to that: Europe is not a progressive socialist paradise. Many European democracies are more socially conservative than the US on important issues (eg reproductive rights, gay rights, religious expression, etc), and their welfare systems are not significantly more generous. If you expand your scope to Canada, Israel, and Asian democracies, again you see that, in significant ways, they can be more conservative than Americans. Even if we restrict our focus *only* to democracies - and I'm not sure we should - it's clear that on summary judgment, the Democrats should not be considered center-right by any serious person.
There's a lot in this piece to digest, and I do agree that anointing HRC in 2016 was a huge mistake. And I too have little hope that the Dems will move in any way towards being a party that looks out for the interests of the working classes.
Back a decade ago, I required to review thousands of emails related to executives at a health insurance company from the time period just prior to Obamacare being implemented. These execs were extremely excited about the billions they were about to receive and how they created Obamacare to give them everything they wanted. It may be the worst health insurance scheme in the world, screwed up to give more money to insurance companies, hospitals, and drug companies. It drove up insurance costs for small business.
We could have copied a lot of great syatems around the world, all of which cost much less and work better.
It is a classic neoliberal program, giving more to the oligarchy and pretending to help the poor and middle class.
The US Chamber of Commerce were out for blood trying to kill the ACA, in part driven by the healthcare industry. The AstroTurf Tea Party basically was created to fight the ACA. The fact that there was one insurance company happy about the ACA doesn't change the wider macro politics of the time.
The "healthcare industry" is a huge and diverse beast, whose components often have radically-diverging or even contradictory interests. Insurers could have been wildly in favor of the ACA, even as hospitals, providers, and drug/device manufacturers hated it.
By the same token, the insurance industry is a huge and diverse beast. It was smaller insurance companies coming out against Hillarycare during Clinton's first term that helped shift the US Chamber of Commerce from an international trade-focused organization to one that was more uniformly rightwing and aligned with Republicans.
The CofC was more considered about payors of health insurance (Big Business) than providers (health insurance co.). Top execs of one of the biggest health insurance companies knew that they were going to make billions off the ACA and they knew they were going to jack rates up.
It's not really controversial that Obama saw that the insurance companies bought Hillarycare tooth and nail, so the very first thing he did was to get them on board.
The problem with switching to a new system is that the people who want to switch would need to internalize what the trade-offs are.
There's a good case that NAFTA made the US more efficient but at the cost of jobs for people that couldn't just retrain to something new. A lot of the savings that could be done in the healthcare system, which I think should be made, involve getting rid of administrative costs by laying off a lot of office workers which is often the best office job for unskilled labor. Keeping health care costs high as a jobs program is pretty crazy but you can see the benefits. (We probably do need jobs programs and it probably shouldn't be the health care system. Maybe making television or coffee makers?)
If you look at western European nations both the Netherlands or Switzerland look a lot like Obamacare with the requirement to get some kind of insurance, so "picking one of those great systems that costs less" was done. But doctors get paid like 50% more here than in the Netherlands. Our nurse wages have gone way up in the past 20 years and that's good news.
Usually the level of detail is "I'm gonna fuck the insurance companies, because fuck them" which is a great applause line but every single thing in America is more expensive. You can likely get savings from cutting out a bunch of useless care, and you can *probably* figure out what the useless care is, but if you don't have a plan for when a photogenic person gets cut off from the care you called useless and they call life-saving, you're just planning to fail.
Lots to agree with and lots to disagree, but primarily I would be interested if you think the following is roughly true.
- Roughly speaking, one can distinguish between internal regulation and external regulation; internal regulation is about markets and production itself: who can enter the market? What are the rights of various markets participants (e.g. capitalists, labor, consumers)? External regulation is about externalities arising from markets: what environmental or safety standards have to be obeyed? What levels of toxins may products contain? What are the rights of various stakeholders not participating in the market, etc.
- Neoliberalism is mostly about deregulating on the internal regulation front: free trade agreements, privatization, looser labor regulation etc. It is perhaps surprisingly indifferent to external regulation: free trade agreements have to harmonize external regulation but the outcome is usually a mixed bag, leading to looser standards on one side and stricter ones on the other. Corporations don't care all that much about local external regulation so long as internal deregulation allows them to outsource jobs to places with less external regulation. Overall, neoliberalism has not affected the level of external regulation a lot.
- The Great Stagnation in technological progress is at least partially caused by an increase in external regulation that started in the late 60s/early 70s not only in the US but in developed countries in general. This includes (or perhaps included) for example excessive and non-sensical safety regulations on nuclear power but there are many more examples. It is perhaps one of the reasons why construction productivity stalled (actually decreased in real terms; the Empire State Building was built in 1 year!) and why there is a trend to move everthing into factories (e.g. Nuclear's small modular reactor trend; factories are basically external regulation protection sleeves).
- The increase in external regulation is in large part bad/excessive. Safety culture does more harm than good. But some degree of external regulation well above what existed, say, in the 1950s is good and in some areas (e.g. climate) more regulation is actually needed.
- There is a trade-off between internal and external regulation: a combination of massive internal regulation and minimal external regulation basically gets you late stage poison-rust-Soviet-socialism. Massive external and minimal internal regulation gives you a shiny-clean-deindustrialized-Neoliberalistan. If you minimize both, it is just Laissez-faire capitalism. Maximizing both - I don't know, let's not try?
- We need a new balance of internal and external regulation: external regulation needs to be low enough to allow a degree of international competitiveness; internal regulation needs to be high enough to allow a sane degree of environmental, climate, safety, etc. standards.
- The Biden administration has made steps in the direction of such a new balance. A wide coalition of people spanning at least from the center left (Yglesias, Klein) to the far right nowadays seem to agree in principle that external regulation has gone way overboard. Ergo, there is great electoral potential for an economic policy predicated on this idea.
- But the Left is really bad on external regulation and hampers the potential of the Democratic party to adopt such a policy.
- If Trump loses (still a big If), he will not leave (and there is no indication that he will die anytime soon). The Republican party either has to oust him (seems unlikely), or by the laws of political evolution, they will be replaced by another party (they cannot indefinitely lose elections and keep existing).
- Such a new party (say libertarians, if they are smart, but probably not, since they are not) could reshuffle the American economic consensus by adopting a new regulatory balance strategy, as I have laid out above. This would be good, both from a left wing and a right wing perspective.
None of this is untrue. But over here in Britain, Jeremy Corbyn – the UK's Bernie Sanders – gave us Boris Johnson, the UK's Trump. The problem may well be intractable.
The UK's electoral system is also partly to blame. Also 2019 as the "Get Brexit Done" election. Jeremy Corbyn, as much as like him, was also a far more flawed candidate, with a lot more baggage than Sanders. I'm not sure these comparisons are all that useful in understanding what happens.
The US electoral system's partly to blame for Trump, so there's equivalence there. I guess I don't know enough about Sanders and his correspondences to Corbyn but the latter was almost an avatar of the British left, believing what they believed, offering a solidly left-wing programme and he was rejected twice. The second time rejected hard in favour of a proven liar and charismatic speaker who had no clue how to govern and no real interest in doing do, only wanting to be liked. I think it's fair to see similarities even without bringing fucked-up hair into it.
Corbyn was far more vulnerable to personal attacks on his character, notably the attack lines around the IRA, antisemitism, and supposedly having been a spy for Czechoslovakia... I'm sure the press wouldn't have gone easy on Sanders, but Corbyn was more vulnerable even than most other left-wing Labour back benchers. Of course there are similarities, but I just don't think they are all that instructive.
At the same time, the French Socialist Party has completely collapsed, with Macron getting the votes of anyone who is to the left of Le Pen. Anna Hidalgo, who is far from the most toxic person the Socialist Party has ever nominated, got less than 2% of the vote in 2022. Sanders would have been vulnerable to attacks on things like the Sandinistas. The DSA is making life difficult for the likes of AOC on issues like Gaza. While Corbyn isn't a perfectly analogue to Sanders, no one would ever be a perfect 1:1 comparison across countries. Corbyn is the most likely comparison to what a general election result would be for Sanders.
The main left party in France is LFI, since as you rightly point out the socialist party has all but collapsed. And this is basically a direct result of Macron decided to leave the socialist party and form LREM.
Hidalgo got 2%, but Mélenchon got 20%, Roussel another 2.5% and Jadot got another 4%. And after the recent legislative elections, the left-wing grouping NFP is the largest parliamentary bloc. In many ways, the French left is doing far better than the German or British left.
Mind you, French politics and the electoral system make any comparison to the UK or US very difficult.
In 2017, he forced a hung parliament and probably would have won a slim majority if he hadn't been stabbed in the back by the Labour Right, who openly stated they'd rather lose to May than win under Corbyn.
Corbyn had two problems. Blairites who would rather lose to Johnson than win with Corbyn and a media that was ready to whip up hysteria against him.
Were a Sanders ever to get near actual power and threaten Establishment sacred cattle, we'd see something much like the russiagate conspiracy theory being used to keep him in line.
I think it's easy to forget in retrospect how intense the UK media bias against Corbyn was across almost all of the press, including the Guardian. Family members and friends I knew who hated him would basically repeat headlines. Sheer repetition works, especially against those who haven't got time, energy and inclination to be more informed. I agreed with all his policy positions but certainly internalised the idea that he was anti-Semitic.
Of course. Corbyn threatened too many sacred cows.
I suppose there are analogues of both of these things in the states too - I'm sure the press would have had pretty good go at Sanders too, but the vitriol directed at Corbyn and co. really was quite unhinged.
Hell, the US MSM spent four years breathlessly pushing a conspiracy theory that would have gotten them laughed out of the 1962-era John Birch Society.
I mean, you saw the implicit threat of national security investigation with Sanders, and, I guess, the explicit one with Tulsi Gabbard.
https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/484121-us-officials-told-sanders-that-russia-is-trying-to-help-his-2020-campaign/
https://www.racket.news/p/american-stasi-tulsi-gabbard-confirms
You forgot the Israel lobby.
See: Al Jazeera censored docuseries.
I didn't forget. They were one of the sacred cow herders.
But Jeremy Corbyn's Labor Party, in 2019, got more votes than Kier Starmer did this year, even while gaining the majority of seats. An imploding opposition can do that.
I think more than anything this is an argument in favour of a proportional representation type electoral system.
I think this fact also suggests that social democratic policies are not as unpopular as certain people in the Labour Party would have you believe. However, it doesn't really say much as to what the way forward is for a genuine Left party - any candidate with a policy platform similar to Lab 2017 or Lab 2019 is going to have to contend with an overwhelmingly hostile press and an electoral system that, rightly or wrongly, places them at a significant disadvantage.
I don’t agree with everything Yglesias says, but I thought he voted for Bernie Sanders in 2016.
I can't say for certain that you're incorrect, but that would surprise me a great deal - especially in 2016. In 2020, he wrote affirmatively about Bernie as part of a larger project Vox did with writers making an affirmative case for each of the 6 leading Dem candidates; I still don't think that's an acknowledgement that he voted for Bernie, rather than an intellectual exercise.
I couldn't find confirmation of that when I was googling it (not saying it's wrong) but I did find this piece he wrote in 2016 that seems pretty on-the-money to me now: https://www.vox.com/2016/4/20/11466376/bernie-sanders-future-democrats
When you’re a communist, everything looks right wing. The problem for Freddie and leftists is only a relatively small small percent of the population sees things the same way.
FYI- the Michael Lewis book “Losers” is a really entertaining perspective of the 96 election from viewpoint of the GOP candidates. I don’t disagree that Clinton found a way to basically steal all the conservative talking points. Similar to what Trump is trying to do now with entitlement spending and tariffs imo.
Does "Losers" include my all-time favorite Michael Lewis phrase, from a TNR article at the time, describing Steve Forbes as having a "special Olympics smile"? That's a one-use-only diss that I'm somewhat ashamed to still remember ~30 years later, but boy was it apt.
I noticed that among my friends from grad school, the Bernie leftists were the ones who had the least cultural interaction with the Midwest and the Rust Belt (often growing up in New England and abroad), while the moderate Democrats were the ones who had actually spent time time in swing states. That helped fuel a delusion that working class people they had never met saw socialism as the answer. It's also the fact that Obama and Clinton have been the most nationally successful Democratic politicians since the end of the Cold War and the only Democratic presidents since FDR to win re-election.
I'm not sure about 2016 but in 2020 the Bernie leftists were in the midwest. The Chapo crew, for example, was out hustling in central Iowa but then about 3/5 of them are midwesterners. We also phone banked for Bernie.
A relatively large percent of the population seems to conflate political analysis with political philosophy or ideology. Clarifying a political situation requires a combined effort of principled dialectics and adhering to rigorous scientific standards of social analysis. Unfortunately, this is not often the case, but my point is that concluding what Freddie has concluded here is not exclusive to a leftist or “communist” perspective.
As some people like to say, facts don’t care about your feelings.
The economy was doing great in 1996. Dole didn't have a chance. Not because he sucked or anything, but it was his turn to run for President under the GOP banner and he walked into a meat grinder.
I'm not a communist, but the American political spectrum on a whole seems pretty right-wing to me as a Canadian. "They want to make us more like the U.S." is frequently used as a boogeyman to scare centrists about the nefarious threats posed by our conservative parties.
Unfortunately the electorate is center-right.
The center of the electorate is, by definition, in the center.
Depends on the scale. If it's a normalized distribution, then yes. But I don't think that's the scale Freddie is using.
I'v seen quite a few polls that suggest that many "left" position are very popular with the American public, among which are healthcare for all, reproductive rightst, and a ceasefire in Gaza. The problem is the candidates and those elected are far more beholden to their donors, than their constituents. One might find it of interest to look up just how frequently members of congress vote according to which of these two group's wishes.
I'll give you reproductive rights but issue orientef polls are misleading because they don't tell you anything about the respondents' prioritization of the issue.
I don't think this is wrong exactly, and I think Freddie is right that the 'socially liberal, fiscally conservative' moderate is much more of a phantom than a reality, especially in the context of the electoral college. However what I think does exist is something closer to the mirror image, that being the 'socially not exactly conservative but not progressive as conventionally understood, fiscal state interventionist.' Freddie has written many, many pieces, touching on this but I think the real issue is that it will be hard to get that sort of vote to the extent it is attached to endorsing various left wing cultural enthusiasms, with mass illegal immigration being the biggest but hardly only albatross. That itself probably also includes meme-ified space Marxism and similar stuff that is nominally about economics but codes as hopelessly entwined with cultural leftism.
I think this is a really good point and this is exactly the kind of voter a class-first Dem candidate could do well with if a campaign was run successfully. And that candidate's platform, aesthetics aside, would look a lot more like Sanders' than it would like Clinton's.
Blaming the democratic centre/right for choosing not to capitulate to their left is like blaming a parent for not capitulating to their child.
Why woould they?
Why should they?
The democratic left are a joke who jump quiclkly on board with anything their party does.
Bernie whipped up a storm... then bent the knee over and again.
AOC even had Glenn Greenwald convinced and now looks like she wants to be the next Pelosi.
If the Republican right pull the republican (and democrat) centre in their direction it's thanks to the strength of the republican right.
If the democrat left fail to do so, it's on them, not the likes of Clinton who have no incentive whatsoever to be anything other than what they are.
That's the problem for the American left in a two party system where the center-right corporate Democrats represent capital's bulwark against the left.
I don't think think the corporate democrats necessarily pull Sanders or the squad to the right. I think those supposedly left wing politicians genuinely, willingly and voluntarily move in line with their party to be seen to unite against Trump.
That it undermines any leverage they might have to drive left wing policy seems a price they're happy to pay.
The left figured out, and subsequently abandoned, AOC half way through her second term. The dress incident and then her voting present on Iron Dome funding (and literally crying about it) told us she was like any other Democrat.
Team D is the political manifestation of the Professional Managerial Class, with minorities as junior partners.
Team R fulfills a similar function for the Local Gentry,with white evangelicals as sidekicks.
Anyway, Obama remains popular, but,as you alluded, policy has nothing to do with it.
I love this so much.
Mostly because I agree completely.
But it’s also well and succinctly stated.
The Finster aims to please.
Everyone seems mad at you, Freddie, so let me just comment on this from your NYT piece: "My favorite comic book run of all time, Frank Miller and Bill Sienkiewicz’s “Elektra: Assassin'..."
Hell yeah.
It is a work of coruscating brilliance. I must read Freddie's piece.
in the 80s Sienkiewicz also illustrated the Christic Institute's lawsuit "brought to light" against the US-Costa Rican rancher Ollie North used to run blow for the NSC (Uncle Sam as a rotting bald eagle not-technically-working for the not-technically-CIA) and the "Friendly Dictators" trading cards (archive only now)
This article is such a fascinating insight into leftist psychology.
Most people might assume that in a democracy, parties would attempt to secure votes by advertising positions palatable to the largest number of voters, and thus the parties moving in any particular direction is a sign that they are chasing a move by the populace as a whole. Most people would also assume that in a democracy, any popular position lacking in political representation would be pretty quickly seized upon by politicians who see an opportunity to pick up easy votes.
The leftist thinks that political positions flow downward from parties to voters, rather than the other way around. They think this because on the left, they actually do. This is why Kamala Harris, who was so incredibly unpopular in 2020 that she dropped out of the election even before the primary, is suddenly the most exciting thing to happen to the Democratic Party since Obama. This is how the leftist can maintain a fantasy that communists could actually win public office in America - people who would normally vote for Trump would totally vote for a communist instead, if only you just ordered them to do so out of a sense of party loyalty.
In reality, the idea that there is an enormous number of secret communists out there who vote for Donald Trump because there isn't a real communist on the ballot is deeply insane. People vote for Donald Trump because they like his politics, and there isn't a real communist on the ballot because communism is so unpopular that no politicians want to touch it.
I'm not sure why anybody is talking about communism - that's clearly not on the agenda. The fact is that moderate social democratic policies like single payer healthcare and a robust social safety net, along with protection for workers and unionisation, are broadly speaking popular, even in right-wing countries such as the US. In fact, polling generally depends on how the question is framed, and in the discourse around elections, how these questions are framed is largely determined by politicians and journalists.
I think that's true as far as it goes but there are real complications in the US, based both on race but also history of immigration, maybe even basic psychology and character of the kinds of people whose descendants are here versus those who stayed home. We're fundamentally a lower solidarity society than any other rich country, and it's no coincidence that Europe is experiencing its own various crisis as it 'diversifies' and social solidarity breaks down (I put diversity in quotes because it's still absurdly more homogeneous than the US yet they're in a socio political meltdown) . Which doesn't mean we just give up on the principles, like that everyone in a country as wealthy as ours should have guaranteed access to basic healthcare, but it may mean acknowledging that success here will not ever look like post war European social democracy.
I agree - I'm not saying that the US should emulate Europe. I'm just trying to make the point that the policy proposals of Sanders et al. are neither "communist" in any meaningful sense, nor particularly unpopular.
While I think that saying Europe is in a "sociopolitical meltdown" is a bit of an exaggeration, clearly it's not all rosy here either.
Maybe that's too strong a term. And the exact situation varies. I think it's fair to observe though that at minimum the center in all the big European countries, where there had been a consensus on a lot of this stuff for about 4 generations, is struggling mightily to hold.
I'm not sure that there has been consensus for 4 generations, I think it's probably closer to 2, from about 1945-1980, maybe a bit longer in France...
It's now been 4 decades or Reagan/Thatcherism and the cracks are starting to show.
I would say that people vote for Trump because of his personality. His politics change and his voters change with him.
And Trump has the right enemies.
This is an absurd claim overall. It’s not a strictly leftist position that voter constituency is influenced by large-scale media and intelligentsia - how do you think political ideology emerges and eventually gets enforced, exactly? Regardless of how grassroots a particular position may be, the whole POINT of politics is to broadly enforce policy interests on a population. That necessarily means political positions flow downwards, the give-and-take of ideological fluidity between individual level voters and elites in positions of power does not discredit this, nor does the fact that what a government and its state apparatuses provide its citizens is exactly the kind of stuff that influences voter interests.
Which puts into question your notion of what we’re even talking about when you mention what a democracy is. In the context of the US, it’s not some childishly conceived direct democracy where politicians pay fealty to the voting masses. Elites pursue their own interests, while the masses squabble within obtuse party apparatuses to vie for their attention. At the risk of losing support from their broader voter base, elites dole out platitudes within the framework of the economic system they’re able to craft and enforce that benefits their class collaborators (it is a fact that we operate in a capitalist economic system that benefits how profit is exploited and distributed, not some leftist conspiracy).
You’re not suggesting anything counter to the point of the essay, and the claim that leftists only view political positions as flowing downward is disingenuous at best.
The United States is not a democracy.
There maybe aren’t a ton of “secret communists” but there is overlap between right wing populism and left wing populism. I knew a several people in the small Indiana town where I was in 2016 who voted for Bernie sanders in the primary but switched over to voting for trump in the general election.
From a 30,000 foot level, sure. But this is where "left" and right" become simplistic labels, and like magic, it's also where...cough....cough...POLICY comes in. Sanders was, among other things, advocating for universal healthcare and holding Wall Street accountable. I doubt that all or most of the people to whom you are referring would identify as either left "wing" or right "wing." Before or after 2016 or 2020. Trump did an end-around on Hillary from the psuedo-left, more accurately described as "f*ck the elite populism" and Bernie was just pushing his usual socialism-lite. So those voters, at least in 2016, were voting (in primaries presumably) for Bernie's policy and then Trump's vague almost lefty sounding populism about bringing back jobs, ending wars, building infrastructure, etc. Then, of course, the other choice was the exact woman whose party apparatus had just been exposed stealing the nomination from Bernie - or doing everything in their power to, anyway - and who came with a terrible reputation, Neoliberal policies and warmongering.
TL/DR: You're not talking about actual left or right wingers; you're talking about frustrated American working class people who were voting for policies and LOTE.
"It turns out that after Bill Clinton shanked labor by passing NAFTA, casting millions of people into economic devastation in crumbling Rust Belt towns, and Obama spent his presidency doing nothing for those people so that he could better embody the tony cosmopolitanism of advisors like Jon Favreau and Penny Pritzker, the people in those crumbling Rust Belt towns weren’t too keen on rewarding the Democrats with their votes."
BINGO!!!!
And you are so right about Obamacare!!!! Obamacare improved access to (questionably useful) healthcare insurance—but did little to improve access to healthcare. And its other great failure was its refusal to address runaway inflation in the healthcare industry: Since 2000, the cost of medical care has risen by more than 120%.
On the one hand, Obamacare was, at its core, a giant gimme to the insurance industry. No wonder they loved it. On the other hand, in a system so dominated by entrenched interests, it may have been the only politically feasible reform at the time.
Or I may be giving Obama too much credit. I mean, the man entered office with huge majorities in both Houses of Congress, Wall Street begging for rescue on any terms, a public appetite for reform unmatched since maybe 1933, and a national media unironically comparing him to Jesus.
And this is all he had to show for that.
The same media also conveniently buried the fact that Obama said pretty early on that "single payer is not on the table."
In a town hall meeting I asked De Fazio why Obamacare didn't include dickering with pharmaceutical companies on Medicare. Why the giveaway? He told me the were one vote shy of passage and XXX wouldn't sign unless they gave the pharma what they wanted. I was surprised by his answer.
Biden has pushed back.
Frankly, I'd have been totally sunk without Obamacare. I was getting a stent for a 99% blockage and the cardiologist asked what I was most concerned about: I told him Trump doing away with Obamacare because I'd have no health insurance anymore.
People like to complain about Obamacare, and it has problems that need fixing, but it was a start. I remember what it was like before. My insurance premiums went up 50% or more a year, out of pocket expenses rose...and if anything actually happened to you, it was gone.
If you think that an LBJ or a Huey Long would have thrown up his hands and said that this was all that could be done, but for one vote....
As I wrote, considering the momentum Obama had in 2008, he could have done a lot more. Notice how Obama fought hard for things he actually cared about, like the extension of the so-called "Patriot Act".
The cost curve of medical care has been bending and slowing down, that has been reported for some time. Presumably ACA related.
It may be slowing, but it's still significantly outpacing other inflationary costs.
Totally open-minded about it and willing to listen to counter-arguments, but total health care spending as a percentage of GDP is at 17.3%, almost exactly what it was pre-pandemic (17.5% in 2019) and pre-Obamacare (17.2% in 2009).
Yes, a good point. Looks like Medicare has been slowing down, though, which may be ACA related.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/09/05/upshot/medicare-budget-threat-receded.html
This is an insane comment.
Obamacare has been incredibly successful at reducing the growth of medical care costs. Are you saying that the flattening of the growth in the percentage of GDP spent on healthcare since 2010 was a coincidence??!!
https://www.healthsystemtracker.org/chart-collection/u-s-spending-healthcare-changed-time/
And if you have any data that backs your claim that the vast reduction in the % of uninsured has not led to increased access to healthcare I would love to see it.
--"Obamacare was a disaster in a very direct way: it did not establish a legal right to medical coverage, as is the law in more than half of the world’s countries, and by instead adopting a piecemeal reform it made it even harder to get an actual functioning medical system in place. Almost 30 million Americans still don’t have health insurance."--
I think this is a strange view of the Affordable Care Act.
The ACA has helped tens of millions of people obtain insurance--45 million or so, last time I checked. That's not what I'd call a disaster. Sure, the system has flaws, but let's keep in mind at least one of those flaws is due at least in part to a conservative Supreme Court, which decided that--for whatever reason--the Medicaid expansion was constititional only if it was voluntary. I'll warrant that a good percentage of those 30 million you mention live in states that have stubbornly refused said expansion. If we'd had a better court, we'd have a better law.
Let's also keep in mind that social programs can be, and often are, improved over time. The Social Security Act of 1935 left out many categories of workers--domestic, governmental and agricultural workers, not to mention many women--and over the decades it was expanded to include those. Benefits for surviving children were added later, as were COLAs and SSI, until Social Security became the program contemporary Americans know and love. In other words, just because the act was imperfect at first doesn't mean it wasn't worthwhile, and even revolutionary.
Of course the Affordable Care Act isn't perfect, but it was a) the best that could have been done, given the politics of the moment; and b) a hell of a lot better than the alternative. We can build on the platform the ACA created and get closer to a system that is even more universal. If we let the perfect be the enemy of the good, however, we're going to get nothing instead of something.
It's worth remembering that the whole thing came down to having a momentary 60 vote majority in the Senate that included Arlen Specter switching parties, a few conservative Democrats from the mid west willing to end (or maybe vainly trying to save?) their political careers no matter how hard they tried to compromise, Joe Lieberman, and the loss of that filibuster proof majority midway through the process due to the death of Ted Kennedy and his replacement with a Republican.
The thing that jumped out to me about that quote is that "A legal right to medical coverage" is a downright *wild* way of framing socialized health care. In every other context, a "legal right" implies a freedom from government interference in accessing that right using your own resources. The left holds to this notion of a "legal right" when it comes to mass censorship by social media companies, even as it's outright coordinated by the government. The left definitely would definitely not be on board with the "right to bear arms" requiring the government to provide us all with AR-15s. But health care? Yeah, health care is a human right, and that means it needs to be paid for by the taxpayer. There are no other rights that we think about this way!
Hmm...I suppose many people think of education this way, and public schools work that way. I mean, kids have a right to be educated by the state, at least until they come of age, right?
I have never heard compulsory education referred to under a "rights" framing.
I'm pretty sure that many if not most state constitutions explicitly define education as a right. I agree that the compulsory nature of school makes it a bit of an odd right--you HAVE to accept it--but if a state constitiution defines something as a right, then it's a right to same as the right to freedom of expression or whatever else that document provides.
Where does the climate left fit into this? I bring it up because the Biden admin could have prioritized making the expanded Child Tax Credit permanent, which would have been a major expansion of redistribution (the temporary expansion cut child poverty by half), but instead they chose to prioritize climate. Is that capitulating to the neoliberals? I dunno, the climate left writ large doesn't really fit cleanly into that camp, what with calls for banning pipelines and so forth. Was it a labor left victory? I mean, maybe, but again, the climate left is really not concerned with losing coal jobs, climate is much more an interest of the educated classes in this country. I just think it's one example of how trying to make this a "pull to the left vs pull to the right" issue obscures more than it clarifies.
Just out of curiosity, how has Biden actually prioritized the climate issue(s)?
It's just deeply inaccurate to call the Democrats a center-right party. The Global Party Survey has them firmly in the center-left (https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EZibQR_WkAM7y4B?format=jpg), and even cursory knowledge of other countries' electoral landscapes would reaffirm that. If you consider the mainstream left equivalents in other liberal democracies (say, Canada, UK, France, Germany, Italy, Ireland, Japan, South Korea, etc), there are only a handful of platform differences, sometimes even favoring Dems. It's only when you look at mainstream *right* parties globally and compare them to the GOP under Trump that you see massive differences in policy and tone.
One more thing:
"But the broader anti-left tendency they represent within the Democratic party leaves the party bereft of direction."
I question the assumption that "direction" is always a good thing, that the center-left needs to always promise movement (incremental or otherwise) towards progressivism. What if the current numbers for, say, minimum wage, taxes, redistribution, etc are all exactly correct? I grant that that's unlikely, but if inaction is as legitimate a choice as action, then so is the whole range of actions in between, some of which might be unsexy to the idealistic left. Transformative change isn't a priori better.
It feels like Freddie's take is reheated from the Bush years and just got updated by adding the word Trump into it.
Who exactly participated in the "Global Party Survey", what questions were asked, how were they framed and what definitions were provided to participants?
This'll be a bit of an expedition. If you read it all from beginning to end, feel free to report back any interesting findings: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/epub/10.1177/1354068820927686
Yeah, I looked it up earlier and noticed a few things. It's run by some academic woman at Harvard, under the auspices of Harvard's JFK School of Government and in conjunction with (and probably shares funding sources) NGOs like the Electoral Integrity Project.
https://www.globalpartysurvey.org/ and https://www.globalpartysurvey.org/what-we-do and https://www.globalpartysurvey.org/methods
Basically, it's a survey primarily concerning UN countries, conducted against a pool of about 1,800 "experts" on party politics (paraphrased, but actual phrasing equally fishy, IMO). I didn't do a deep enough dive into how these "experts" are vetted or chosen, but the whole affair smacks of anti-populist neoliberalism and Atlanticism. The reason I say that is the tie-ins with the Electoral Integrity Project and, less so, the Chapel Hill Expert Survey (CHES).
Forgive the tangent, and off the topic of their actual methodology (which I will do some further reading on), any time I see the words "Election" or "Electoral" with the word "Integrity" I immediately think to the various NGO collaborations and crossover with the NED, basically the US's regime change arm. To wit: I would bet money that the EIP (an NGO) has a track record of painting elections in countries like Venezuela, where the socialist candidate wins (and especially when the US government and multinationals like Chevron have a beef with them), as unfair. Again, historically; not just this cycle. As another example, China. Since I haven't read the report, I'm just engaging in educated guesswork here, but I'd also bet money that they classify China as undemocratic, when it's well known that Chinese people feel like their system is actually *more* democratic that ours in the US.
Interestingly, maybe even ironically, and IIRC, the EIP also engaged in some activities that Trump and his supporters cried foul about during the 2020 election cycle, so I guess they've managed to piss off the "populist" right as well.
Also, please forgive my cynicism, but I simply cannot trust these many headed hydra US NGO-NED-CIA-elite institution groups. It's all of a piece with US empire/hegemony and the many tools it uses to define and massage "the narrative" at home and abroad in favor of global arch-neoliberal austerity capitalism.
I think this calls into question the rigor and focus of this project, and I appreciate the thought and detail that went into highlighting something that most people would dismiss as conspiratorial (that would be my intuition too, but still, it deserves a fair hearing). But also, respectfully, it's kind of like conducting a study showing doctors earn more than teachers. Whether the survey you use is methodologically sound or not, what you're proving is trivially true. Similarly, if you pay attention to news about other countries for long enough, you notice that mainstream left parties across liberal democracies are just not that different. In these discussions this usually takes the form of debunking the myth that Europe is a progressive socialist paradise, so I will just skip to that: Europe is not a progressive socialist paradise. Many European democracies are more socially conservative than the US on important issues (eg reproductive rights, gay rights, religious expression, etc), and their welfare systems are not significantly more generous. If you expand your scope to Canada, Israel, and Asian democracies, again you see that, in significant ways, they can be more conservative than Americans. Even if we restrict our focus *only* to democracies - and I'm not sure we should - it's clear that on summary judgment, the Democrats should not be considered center-right by any serious person.
There's a lot in this piece to digest, and I do agree that anointing HRC in 2016 was a huge mistake. And I too have little hope that the Dems will move in any way towards being a party that looks out for the interests of the working classes.
Back a decade ago, I required to review thousands of emails related to executives at a health insurance company from the time period just prior to Obamacare being implemented. These execs were extremely excited about the billions they were about to receive and how they created Obamacare to give them everything they wanted. It may be the worst health insurance scheme in the world, screwed up to give more money to insurance companies, hospitals, and drug companies. It drove up insurance costs for small business.
We could have copied a lot of great syatems around the world, all of which cost much less and work better.
It is a classic neoliberal program, giving more to the oligarchy and pretending to help the poor and middle class.
The US Chamber of Commerce were out for blood trying to kill the ACA, in part driven by the healthcare industry. The AstroTurf Tea Party basically was created to fight the ACA. The fact that there was one insurance company happy about the ACA doesn't change the wider macro politics of the time.
The "healthcare industry" is a huge and diverse beast, whose components often have radically-diverging or even contradictory interests. Insurers could have been wildly in favor of the ACA, even as hospitals, providers, and drug/device manufacturers hated it.
By the same token, the insurance industry is a huge and diverse beast. It was smaller insurance companies coming out against Hillarycare during Clinton's first term that helped shift the US Chamber of Commerce from an international trade-focused organization to one that was more uniformly rightwing and aligned with Republicans.
The CofC was more considered about payors of health insurance (Big Business) than providers (health insurance co.). Top execs of one of the biggest health insurance companies knew that they were going to make billions off the ACA and they knew they were going to jack rates up.
The oligarchy isn't unified but it never is.
It's not "one insurance company."
It's not really controversial that Obama saw that the insurance companies bought Hillarycare tooth and nail, so the very first thing he did was to get them on board.
The problem with switching to a new system is that the people who want to switch would need to internalize what the trade-offs are.
There's a good case that NAFTA made the US more efficient but at the cost of jobs for people that couldn't just retrain to something new. A lot of the savings that could be done in the healthcare system, which I think should be made, involve getting rid of administrative costs by laying off a lot of office workers which is often the best office job for unskilled labor. Keeping health care costs high as a jobs program is pretty crazy but you can see the benefits. (We probably do need jobs programs and it probably shouldn't be the health care system. Maybe making television or coffee makers?)
If you look at western European nations both the Netherlands or Switzerland look a lot like Obamacare with the requirement to get some kind of insurance, so "picking one of those great systems that costs less" was done. But doctors get paid like 50% more here than in the Netherlands. Our nurse wages have gone way up in the past 20 years and that's good news.
Usually the level of detail is "I'm gonna fuck the insurance companies, because fuck them" which is a great applause line but every single thing in America is more expensive. You can likely get savings from cutting out a bunch of useless care, and you can *probably* figure out what the useless care is, but if you don't have a plan for when a photogenic person gets cut off from the care you called useless and they call life-saving, you're just planning to fail.
Lots to agree with and lots to disagree, but primarily I would be interested if you think the following is roughly true.
- Roughly speaking, one can distinguish between internal regulation and external regulation; internal regulation is about markets and production itself: who can enter the market? What are the rights of various markets participants (e.g. capitalists, labor, consumers)? External regulation is about externalities arising from markets: what environmental or safety standards have to be obeyed? What levels of toxins may products contain? What are the rights of various stakeholders not participating in the market, etc.
- Neoliberalism is mostly about deregulating on the internal regulation front: free trade agreements, privatization, looser labor regulation etc. It is perhaps surprisingly indifferent to external regulation: free trade agreements have to harmonize external regulation but the outcome is usually a mixed bag, leading to looser standards on one side and stricter ones on the other. Corporations don't care all that much about local external regulation so long as internal deregulation allows them to outsource jobs to places with less external regulation. Overall, neoliberalism has not affected the level of external regulation a lot.
- The Great Stagnation in technological progress is at least partially caused by an increase in external regulation that started in the late 60s/early 70s not only in the US but in developed countries in general. This includes (or perhaps included) for example excessive and non-sensical safety regulations on nuclear power but there are many more examples. It is perhaps one of the reasons why construction productivity stalled (actually decreased in real terms; the Empire State Building was built in 1 year!) and why there is a trend to move everthing into factories (e.g. Nuclear's small modular reactor trend; factories are basically external regulation protection sleeves).
- The increase in external regulation is in large part bad/excessive. Safety culture does more harm than good. But some degree of external regulation well above what existed, say, in the 1950s is good and in some areas (e.g. climate) more regulation is actually needed.
- There is a trade-off between internal and external regulation: a combination of massive internal regulation and minimal external regulation basically gets you late stage poison-rust-Soviet-socialism. Massive external and minimal internal regulation gives you a shiny-clean-deindustrialized-Neoliberalistan. If you minimize both, it is just Laissez-faire capitalism. Maximizing both - I don't know, let's not try?
- We need a new balance of internal and external regulation: external regulation needs to be low enough to allow a degree of international competitiveness; internal regulation needs to be high enough to allow a sane degree of environmental, climate, safety, etc. standards.
- The Biden administration has made steps in the direction of such a new balance. A wide coalition of people spanning at least from the center left (Yglesias, Klein) to the far right nowadays seem to agree in principle that external regulation has gone way overboard. Ergo, there is great electoral potential for an economic policy predicated on this idea.
- But the Left is really bad on external regulation and hampers the potential of the Democratic party to adopt such a policy.
- If Trump loses (still a big If), he will not leave (and there is no indication that he will die anytime soon). The Republican party either has to oust him (seems unlikely), or by the laws of political evolution, they will be replaced by another party (they cannot indefinitely lose elections and keep existing).
- Such a new party (say libertarians, if they are smart, but probably not, since they are not) could reshuffle the American economic consensus by adopting a new regulatory balance strategy, as I have laid out above. This would be good, both from a left wing and a right wing perspective.