Now that Joe Biden and Kamala Harris are coming into power using similar "bipartisan" language to that of the Obama-Biden Administration 12 years ago but with a distinctly more visible and powerful progressive left in the Democratic Party, the star pundits and reporters have to reposition their rhetoric to be able to stick with some form of Both Sides Do It in which the two parties are mirror images of each other, one center-right the other center-left, both with "fringe" elements which can conveniently be used to emphasize the centrism of the two main parties.
Jay Rosen has been analyzing press frameworks like this for a long time. If you're not already paying attention to his Twitter account or his PressThink website, this is a fine time to start. In his most recent post, he writes, "What happens now in the political imagination of the press, and to its practices that Trump broke; how journalists can build it back better after the siege lifts; the dangers of reverting to form after form failed them, and us - these are things that do concern me." (Two paths forward for the American press 11/16/2020)
Levitz' article takes off from the current pre-Christmas flap in which comedian/commentator Jimmy Dore raised his online profile notably by attacking Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez as a sellout and shill for the health-insurance industry because she wouldn't embrace a very particular political maneuver to force a vote in the House on Medicare For All. The idea would be for progressive Congressmembers to withhold a vote for Pelosi as Speaker unless she agreed to the Medicare For All vote. There's nothing inherently absurd about the suggestion. But it's pretty clear that it would have been no magic bullet for an immediate legislative goal but rather one in a long series of efforts to forefront the issue.
Declaring a very specific tactical idea like that, which almost no one notices in real time and even fewer will remember a month from now, to be a fundamental test of anyone's basic political principles is silly on its face. But politics is politics, and show business is show business. And in the YouTube world in which Dore operates, the algorithms that promote content and produce rating and revenue are particularly fond of controversies and scandals. The old journalistic maxim of "if it bleeds, it leads" has an online counterpart.
Levitz' article is valuable in highlighting a range of arguments that can and will be used to discredit and marginalize the left, although he is careful to state that is not his intention. And most progressives would probably agree with Levitz' closing summary:
Ignoring the structural obstacles to single-payer’s passage, the fragility of public support for the policy, and the simple fact that people can share political values while earnestly disagreeing about the best way to advance them — all for the sake of declaring Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez an enemy of America’s uninsured — is a sound strategy for ginning up interest in your rant-based YouTube show. But it is also a recipe for converting your politically naïve viewers into anti-political cynics and making the U.S. left as self-deluded and internally divided as corporate America wishes for it to be.Levitz also focuses on arguments made by Briahna Joy Gray and Kyle Kulinski, both of whom have significant practical political experience, in support of the tactic.
But the particulars of this parliamentary tactic, which the House progressives aren't pursuing in any case, are not as interesting for me in this article as three other features. One is that Levitz' entire, rather longish article focuses in good Establishment press corps style on the political horserace. Who's up, who's down, what are the odds in this race? But he never gets around to mentioning the substance of national health insurance, aka, Medicare For All. He doesn't squeeze in even a sentence to talk about how the overall performance on public health of the US system companies to the many nations around the world who have well-established national health insurance system. (Spoiler: they generally deliver strikingly better public health results at lower overall costs than the US system.)
In his horserace analysis, he makes much of the fact that the general concept of Medicare For All polls well but that particular elements poll less well. Surely it can't be a total surprise to an experienced political reporter that the general public relies on broad impressions of programs and don't normally spend a great deal of time pouring through think tank position papers on them. Levitz puts a great deal of emphasis on a Kaiser Family Foundation poll that finds that even a majority of supporters of the notion of Medicare For All "believe they would be able to keep their current health insurance under Medicare for All." But polls can be tricky. Do those respondents mean they want to keep their very specific current health insurance? Do they mean they want to keep their current doctors? Or that they would expect that Medicare For All would provide a comparable type of health insurance to what they currently have?
He uses this to make a second point I want to emphasize, a seemingly pragmatic argument that, well, since powerful lobbies are opposed to Medicare For All, maybe instead go for incremental changes that maybe might not draw such strong opposition. This was the argument that Obama's chief of staff Rahm Emmanuel used in 2009 to argue for throwing in the towel on the Affordable Care Act altogether.
In PunditWorld, the questions may vary. But Centrism is always the answer! Even when one of the Both Sides is tripping out on QAnon fantasies.
The third point is that he closes with a standard diversionary argument that, hey, there are lots of problems in the world, so why worry so much about this Medicare For All thing? It's too hackneyed to be original. But it's worth quoting this paragraph to see how political analysis works when all that's really important is the horserace issues going on in The Center. He begins with what sounds like a sympathetic observation.
Dore justifies casting such aspersions by appealing to the moral horror of America’s status-quo health-care system: Given the consequences of delaying the achievement of universal coverage, he argues that acquiescing to political reality — instead of mounting an effort to change it (however improbable that effort may be, and whatever other opportunities for building power that Hail Mary may foreclose) — is unacceptable.Then comes the real point:
Yet there are countless other moral atrocities that the U.S. government has the power to ameliorate. There are 26 million refugees in the world whom the United States could welcome to its shores. There are myriad nations beset by a history of colonial subjugation — and a future of ecological decline — that deserve climate reparations from the United States and transfers of green technology to abet their sustainable development. Medicare for All would not reduce suffering as much as the resettlement of tens of millions of displaced people or trillions of dollars in transfer payments from the U.S. to the Global South. In calling on House progressives to force a vote on the former but not the latter, Dore & Co. tacitly concede that, when setting legislative priorities, the moral righteousness of a given policy must be weighed against its political viability. Their disagreement with AOC is therefore not one of principle; they too believe that some morally urgent causes are too improbable to be worth prioritizing over imminently winnable fights. They just have a different judgment of how winnable the fight over Medicare for All is at the present moment. [my emphasis]Oh, look, the silly hippies are making a big deal about Medicare For All again. Hey, what about the 26 million refugees in various parts of the world? Shouldn't you bleeding-heart do-gooders be fixing that first, yuck, yuck?
But, hey, back to real news! Who's ahead in the 2024 Presidential polls?
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