Last night, because of the persistence of Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi, and Harry Reid, health-care reform passed the House and is finally going forward. After a year of trying to woo the Republican Party, the bill got no Republican votes. And the bill itself remains controversial, thanks to months of GOP misinformation and Democratic horse-trading. It was an ugly win, but a win nonetheless. This isn' t the health care plan Johnson would have chosen. The most direct and relevant document I've seen throughout this entire debate was the Kaiser Family Foundation's side-by-side comparison of *John Chafee's 1993 alternative to the Clinton proposal, the plan put forth by House Republicans this year, and the plan the Obama administration offered. The Chafee and Obama proposals are extremely close. Both the chart and the passage of yesterday's legislation show how much liberalism has changed since Johnson, how moderate its policy ideas have become even as it has grown more functionally "partisan," and how far to the right the GOP has gone since the Clinton years.
Obama liberalism has looked at the defeats of the 1980s and 1990s and said to conservatives, "You know what, you might be right about that," and considered how conservative ideas might be leveraged toward liberal goals. At the same time, Democrats grew enough faith in the justness of their cause to be able to go it alone when they realized that Republicans would not, under any circumstances, come to an agreement with them. This liberalism stands in contrast to the conservatism of today, which sees liberalism as a force to be annihilated and liberals as traitors if it sees them as Americans at all. It expresses itself in apocalyptic rhetoric that teeters on the precipice of endorsing violence as a political tool. Where the Obama liberals of today internalized the conservative critiques of liberalism in the aftermath of their defeats, conservatives concluded in the aftermath of theirs that liberalism has nothing to teach them, even to the point of rejecting the functionally bipartisan civil-rights reforms that extended basic rights to all Americans in the 1960s. These are the circumstances of the present. Where conservatives go now, after having portrayed Obama as the second coming of Stalin and health-care reform as the beginning of totalitarianism I do not know -- particularly since the conservative soul-searching of recent years has only led them further to the right.
The apocalyptic rhetoric we saw from conservatives as the bill passed yesterday tries to substitute emotional intensity for substantive objection -- this is but the wounded vanity of losers, and it fools no one. Something Democrats also learned from conservatives over the past few decades was that winning ugly was better than losing. If they didn't know that before, they certainly learned it from the town halls last summer and the Tea Party protesters hurling slurs at lawmakers this weekend. The flip side is that when you try to win that ugly and lose, all you have left is a whole lotta ugly.
(Photo via Ben Smith)
-- A. Serwer
