So this blog writer app on my phone doesn't have support for drafts or edits! Continuing from my previous thoughts:
Case in point: today I was riding around with a conservative fellow who is the pro-business, former executive for a health insurance giant, has multiple homes and fancy cars type. He is talking about how Obama is in trouble because now the Left is hating on him for the health care situation.
On the road we passed a beat up pickup truck with an NRA bumper sticker that says "when you pry it from my cold dead hands".
Both the Mercedes driving former health insurance exec and the pickup truck arms bearer are supposedly in the same political party, but it's pretty hard to believe. Whereas the disagreers on the Left seem miles closer by comparison.
At least on the left our sub-factions don't have diametrically opposed desires. What do you think a real Libertarian would say about abortion rights or gay marriage? The isolationist preferences of a social conservative don't jive at all with the interventionist tendencies of a neocon.
Compare that to the Left's pragmatist vs. the idealist. They still both want the same things, they just have different ideas about how to achieve them.
Now, at a certain point you do see some fractures on the left. There's much discussion recently of the "third way" - using private enterprise to pursue the public good, largely through subsidies. And that can run counter to the hardcore socialist condemnation of the profit motive as a drain on public goods.
And again I come back to the question of "where am I on this spectrum?" I certainly am highly suspicious of private sector involvement in public goods. I don't trust private enterprise with public parks, national defense, firefighting or public safety, and I don't see why I should trust them with health care.
However I can be convinced that with proper (heavy) regulation and subsidies, health care reform can be achieved. And perhaps that is a more realistic way of getting there. But I don't think, all other things being equal, that the private sector path is preferable. And I would be surprised to hear a Democrat argue that losing the public option is the 'better' choice in any sense other than increasing the chances of passing reform.
If anything, I feel like my political energies are best spent pushing for better regulation to protect citizens from the private sector than worrying about the purity of how health care is reformed. And that I think is something that falls in the old "80% of things we can agree on" category, and it doesn't really cost anything.
1 comment:
1) you don't post anymore.
2) I'm growing increasingly pessimistic about the possibility of a just capitalist system. Here's the basic problem. Under capitalism, capitalists own the means of production while workers--you and me--own nothing but their labor power. We're forced to sell that labor power for a wage just to survive. Because there is structural unemployment--that is, unemployment built into the system that will never go away (unemployment never dips below 4% or so)--there is always a 'reserve army of the unemployed' ready to take our jobs if we grow too uppity. Thus capitalists enjoy a superior position. We need them more than they need us. This power asymmetry cannot help but warp social relations at work.
Even worse, capitalist use their power to amass great inequalities of income and wealth. The rich own the means of production and use the power this confers to amass even more capital which they reinvest so as to gain even more control which they use to gain even more money...and so on and so forth. Before we know it, the top 1% owns 80% of the wealth (or whatever the current ratio is--something close to that). Such steep inequalities in wealth bleed into equally steep inequalities in other domains like the political and the social. The rich capture the government via lobbyists; they dominate culture through control of the mass media; etc etc.
More generally, think about the core feature of capitalism: the profit motive. Under capitalism people do stuff in order to make a profit or earn a wage. What gets done, then, are things that conduce to those ends. Production directly tracks profit, not human need. Sure, sometimes what people really need overlaps with what is profitable. But this overlap is contingent and tenuous. It comes apart. Capitalism, for all its amazing efficiencies, is actually an unfathomably wasteful system from a certain point of view. It *way* overproduces luxuries and do-dads for those with 'dollar votes' while way underproducing vital goods like health care for the poor, quality education for all, a clean and sustainable environment, and so on.
Basically, it's true, as many say, that capitalism 'delivers the goods'--but they are not always the right kinds of goods for the right people. Capitalism is amazing for the rich and the owners of the means of production, but a total irrational disaster for everyone else.
And that's what lead Marx and others to think that *surely* capitalism would eventually implode or explode: riven, as it is, with 'internal contradictions', distastrous, as it is, for the masses, eventually the masses would develop 'class consciousness' and perceive that capitalist relations of production are NOT in their objective interest, but are, instead, diametrically opposed to their interests. This realization will trigger a revolution. After all, the workers have nothing to lose but their chains.
OK, this has all been a bit rambling. Originally I intended for this to be a commentary on the proper stance for a progressive liberal given today's political landscape. I find myself torn. On the one hand, I harbor these deep suspicions about capitalism. On the other, I see absolutely no prospect of real movement in a socialist direction in this country. So what am I to do, practically? I support the left-most democratic policy that seems feasible, all the while realizing that the American left is still way too far to the center, way too conservative, to really match the demands of justice as I see them.
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