The Feedback Loop of Politics and Policy
Here are a couple of good pieces reflecting the ways that healthcare reform tilts the playing field toward more liberal politics and more liberal policy reforms in the future.
Jonathan Cohn notes Nancy Pelosi’s argument that the left-wing opposition to the health reform bill (sans public option) underappreciates the significance of expanding coverage to 31 million people, and that passage of this bill shifts the grounds of policy debate to a new default state in which the government is committed to closing the coverage gap, reducing costs, and “holding the insurance companies accountable” by moving toward a regulated-utility model for health-insurance markets.
Peter Beinart focuses on how reform changes dynamics within the Democratic party.
For close to a decade now, Democrats have been arguing with each other about what kind of country this is, and what kind of party they should be. On one side stands a group of politicians, consultants and wonks who believe that America is, at its core, a pretty conservative place. These Democrats form something of a political generation. In their youth, they saw their party move left during Vietnam and get booted from power in 1968. Then they saw George McGovern, the most left-wing major party presidential candidate of the twentieth century, lose 49 states. Then they saw Jimmy Carter’s presidency destroyed in part because he looked weak during the Iran hostage crisis. Then they saw Ronald Reagan, once considered as an unelectable right-wing nut, become the most popular president of their adult lives.
[...] For this generation of Democrats … being a liberal is like walking past a bear. Move cautiously and reassuringly and the bear will purr contentedly. But make any sudden or threatening gestures, and you’ll be mauled because, fundamentally, the bear distrusts liberals.
Beinart colors Obama’s decision not to back down in the wake of Scott Brown’s election to the Senate as a triumph of bold liberalism over “don’t scare the bear” liberalism. Interestingly, he thinks the party will have been transformed by that decision even if healthcare reform ultimately fails. Maybe we’ve realized the bear comes after us either way.
A common trope in political commentary is to decry the short-sightedness of our policies. The rarer wisdom, though, is one that also takes the long view of our politics and can discern the organic development of politics and policy together, each feeding back into the other.
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