Husar, don't you have anything to say about changing the culture of the German SPD or other left parties? Aren't they "neoliberalized" too? I think it's up to us to handle America; Germany and Europe are also deserving topics/spaces.
Originally Posted by
Husar
Obviously in the US one can much easier become homeless by just losing one's job, etc. I've heard varying stories about the possibility of that happening in Germany, but then you also have to enter drug abuse, unwillingness to get government aid, inability to fill out forms, etc. into the picture. Giving someone some change mostly makes you feel better about yourself, but if they spend it on booze, how exactly did you help them? By making them die faster of liver failure?
Let's say for argument's sake homelessness takes different forms in different places. But in abstract, the underlying principle is complementarity, as in the meeting the immediate needs of homeless people and the trying to reform the underlying economic and social forces contributing to homelessness is the object of interest.And with homelessness specifically, while you may feel that many of the principals are 'undeserving' or otherwise marginal, meeting them with blanket contempt and mistrust is not productive, nor does it suggest you have faith that the underlying problems can be impinged on by whatever transformative politics you favor. In other words, that you're covering for cynicism and disregard of a problem you don't rate highly in its own right. If this isn't the case, the same delegation to reformers you accept with respect to the details of the broadest challenges you should be able to accept with respect to the limited ones.
I was saying that starting with the "wrong" agenda items means you will make much slower progress or no progress at all.
1. It is possible to talk about more than one thing at once, especially if these items are related to each other (just a somehow controversial e.g. American plutocrats buying politicians vs. Russian/Chinese plutocrats buying politicians - they're all plutocrats united by class interest)
2. There are many groups and organizations in civil society and government that can speak or act on specific or general issues. They can act in concert or independently. Many people doing many things, in other words.
You have a very videogame-like idea of focus. It's not just one centralized actor doing everything everywhere in top-down fashion. It's not a 4X game. Points are not doled out along a slider to achieve a discrete and fixed result. Saving 5 months on researching planetary shelters does not prolong the discovery of plasma cannons by a year. Life is also not like an anime. You don't accomplish anything just by wanting it very hard, or channeling your passion and energy into a physical manifestation.
For example, successful Democrats generally ran campaigns tailored to what their constituents cared about. If your constituents strongly want Trump impeached, promote impeaching Trump. If many of your constituents are uncomfortable about impeachment, just don't mention it. On the national level in 2018, the Democratic "establishment" promoted unified messaging on healthcare issues and the failure of the Republican tax law. Having people working on all levels toward common, related, or even parallel goals, without being obsessed over the perfect single message for everyone to repeat like a robot, is therefore both sensible in concept and empirically supported.
You seem to think Democrats in DC are all just standing around screaming about "transgender bathrooms" or the existence of racism without offering solutions. Each politician has their own areas of interest, but most of them merely agree that transgender rights deserve protection and that racism is indeed real. Thus they're part of the Democratic Party, or at least allied 3rd party/independent, and not a Republican. Activist groups and lobbyists will work with particular relevant politicians to develop relevant legislation, which (in theory) then gets input/voted on by the rest of the caucus. The same with issues of foreign policy, education, energy, finance, really anything. There's quite a lot going on at any given moment.
Ro Khanna and Bernie Sanders have been pushing on the issue of US support of Saudi Arabia in Yemen, and trying to get votes diminishing or withdrawing US support since 2017. They've constantly failed, but over time they've gained support and now a vote in the House is supposed to go ahead imminently that the Khanna is confident will pass in the House, and Sanders thinks could pass in the Senate. (Whether Trump will sign it is another question.) Would you say they have been wasting their time by "focusing" on the "wrong" things?
The only thing we really ought to have up for debate is what should receive the most emphasis on the national level, and crucially what premises should be advanced in that emphasis. For example, we might agree with Ocasio-Cortez that billionaires shouldn't really exist, and so we would want the national level to emphasize that vision of society as part of the party platform on economic policy. This doesn't take away space for other people to talk about other things, or even in a different way if necessary; the movement must be big-tent to be representative, popular and effective.
See Obama care, which was some weird compromise that barely got through, still faces opposition trying to dismantle it again anddidn't really help everyone. Yes, it's better than before, better than nothing, but how long did it take you to get this half-arsed bandaid? When was the last major healthcare reform before it?
Ah, but Obamacare has set the stage, at least in popular consciousness, for Medicare for All. Obviously healthcare has been a major political issue for long before the ACA. The 1990s, in fact. Actually, the 1980s. Actually, the last gasp of the New Deal in the 1970s when there was some effort to, among other reforms, introduce universal healthcare. It's a long process. The historical moment as a whole matters a lot, but it's also clear that the fight over the passage and implementation of the ACA has furthered the conversation and made the idea of, in Kamala Harris' words
Let's eliminate all of that. Let's move on.
much easier to swallow. Even to the point that most Republicans say they want something like universal health coverage. (Though if you check the link with the Harris quote, polling shows Americans don't want Medicare for All if it means eliminating private insurance, but setting that aside for now...).
Also, yes, the Obamacare has helped most of the US population somewhat, and many tens of millions a whole lot. It would have done even better if one of the most conservative Dems at the time, Joe Lieberman, vowed to withhold his vote (necessary for passage IIRC) unless the public insurance option was removed. That was just one dick. So it's strange of you to say it didn't help everyone, when the people who benefited most from extended adult child coverage on family plans, expanded Medicaid, and market subsidies were exactly the people who needed it most (low-income earners). And I'm pretty sure curtailing of discrimination on basis of pre-existing conditions benefitted almost everyone. This is where your desire for universalism runs aground, as I've been trying to relate. If it helps many people, whether or not it's a broad cross-section of society, that's a good thing. All or nothing is a child's idea of politics, especially if you personally don't get hurt either way.
Yes, you got gay marriage.
Did you know that not all gay people are even interested in marriage? Just like fewer people in general are interested in marriage these days! But it was an important fight, and it had downstream effects of totally changing the culture on many related issues, including individual attitudes to queer people. Think about how much easier life is in most of the country (and in Europe and Australia btw, these movements took place there as well) for a young lesbian or non-conforming person. Totally unrelated to marriage, but still so valuable. A little over 10 years ago people were still calling each other gay in school, not as a way of labeling people but as a pure insult. Because "ghey" = lame, and no one wants to be thought of as ghey! The word flowed like water from the mouths of K-12 students. Now at least most kids know that (and hopefully why) this is bad behavior. It's not like only pre-existing liberals were affected, attitudes changed among all generations, races, and political leanings (though obviously less for pre-existing conservatives). And that was just one movement. Not such a waste of time now, huh?
To reiterate, you can't even be concerned that politicians were "distracted" because most of them, even Democrats, opposed it almost until the last minute. If anything, you should be praising the few who were at the vanguard in Congress (as well as the state politicians who acted early to pass laws) for their contributions to the national and international cause, a successful cause that continues to bring all kinds of positive externalities.
Anyway, I guess reforming the justice system is close to the core issues, but why would it have to be spearheaded by black people, who also appear (from how they're described, I could be wrong) like single-issue activists?
They're not single issue activists, unless you think a socialist is a single-issue activist because they too want "justice".
Since the justice system and political discourse has always had a special relationship to black people, such as in the Jim Crow South when the law was used to re-enslave many rural blacks (economic slavery + actual slavery through the 13th Amendment exemption for criminal penalties). It makes perfect sense for black people to play a prominent role, which is not at all to say that no other groups are stakeholders or participants. You could say it is precisely out of their unique experiences that the black community has produced the loudest voices for universal reform. Somewhat similarly, are you surprised that the industrial proletariat themselves played a role in agitating for labor rights, that it wasn't all just bourgeois intelligentsia writing about it? Or even more pertinently, that it wasn't just the industrial laborers protesting, it was agricultural workers too, and later on service workers. Factory workers weren't the only workers that mattered, you see.
Of course it can backfire, as with many black leaders in the Reagan-Clinton years agitating in response to the crime waves of the era in favor of the state and federal reforms that ultimately contributed most to mass incarceration and the War on Drugs, which as noted had an outsized effect on their demographic. Rest assured, however, that black leadership and activists as well as much of the rest of the country has moved considerably left on these issues as a result of experience and public outreach (a little like the queer rights movement!).
Indeed, if you read the Black Lives Matter manifesto it's pretty much interchangeable as a call for socialism. Though it was obviously prepared by academics who may represent themselves better than the common black person with their words. But anyway...
Sometimes people just sound like Harris is a better candidate than Sanders simply because she is black and because she is less focused on social justice ("Sanders is too extreme"). Well, if you think about it, prison reform is about social justice as well and I don't see how being extreme is a bad thing when Trump was voted in for being so extreme. He's extreme in the wrong way, but it's not like noone wants extreme changes.
Sanders on "racial justice"
I don't see on Harris' site a full platform description, but from what I've read there's not really much daylight between Sanders' stance and hers (in reference to "Physical Violence" subsection). There's nothing particularly radical from either of them, compared to the BLM platform:
Until we achieve a world where cages are no longer used against our people we demand an immediate change in conditions and an end to all jails, detention centers, youth facilities and prisons as we know them.
Getting back on the subject of eliminating private insurance that Harris raised, and it's unpopularity (most people like their insurance and are scared of change), I would offer a perspective through my theory of "incremental revolution". Without hugely expanding my post, let's say for now it's exactly what it sounds like and is meant to develop a theoretical and instrumental response to the fact that very sudden and tumultuous revolutions have a 100% record of either descending into horrendous violence or being captured by powerful actors. In the latter scenario the outcome is usually dictatorship, and at best turns out as some kind of liberal democracy like in post-Soviet Europe. So revolution has to be incremental, but constant, to survive. So, we need a compromise over Medicare for All that meets these criteria. If we don't have political support to nullify all private insurance at a stroke and enroll the whole population in the national service (the insurance industry employs millions of people, by the way), then we need a shadow process to absorb everyone over time without overt action that freaks voters out. This is necessary because unless a sufficient cross-section of the public is incorporated the program doesn't have the chance to become a social monument like Social Security (or regular Medicare), an untouchable idol and to achieve true efficiencies of scale. I'm not the wonk to work out the details, but I see at least 5 components:
0. Start implementing the national service to include all pre-existing Medicare, Medicaid, and smaller programs plus the uninsured and early adopters (40-50% of the population). Where states or cities have already begun pursuing bespoke programs, try to incorporate them.
1. Repeal laws requiring employers offer insurance. Very popular with employers I'm sure, and indirectly ends most new private insurance plans on the group market because demand drops out.
2. Grandfather in existing insurance so as to not freak people out. Once people change jobs, they will lose that insurance, but will automatically be enrolled in the national service.
3. Desubsidize insurance companies/markets and take other measures to undercut them, perhaps such as by temporarily turbocharging the national service at a financial loss to government in order to outcompete ("crowd out") the individual market private insurers up front.
4. Federal jobs guarantee + Green New Deal to absorb the unemployed from the collapsed insurance industry.
I would try to calculate the timescale so that this all happens over ~10 years. Too fast, and there will be public outcry and the government will not be able to respond fast enough to the shocks to the economy, likely leading the left-wing government to lose momentum and elections, throwing the whole socialist project in disarray. Too slow, and the national service might be weakened by Republicans or plutocrat-funded propaganda may damage public commitment to the cause and identification as a national monument.
EDIT: It would be remiss of me to fail to note in all this, btw, that the Medicare for All bill (it's where I got some of my ideas) sponsored by Harris (and Warren, and Gillibrand, and even Booker) and Sanders has its primary mechanism for diminishing the role of private insurance the following:
(a) IN GENERAL.—Beginning on the effective date
[after 4-year transition period]
24 described in section 106(a), it shall be unlawful for—
1 (1) a private health insurer to sell health insur2 ance coverage that duplicates the benefits provided
3 under this Act; or
4 (2) an employer to provide benefits for an em5 ployee, former employee, or the dependents of an
6 employee or former employee that duplicate the ben7 efits provided under this Act.
Basically, most insurance companies will quickly have to shut down or diversify because they will only be allowed to sell the highest-tier benefits. My contribution is the sub rosa "nickel and dimeing" of the takeup by the population without requiring direct and disruptive timelines or transition periods. My outright cessation of employment coverage to new employees spurs a more organic transition.
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