The DMZ America Podcast’s Ted Rall (on the Left) and Scott Stantis (on the Right) are joined by syndicated columnist Clarence Page of the Chicago Tribune to discuss the despondent state of the Democratic Party in the wake of their defeat. Progressives like Bernie Sanders say the party erred in neglecting the working class, moderates think the party appears too “woke” for mainstream Americans and it’s hard to reconcile Biden and the Democrats’ criticism of Donald Trump as dishonest with his decision to pardon Hunter Biden despite numerous categorical denials that he would do so. Where does the Democratic Party go from here? Is “resistance” possible and, if so, what will it look like?
The Blame Game
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Defeat is an orphan. But defeated Democrats, themselves responsible for losing an election to Donald Trump that should have been easy to win, are flailing about trying to pin the blame on everyone but themselves.
The TMI Show Ep 16: Wounded Democrats Scramble to Regroup
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On today’s TMI Show, co-hosts Ted Rall and Manila Chan are joined by former Pittsburgh Post-Gazette editorial cartoonist Rob Rogers to discuss the fallout of Trump’s reelection win, namely: Where do Democrats go now? What will a Democratic Resistance 2.0 look like? How effectively can Democrats block Trump’s initiatives? Are there areas in which Democrats and Republicans can work together in a bipartisan manner? Who are the rising stars within the party? Will Democrats continue to drift right to chase anti-MAGA Republicans, or will they follow the advice of Bernie Sanders and others who suggest that it’s time to either abandon the Democratic Party or take it over?
Keywords: Donald Trump, 2024 election results, 2024 election, 2024 campaign, Rob Rogers, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, editorial cartoonist, political cartoonist, interview, Democrats, future, Bernie Sanders, MAGA movement, resistance
The TMI Show Ep 9: What Should Lefties Do About Kamala?
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What do you do as a voter when your party isn’t that into you? On today’s TMI Show, in which there’s no such thing as Too Much Information, Ted Rall and Scott Stantis (guest hosting for Manila Chan) Progressive and other left-leaning Democrats are once again wrestling with a dilemma they’ve seen before: Kamala Harris has pivoted to the right of her party, eschewing progressive policies, campaigning with far-right Liz Cheney and supporting Israel against Gaza, and Ukraine against Russia.
Should progressives support Harris despite her snubs, hoping she secretly plans to move left of she wins? Should they punish her by voting third party or even for Trump? Or should they abstain from voting?
Refusing to Censor Speech Isn’t the Same as Agreeing with It
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If someone said something I found annoying or offensive, my mother taught me, the appropriate response was to allow them to finish speaking and reply with a calm, considered counterargument. Now you’re supposed to talk over them until they shut up.
Or, better yet, cut their mic and show them the door.
Censorship has become a bipartisan norm. Why waste the time and energy to conceive and articulate an intelligent rebuttal when you can make your opponent shut up?
Alan Dershowitz, a nationally-known former Harvard Law professor, announced that he was leaving the Democratic Party because the party’s organizers allowed pro-Palestinian speakers to address its convention in Chicago. “They had more anti-Jewish, anti-Zionist people who were speaking, starting with [Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez]–a miserable, anti-Zionist bigot,” Dershowitz said on “Talkline with Zev Brenner.” “Then of course they had [Senator Elizabeth] Warren, who is one of the most anti-Jewish people in the Senate. Then they had Bernie Sanders, one of the most anti-Jewish people in the Senate.” (Sanders is Jewish.)
“[B]y giving them platforms, what it says is that when AOC does call Israel a genocidal country and rails against it, she now has the imprimatur of the Democratic Party,” he argued.
On the opposite side of the ideological divide, high-profile podcaster and ex-Fox News host Tucker Carlson caught flak for hosting Darryl Cooper, a Holocaust revisionist, on his show on the social media platform X. Representative Mike Lawler of New York, told The Jewish Insider: “Platforming known Holocaust revisionists is deeply disturbing.”
I’m a leftist. Some of my fans lost their minds when I invited former Klansman David Duke to guest on my old talk-radio show on KFI Los Angeles. Feeling betrayed, they accused me of amplifying and tacitly endorsing a voice of the racist alt-right. I recall the exchange as vigorous, challenging and a rare opportunity to hear ideas on both sides of a variety of issues aired in an intelligent format.
The way I saw it, many Americans share Duke’s far-right views whether they hear them on the air or not. This was a chance to expose the existence of these thoughts to blissfully unaware liberals and workshop arguments against them. I would do it again in a heartbeat—but I’d become the target of even more venom now.
Platforming speech is not the same as endorsing what is said.
Platforming is the act of providing a means of public expression. A newspaper that publishes an interview with or even just a short quote by a person gives them a platform. A college that invites someone to give a speech or participate in a panel discussion is engaged in platforming, as is a cable network that decides to add a channel to its lineup.
None of these actions is a tacit endorsement.
Nor can it be.
Unless it limits its opinionists to a single voice or aggressively enforces a rigid set of ideological strictures upon a group of them—no one need apply unless they are, for example, socially liberal, fiscally conservative and opposed to military adventurism except in Myanmar—any newspaper’s decision to simultaneously platform one writer who disagrees materially with a second writer (and a third and a fourth) means that, by definition, there are contrasts and disagreements. Inherently, because no institution can simultaneously endorse conflicting points of view, no endorsement has occurred
Many news stories include quotes by both a Democrat and a Republican. If platforming the Democrat is an endorsement, how should one explain the appearance of the Republican? Most universities host speakers representing a range of views on a variety of subjects, many of them controversial. It makes no sense to imply that those institutions agree with everyone they invite on campus.
Until fairly recently, most Americans appreciated the value of showcasing a spectrum of ideological and stylistic views in public fora. Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis famously wrote in 1926 that the solution to offensive speech was “more speech, not enforced silence.” Today what we call Brandeis’ counter-speech doctrine—the answer to bad speech is good speech, not censorship—is in grave danger. Rather than argue against their opponents, cultural and journalistic gatekeepers are increasingly resorting to telling those with whom they to disagree to STFU.
Censorship drives dangerous rhetoric underground. It conveys a sense that purveyors of “mainstream” opinion are contemptuous of others, unable to defend their views, possibly intellectually feeble, and just plain bullies. Mostly, it doesn’t work.
After the January 6, 2021 attack on the Capitol, Twitter suspended 70,000 accounts, including that of President Donald Trump. Facebook acted similarly. A year later, in 2022, liberal censors claimed victory. “The best research that we have suggests that deplatforming is very powerful,” Rebekah Tromble, director of the Institute for Data, Democracy and Politics at George Washington University, told NPR. “It means that really prominent actors who helped stoke the Stop the Steal campaign that led to the insurrection have much less reach, get much less audience and attention. And that is very, very, very important.”
Was it? Donald Trump, the biggest January 6er of them all, is also the undisputed kingpin of the Republican Party, in whose primaries he ran unopposed. Running neck and neck with Kamala Harris, he may easily be reelected.
The belief that editors, producers, tech CEOs and other gatekeepers control enough outlets to deny their enemies an outlet to a significant audience is a profoundly flawed assumption. To whatever extent this was true in an era of four television news networks and cities with a morning and afternoon paper and not much else—and, even then, there were underground presses and alternative newsweeklies like The Village Voice—the Internet has blown that idea to smithereens. Al Jazeera, the Qatar-based cable news network whose American channel was shut down after the War on Terror-era Bush Administration leaned on U.S. broadcasters, disseminates live news from Gaza and other global hot spots via its website, which is one of the biggest in this country. InfoWars, Alex Jones’ “fringe” news site, gets 19 million views daily despite Jones’ epic legal defeat at the hands of parents whose children were killed at Sandy Hook Elementary School, who were awarded $1 billion. Any government or other corporate entity that tries to control information narratives in an era of fragmented media is playing whack-a-mole with a million rodents.
As long as there’s an audience for what someone has to say, you can’t keep a good—or bad—man down.
(Ted Rall (Twitter: @tedrall), the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, co-hosts the left-vs-right DMZ America podcast with fellow cartoonist Scott Stantis. His latest book, brand-new right now, is the graphic novel 2024: Revisited.)
Don’t Negotiate Against Yourselves, Lefties
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Anyone who has experience haggling at a flea market has intuited the basics of negotiating. If a seller offers the item you want at a fire-sale price that you’re unlikely to find elsewhere, smile, pay the asking price and walk away before they change their mind. If the requested price is many times higher than you’re willing to pay, just walk away. Stratospheric pricing pretty much eliminates the odds that you’ll be able to come to terms. Your time is better spend haggling with a different vendor. In other cases, offer a low-ball rate and work toward middle ground.
In politics, liberals tend to negotiate against themselves. Rather than pushing for radical change, Democrats begin with an incrementalist approach that factors in their conservative opponents’ counteroffer and begins from there. Since the Right is aggressive, they push back to the point that the resulting change is a smaller improvement that, in many cases, is so tiny as to be a rounding error. Obama’s opening gambit in the healthcare reform debate illustrates this phenomenon.
We know what we wound up with: Obamacare, originally developed by the right-wing Heritage Foundation, is a free-market scheme that prioritizes insurance-company profits, relies on economies of scale and assumes robust competition will reduce costs. (In practice, the healthcare business is de facto monopolized to the extent that there is little downward pressure on prices. The industry is disincentivized to participate in the public sector to the point that only a small fraction of the health plans available individually and via private employers can be purchased in the ACA’s online marketplace.)
The point is how the ACA as we know it came to pass. Obama, wielding considerable political capital at the start of his first term, decided to make healthcare reform his first major legislative priority. The public, long struggling under high costs for medical care and prescription pharmaceuticals, was supportive across party lines.
Right out of the gate, Obama negotiated against himself. Though he had promised during this campaign that the ACA would include a “public option,” i.e. the right to join what Bernie Sanders called Medicare For All, he agreed to drop it from the bill because, Democrats explained, they were short one vote in the Senate. Joe Lieberman, a right-wing independent senator from Connecticut, home to many of the nation’s major insurers, threatened to scuttle the measure via a filibuster parliamentary maneuver.
Rather than force Lieberman and his Republican allies to go on the record as having rejected a popular bill on a major issue, Obama dropped the public option. Obama noted the public option “has become a source of ideological contention between the left and right.” Anyway, he lied, “I didn’t campaign on the public option.” Good news: the ACA passed. But the lack of a public option was so unpopular (88% of Democrats wanted one) that it was a significant factor behind Bernie Sanders’ insurgent campaign in 2016. Instead of a towering achievement, Obamacare is widely viewed as a disappointment. The vast majority of Americans say its failure left the problem unsolved.
Shortly before he left office, Obama suggested that Congress add a public option to the ACA. This is what happens when you negotiate against yourself.
The 38% of Americans who oppose capitalism—socialists, communists, left libertarians and others to the Left of the Democratic Party—should take careful note of the Democrats’ repeated refusals to seek big changes and the subsequent failures that have followed as a result. Unlike the Democrats, who negotiate in Congress against Republicans who share their basic political values and assumptions on the relationship between workers and their labor, militarism and social priorities, we on the actual Left are fighting to overturn the system entirely.
Our goal is Revolution. But we are completely, for the time being, disorganized. There is no viable leftist political party with a revolutionary orientation, no well-funded highly distributed media outlet to disseminate news and opinion with our point of view. We have, not even in the so-called progressive “Squad” in the House of Representatives, zero elected representatives who seek to abolish capitalism and prioritize the needs and desires of the people. Absent these basic organizational structures or an as-yet-undeveloped Internet-driven organizational strategy that short circuits traditional grassroots organizing and agitation strategies, emancipation by revolution will continue to elude us.
In the meantime, we must lay the groundwork for revolutionary foment. We must, within the constructs and limitations of the current capitalist system, expose the true nature of a government that claims to be by and for the people but is in truth nothing but a Ponzi scheme that extracts wealth upward from the poor and the working class up to the tiny few at the top point of the pyramid. We can and must accomplish this by exposing the system’s internal, self-evident contradictions.
This begins by asking why the powers that be repeatedly and continuously find billions of dollars for all manner of destructive nonsense—foreign wars, corrupt defense contractors, tax breaks to for-profit corporations—repeatedly and continuously inform us that there is never enough money to satisfy basic human needs.
We know, when we demand that everyone have enough to eat, that the political elites will refuse or ignore us. We expect, when we demand that everyone be housed, that we will be told to stuff it. We understand, when we demand that a day of work should be paid fairly, that we are asking for something that they will never agree to—indeed, that they cannot because it would destroy them and their self-perceived identity in the power structure.
We make demands, not because we believe they will be achieved under this fake parliamentary-style democracy, but because they will be unreasonably refused, without just cause. We want people to hear us ask, and hear them say no, over and over in order to expose them and the fundamental nature of their system.
We are not, therefore, negotiating. We are demanding. Those who demand should appear reasonable. But we must also be ambitious. Our demands should be aggressive enough that we would genuinely be satisfied were we to achieve them and never so modest that there is a chance the ruling classes would ever seriously consider them.
Nothing less than a perfect world will do.
(Ted Rall (Twitter: @tedrall), the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, co-hosts the left-vs-right DMZ America podcast with fellow cartoonist Scott Stantis. His latest book, brand-new right now, is the graphic novel 2024: Revisited.)
Don’t Get Obama-ed Again
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Barack Obama’s 2008 run, a classic identity play, emphasized the history-making potential of electing the nation’s first Black president. No one knew or cared much about Obama’s policy positions, and he didn’t bother to share them. Bernie Sanders’ 2016 and 2020 bids were policy arguments focused around a succinct set of issues: student loan debt, the minimum wage and healthcare. The fact that he would have been the first Jewish president was scarcely noticed.
If I were one of the Democratic strategists advising Kamala Harris’ rump 2024 campaign for president, I would focus on an identity play emphasizing her race and gender over a run about a set of policies. Which is exactly what she’s doing. “The longer the Harris campaign can portray her as a cultural phenomenon,” The New York Times reported on July 31st, “the longer she can avoid articulating details of her policy agenda that could divide her support…For now, the Harris team intends to skip some of the traditional markers of a presidential bid. While Ms. Harris released a host of policy papers during her 2020 campaign—some of which she has since disavowed—this time she plans to cast herself as a policy extension of Mr. Biden’s administration.”
“I think we are three weeks from knowing whether she can ascend the Obama ladder to where it’s about her and not any specific policies she has,” Rick Davis, campaign manager for McCain in 2008, told the Times.
If Kamala Harris can get elected without making policy promises, good for her. But we, as individual voters, have different interests than she does.
“I’m with her,” a Hillary Clinton campaign slogan quickly adopted by Kamala Harris supporters, is exactly the opposite of what representative democracy is supposed to be about. She should be watching our backs. A politician ought to be there for us, fighting like hell to improve our lives.
Just as Harris is attempting to do now, Obama ran as a rock star, long on charisma and short on specifics. Progressives and other leftists who gave him their votes quickly learned that being young, Black and cool enough to enjoy weed is no guarantee that a candidate will govern any better or differently than a boring old white guy. As president, Obama did exactly what a Republican would have done. He refused to codify Roe v. Wade (he called abortion rights “not the highest legislative priority”), granted full immunity to Guantánamo torturers, sent tens of thousands of more troops to the losing wars against Afghanistan and Iraq, used assassination drones 10 times more than Bush and supported the military coup against the democratically-elected, left-leaning president of Honduras.
Obama’s decision to bail out Wall Street but not Main Street after the 2008-09 subprime mortgage crisis prompted pissed-off progressives to form the Occupy Wall Street movement in late 2011. True to right-wing form, Obama had his Homeland Security department partner with Wall Street banks, real estate companies, local police and the FBI to ruthlessly crush hundreds of Occupy encampments in violent coordinated raids.
Obama is still a rock star. But he gravely wounded the Democratic Party. Obamaism led directly to the surprise success of Bernie Sanders’ insurgent 2016 campaign—and the intraparty schism that allowed Donald Trump’s surprise win.
Let’s not get fooled again. If the left-leaning Democrats who comprise the majority of the party’s voters want to avoid getting conned into supporting another DINO like Obama, they must insist upon a clear and coherent policy agenda for a first Harris Administration. “She is not Trump” is not enough. Nor is “we need a Black woman president.” By those standards, we could have elected Condoleezza Rice.
We don’t know nearly enough about Harris’s stances on the issues. The little we have learned so far on matters like Gaza (she supports Israel), universal healthcare (she’s against it) and the long-frozen minimum wage (she doesn’t talk about it) doesn’t give much reason for optimism from a leftist point of view.
It’s been more than two weeks since she became the Democratic standardbearer. Yet she still refuses to give any press conferences—something every candidate and every president ought to do daily, 365 days a year—or interviews with reporters. Like the senile Biden, every word she utters in public is read off a Teleprompter.
If she won’t tell us what she thinks, and we don’t like what she says, she shouldn’t get our votes.
(Ted Rall (Twitter: @tedrall), the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, co-hosts the left-vs-right DMZ America podcast with fellow cartoonist Scott Stantis. His latest book, brand-new right now, is the graphic novel 2024: Revisited.)
No Sympathy for Biden I
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Poor Joe.
No.
Poor us. Poor United States. Poor Democratic Party.
We’ve been suckered. While we were fearfully obsessing over the ethically-challenged Donald Trump, a much more talented grifter—Joe Biden along with his hidden passel of co-conspirators—conned the electorate, the news media and most of his own party’s leaders out of the American presidency.
The Bidenite scam sounds like a fourth entry in Alan J. Pakula’s “paranoia trilogy” of 1970s political thrillers.
A populist socialist senator takes an early lead in the 2020 primaries. Ruling-class elites panic. Who can stop him? Alarmed party bosses and their mouthpieces in the corporate media recruit an unlikely centrist champion to take him on: the oldest person ever to run for president, a washed-up hack who came in fourth in Iowa and fifth in New Hampshire. Even more worrisome, the elderly man presents with signs of dementia. He “campaigned unevenly and delivered uncomfortably meandering performances at the debates that often worsened as each debate dragged on,” a major national political magazine pundit observes.
A 19th century-style boss who controls a chunk of the Black vote yanks his secret levers of power: just before Super Tuesday, several of the younger candidates drop out and simultaneously endorse the demented old man. “Rarely, if ever, have opponents joined forces so dramatically,” The New York Times reports. A narrowed field and the Black bloc finishes the hit. The socialist drops out a month later.
The dementia problem remains. A leftist columnist (cough cough) argues in March 2020 that the emperor has no brain (“Biden obviously has dementia and should withdraw from the race”); right-wingers agree. They are ignored by the media, the vast majority of whom live deep inside the mushy, muddled, moderate middle where common sense goes to die. 40% of voters (including 20% of Democrats) tell a June 2020 Rasmussen Reports poll that they think Biden suffers from dementia. They are called victims of Republican disinformation.
To the party elites—the DNC, Congressional leaders like House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, media allies like the Times op-ed page and MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough—Biden’s diminished mental acuity is a feature, not a bug. Never the fastest car in the showroom to begin with, nor possessed of a strong moral center, the enfeebled Democratic nominee will say and do pretty much anything they want. All the scammers have to do now is get Biden into the White House without the voters figuring out that he isn’t all there.
With the Democratic nomination nailed down, Biden’s co-conspirators receive a gift from the gods: the Covid-19 pandemic prompts incumbent president Donald Trump into ordering a national lockdown. 2020 becomes a campaign like no other—one perfect for a Biden who can’t campaign or speak extemporaneously.
No rallies. No press conferences. No town halls. No unscripted interviews. “Everybody says, you know, ‘Biden’s hiding.’ Well, let me tell you something, we’re doing very well. We’re following the guidelines of the medical profession,” Biden explains.
Biden spends the campaign in his Delaware basement, reading prepared speeches to a TV camera. On Election Night he acknowledges his win against Trump remotely to a parking lot full of socially-distanced cars.
The Bidenite plot is breathtakingly audacious. For the next four years—a time span as long as America’s involvement in World War II—Biden’s puppeteers will keep on hiding him. A hidden junta will disguise, deflect and distract from the mental condition of the President of the United States, the most powerful political leader on the planet holding an office that calls for countless public appearances, gaslighting like crazy while they call the shots. This digital Potemkin presidency will be propped up by Teleprompters, even in intimate private fundraisers with big donors, fake interviews in which “reporters” are spoon-fed questions that Biden responds to by reading prepared text, and pompous accusations of ageism fired at skeptics.
It was a ridiculous scheme, carried out in plain sight. And it worked.
Biden gave hardly any press conferences or interviews. A minute cabal of staff and family members kept the president, like a hostage, in a bubble. “Biden’s closest aides—often led by Jill Biden’s top aide, Anthony Bernal [a thuggish figure nicknamed “Biden’s Rasputin” by insiders], and deputy chief of staff Annie Tomasini—took steps early in his term to essentially rope off the president,” Axios would report after Biden’s 2024 debate performance revealed his mental condition. Even the White House residence staff hardly ever saw him.
Reality, however, intruded. In 2021, Biden said he had discussed the Jan. 6th Capitol riot with German chancellor Helmut Kohl, who died in 2017. He also confused French President Emmanuel Macron with his predecessor Francois Mitterrand, who died in 1996: “Mitterrand from Germany—I mean, from France—looked at me and said, ‘You know, what…why…how long you back for?” He called out for a Congressional ally at a rally—a woman who had died a month earlier in a widely-reported car crash and whose family had received a condolence call from him: “Jackie, are you here? Where’s Jackie?,” he asked. “She was going to be here.” Russian President Vladimir Putin, Biden said in 2023 was “clearly losing the war in Iraq.” He recently introduced Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky as Putin.
Voters noticed. An August 2023 AP-NORC poll found that 69% of Democrats (and 89% of Republicans) thought Biden was too old to run for reelection. The press kept covering.
The ruse fell apart twice.
First came Biden’s hubristic quest for a second term. Had Biden kept his implicit promise to serve only four years before passing the torch, media and voter attention would have been focused on the Democrats who wanted to succeed him, including Vice President Kamala Harris. As with Ronald Reagan’s last few years in office, Biden’s mental diminishment would have been tacitly understood as a temporary problem. The crisis we’re currently facing is as if Reagan had run in 1988, asking for four more years and making lame excuses—he has a cold, he has jet lag, he stutters—while visibly suffering from Alzheimer’s.
Second, not sticking to the plan. Once underway and committed to a reelection campaign, Operation Hidin’ Biden’s control team ought to have refused to debate Trump. Debates aren’t mandatory; the excuse that Trump was a contemptable convicted felon and insurrectionist would have gotten journalists off Biden’s back. Clearly a big part of Biden World got spooked by low polls—low because citizens like to see their presidents. So, to prove to the world that they were right and that voters should no longer believe their lying eyes, panicked Democrats foolishly demanded an early, high-profile debate that, with the benefit of hindsight included rules that hurt Biden. Democrats should have wanted Trump to talk over Biden. They should have asked for a big, noisy, disruptive audience to drown out Biden’s rambling, confused word salad.
They crossed their fingers and hoped for the best and prayed that Joe would have one last good day. As anyone experienced with dementia patients can tell—my mom died of Alzheimer’s—there comes a time when the last good day is in the past. Biden has been there for quite some time.
I look forward to reading the first solid tell-all book about this debacle. Congressional Republicans have signaled that they plan to investigate Biden’s physical and mental health. The legislative branch must exercise its constitutional oversight powers to find out how it happened and who is responsible.
But let’s be something that the president can’t be: clear. Joe Biden and the people behind him do not deserve our sympathy. Save your pity for we, the people of the United States.
Biden was elected under false pretenses. He was “president”*, not President. We don’t know who really made the big decisions in the White House.
This is not how democracy or representative government work. BidenGate was the cooption of a major political party, a coup d’état and an insidious attack that the American people couldn’t defend themselves against because they never knew it happened. A stooge was installed, so perfectly ironically, by those who loudly claimed to be defending democracy from a wannabe fascist. The Democratic Party traitors who carried out and knew about this obscenity should be held legally and politically accountable.
(Ted Rall (Twitter: @tedrall), the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, co-hosts the left-vs-right DMZ America podcast with fellow cartoonist Scott Stantis. His latest book, brand-new right now, is the graphic novel 2024: Revisited.)
What’s Left 7: Healthcare is a Human Right
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Liberals believe that a compromise that gets us closer to a goal is better than no progress at all. But compromise can lead to the dead end of dilution and a false sense of resolution.
The early 20th century progressive and presidential Robert “Fighting Bob” LaFollette argued that politics played into different a psychological dynamic. “In legislation no bread is often better than half a loaf,” he observed. “Half a loaf, as a rule, dulls the appetite, and destroys the keenness of interest in attaining the full loaf.”
Nothing in recent history demonstrates LaFollette’s viewpoint more clearly than the evolution of then healthcare debate. When Obama won the presidential election in 2008, healthcare—particularly its expense—was such a big worry for American voters that the ruling classes came to view the problem as a crisis. The system was expensive, dysfunctional and despised. Despite an economy reeling from a severe Great Recession, the new president quickly moved to address the issue by pushing for passage of his 2009 Affordable Care Act, popularly known as Obamacare, and even a divided Congress went along.
Obamacare was a classic political compromise of the variety that moderates adore: it made nobody happy. The healthcare industry—though their concerns soon proved to have been wildly unfounded—worried about losing some of their precious profits. Patient advocates preferred a European-style, fully socialized system in which doctors and nurses are government employees to the ACA, a market-based system originally conceived by the conservative Heritage Foundation. Figuring that the ACA would move the center of gravity closer to socialized medicine, leftists supported it despite their reservations.
By most accounts, the ACA has failed to fix the problems it was supposed to address. In many American counties (health plans are designed by county) the government “marketplace” has just one or two plans to “choose” from. The only high-income nation without universal health coverage, the U.S. spends more by far on healthcare, both per person and as a share of GDP, than other countries. Yet we still have the lowest life expectancy at birth, the highest death rates for avoidable and treatable conditions, the highest infant mortality and the highest rate of people with multiple chronic conditions and an obesity rate nearly twice the OECD average. Premiums are high but co-pays are low, so we see physicians less often than patients in most other countries. A whopping 650,000 Americans go bankrupt each year due to healthcare bills, accounting for 60% of all personal bankruptcies. Americans are extremely dissatisfied with the cost and access to healthcare.
A decade and a half later, healthcare ranks near the bottom on the hierarchy of policy priorities articulated by voters. How can this be?
LaFollette’s dictum at work! The half-loaf of ACA dulled the appetite, creating the illusion that the healthcare problem had either been resolved—an opinion common among those with employer-supplied health insurance and/or those who live in one of the big cities where the online marketplace has competition—or had been as fixed as is reasonable to expect from the current system. As a result, there is no indication that politicians of either party are inclined to propose a legislative improvement any time soon.
Nevertheless the need is acute. People want affordable healthcare (even if they despair of ever getting it). The right to affordable—no, free—healthcare is a basic human right. Without it, after all, people quite literally drop dead.
According to a 2020 estimate by the nonpartisan Urban Institute, Bernie Sanders’ Medicare For All plan—the most thoroughly thought-out, frictionless plan on the drawing board that salvages as much from the existing network as possible, would cost about $3 trillion per year. However, a Yale study concluded that the government would save about half a trillion each year “by improving access to preventive care, reducing administrative overhead, and empowering Medicare to negotiate prices.” Working net cost: $2.5 trillion per annum.
Medicare For All would replace our current, highly wasteful system. “We’re already paying as taxpayers for universal basic automatic coverage, we’re just not getting it,” economist Amy Finkelstein says. “We might as well formalize and fund that commitment upfront.” She points to the fact that the federal government currently pays $1.8 trillion a year for Medicare, Medicaid, veterans’ services and other government-funded healthcare costs—all of which would vanish after they were replaced by a holistic Medicare For All scheme. Third-party programs, which are often government-funded, and public health programs eat up an additional $600 billion per year.
Medicare For All would also save the lives of the 45,000 Americans who die annually due to lack of insurance. The IRS would collect an additional $1 billion a year in tax revenues as a result.
So the net cost of treating everyone who needs medical care is about $100 billion per year, which is just over two percent of the $4.5 trillion we’re currently wasting on wars and other things that make our lives worse.
Most analyses of Medicare For All focus on how it would save patients money. Even if they had to pay higher taxes, this is indeed true. For liberals, such an improvement might be triumph worth celebrating. The Left, however, must be as ambitious as possible, even under the bourgeois electoral democracy currently in place pending the Revolution for which we are waiting and ought to be working for. Healthcare, a basic human need every bit as essential to life as food and clean water, should be provided by the government, gratis. The good news is, we can afford it. What we require to enact a real First World healthcare system is for the Left to come to power.
Next: A college education is a right. So is the choice not to attend college, yet still be considered for a job.
(Ted Rall (Twitter: @tedrall), the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, co-hosts the left-vs-right DMZ America podcast with fellow cartoonist Scott Stantis. You can support Ted’s hard-hitting political cartoons and columns and see his work first by sponsoring his work on Patreon.)
What’s Left 4: We Need a Real Minimum Wage
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When Gallup pollsters ask Americans what causes them the most stress and worry, personal economic concerns—the cost of living, lack of money, the gap between rich and poor, difficulty finding a job or, if they’re employed, low wages—consistently come in first, so much so that they can’t imagine saving for the future. General economic issues like poverty, hunger and homelessness come in next. In a capitalist country with decades of rising income inequality and a modest safety net, these findings come as little surprise.
The rent is too damn high; buying a house gets more and more out of reach. We’re living paycheck to paycheck, expenses rise faster than salaries, and bosses, who can fire you at will even if you’ve been working hard and following the rules, have absolute power in a country where 10% of workers belong to a union. No wonder we’re worried sick.
Economic insecurity is America’s biggest political issue. Yet neither of the major parties campaigns on it. At most, they’ll refer to it obliquely, as when nativists call for reduced immigration—sometimes they argue that new arrivals take away jobs from the native-born.
Many of the other things that keep people up at night are partly or fully grounded in economic insecurity. Crime and violence are more pervasive in poor neighborhoods, courts are better-staffed and more efficient in wealthy areas. Patients worry about being able to afford to see a doctor and pay for medications at least as much as they do about the quality of healthcare. Racial tensions dissipate in places and periods of prosperity.
The failure of bourgeois electoral democracy to address the nation’s biggest political issue, economic insecurity, is tailor-made for the agenda of the Left, which historically has been grounded in Marxist class analysis.
Naturally, the ultimate goal of Leftists is the overthrow of capitalism, which centers inequality and monopoly as inevitable at best and laudable at worst, with a socialism that provides equal access to the basic necessities of life and equal opportunity to achieve more. But Revolution is not like a cake; there is no recipe to follow. All the conditions must be ripe and, frustratingly to the revolutionist, the determination that those conditions exist can only be affirmed after the fact of success.
One predicate for revolution is a well-organized grassroots movement. There are few better ways to build such a structure than to consistently and relentlessly agitate for improvement in people’s economic living conditions—which are, after all, their biggest problem—in elections, street demonstrations, strikes, sit-ins, sabotage and other militant actions centered around a Left programme that demands improvements in wages, benefits and government safety-net programs.
Never has the public been more predisposed to the argument that government ought to intercede on behalf of those who are having trouble making ends meet, or fear that unemployment might put them into such a position. People’s buying power has been ravaged by inflation, corporations are again turning the screws after a brief period of liberalization driven by the post-pandemic labor shortage, and it has been 60 years since a major party proposed a federal anti-poverty program (LBJ’s Great Society).
Some bourgeois political analysts, particularly the progressive wing of the Democratic Party, identify the vacuum in the dialogue space of economic injustice. But neither party can meaningfully address issues like poverty and homelessness for one simple reason: they are capitalist parties. Whatever room existed for the reformist impulse vanished after the postwar period yielded to the beginning of America’s late-capitalist decline. Admitting that capitalism leaves millions behind is unthinkable, let alone developing legislative attempts to fix the problem.
We, the Left, have the signature issue of economic justice all to ourselves, provided that we do not obsess over identity politics to the exclusion of class divisions.
Wages come first.
A day’s work should pay enough to pay for rent, a car and other necessities. If the federal minimum wage had kept up with inflation since 1970, it would currently be $30 an hour. The average worker is twice as productive as 1970, so make that $60. For a full-time worker, that’s $120,000 a year. But 1970 wasn’t a perfect time for workers. We deserve and demand better. The Left should think of $60 an hour as the bare minimum necessary to live decently in the United States, and push for more for skilled labor.
Think that’s unrealistic? If so, you’ve been corrupted by capitalistic propaganda that devalues labor. Bernie Sanders and the Squad are still struggling to raise the federal minimum from $7.25 to $15.00—that’s what passes for progressive! What a joke! The bosses themselves consider $60 an hour to be the real minimum wage to subsist in the world we live in today; in New York, where I live, you can’t qualify for a rental apartment unless your annual salary is 40 times the monthly rent. You need $120,000 to be considered for a $3000 per month apartment; good luck finding anything for less than that. It’s not that landlords want to discriminate against working-class tenants. They’ve learned from experience that people who earn less than $120,000 are far likelier to fall behind on the rent until they have to be evicted, costing building owners and managers money.
Be reasonable. Demand the impossible: $60 an hour minimum wage.
Next: the Left’s programme for economic security.
(Ted Rall (Twitter: @tedrall), the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, co-hosts the left-vs-right DMZ America podcast with fellow cartoonist Scott Stantis. You can support Ted’s hard-hitting political cartoons and columns and see his work first by sponsoring his work on Patreon.)
