Bedard is invoking a now-familiar argument among American liberals — namely that their party should always be pitching compromises rather than making maximalist demands. And perhaps at the end of drawn-out legislative fights, that logic occasionally might make a bit of sense. But what’s new here is that this argument — which had resulted in so many surrenders, including Barack Obama’s surrender of his single payer promise and then his public option promise — is now being made by liberals even before Democrats are in any kind of policy fight at all.
That, of course, is the intended effect of the Searchlight Institute’s proposals — to get liberals to help stop a Medicare for All fight before one even unfolds.
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Notably, Searchlight’s own executive director, Adam Jentleson, once criticized that game in 2019 when Pete Buttigieg suddenly dialed back his support for Medicare for All. Back then, Jentleson impugned Buttigieg, saying he “supported Medicare for All for 15 years, then flipped and started attacking other Dems over it after raising a ton of money from the health care industry.” Jentleson added: “A reasonable person might conclude that the health care industry bought Pete’s opposition - and did so pretty easily.”
Fast forward seven years, and the health care crisis is worse, but Jentleson is now playing that game. And my question is: Why would anyone fall for such an obvious parlor trick? This impulse by liberals to constantly back down and make apologies for capitulating Democrats is just weird — and it’s ultimately why so many Americans think Democrats stand for nothing.
Half measures is how fascism took over.
Full measures only moving forwards. Those who propose or insist on halfway solutions are on the side of the enemy.
The way I would frame it is people are nowhere near as motivated to survive as we commonly assert, rather people are primarily motivated to live.
It will not work to build power with the promise to provide people a marginally better way to survive, even if is completely true.
You must put forth a vision for how people can actually live a decent life to get them to invest hope and energy into a movement or campaign.
The only other alternative is motivating people with violence, and this is why centrist neoliberals are often incapable of winning against fascists who are aesthetically obsessed with violence as a display of social status. Fascism is an evil motivator, but it is a motivator and it derives its power from masses of people who have lost the ability to believe anyone will help them actually be able to live a decent life, not just survive, which is the inevitable endstate of neoliberal austerity politics.
this is why centrist neoliberals are often incapable of winning against fascists
Neoliberals may have lost against Trump because of the election rigging but they still performed much better than leftists.
I would classify this as a positivist framing and when I told neoliberals here, that if Biden (and later Harris) didn’t adopt a positivist framing, they would lose the election.
