Democracy In Three Easy Payments?

Back in late July, Kevin Drum had a smart post up talking about the process behind successfully driving legislative initiatives like health care reform that dovetails in some fashion with Mark’s post about Democrats losing control of the debate,

But underneath that, it’s all about how it’s sold.  Everything has to have a constituency if it’s going to get passed.  For ag subsidies it’s farmers.  For lax financial regulation, it’s banks.  For tax cuts it’s rich people.

For healthcare it’s…..I dunno.  Who?  But that’s the point.  Everyone has been so hung up on congressional process that they seem to have forgotten that Congress responds to the public.  If constituents are mad as hell that their healthcare isn’t as good as France’s, they’ll flood congressional offices with phone calls.  But if they think America has the best healthcare in the world, while the rest of the world is a socialist dystopia of ramshackle hospitals, yearlong waits for hip replacements, and harried doctors who can’t see you for months and treat you like a postal customer when you finally get in — well, who’s going to get pissed off about the occasional scuffle with their insurance company?  And if the public isn’t worked up, then Congress won’t get worked up either.

This has always been about public opinion.  Everything is about public opinion.  It’s about public opinion being strong enough to overcome the resistance of whatever corporate interests are on the other side.  For some reason, though, liberals don’t seem to get that anymore, and because of that we don’t spend enough time on either side of the basic vox populi equation: (a) hammering home why individuals, personally, should be unhappy with the status quo, and (b) promising them, personally, lots of cool new stuff if they buy into change.

You don’t have to lie to accomplish this.  But you do have to sell, the same way any salesman anywhere sells stuff.

Certainly Kevin’s formula has accurately predicted the state of the health care debate. It is Republicans and (some) conservatives who have gotten their base riled up and have; therefore, come to take control over the contours of the debate. And insofar as Kevin’s analysis is descriptive, I think he makes a lot of sense.

But I think that said analysis also contains within it many of the explanations about why it seems to many people as though the health care debate has gone so far off the tracks.

Selling a product, in this case legislative reform on health care, is rarely about trading in reality and having a grounded discussion about what the best course of action is as regards the acquisition or non-acquisition of said product when weighed against the various options. Rather, as Kevin notes, selling is more often a contrived and hyper-real environment that plays utilizes the seller’s understanding about the buyer’s hopes and fears as a means of achieving a desired outcome that doesn’t necessarily actually have much of anything to with said hopes and fears. The point of a sale is to, well, make the sale, not to generate a meaningful discussion about the merits of said sale.

To the extent that the practice of politics in a US context reflects just that kind of contrived environment, the sorts of extreme and, to some, seemingly unhinged responses that have taken up so much space in terms of the actual debate around health care are wholly predictable. The average sale lasts minutes, for some big ticket items it may last a couple of hours or even days. This sell job around health care is many months (if not years) in the making and has the added bonus of not just containing an full-throated cheerleader pushing the sale, but also a vehement detractor listing off all the reasons why listening to the cheerleader will ruin your life.

Just thirty seconds of exporting that scenario into the context of your average sale is enough to make me quiver with nausea.

But what’s more, to my mind, is that while this analysis seems accurate and, in that regard, spells out all the current and future pitfalls we now seem destined to tumble in to, it also spells out an all too familiar notion about how politics is supposed to work and how that notion winds up rendering the pubic largely marginalized in the process.

The idea that the public has to be sold on particular reforms or legislative propositions places the ball in terms of debate and discussion square in the court of politicians and political parties. Little opportunity or, perhaps more importantly, responsibility is laid at the feet of the public for committing their own time, resources, experiences, and intelligence towards the generation of meaningful conversation amongst themselves. Rather, the “selling mentality” of political discourse dictates that the parameters and contours of the debate are largely, if not wholly, pre-determined.

It is, by my lights, just this kind of systemically passive approach to civic engagement that ensures the maintenance of just the kinds of debates we see raging currently. For those of us who can’t but shake our heads at this state of affairs, it imperative, I think, to seek out the underlying norms and mores that underpin and propagate the ongoing reality show of our lives.

So Kevin, brother, I loves ya, but if we want to live in a healthy democratic republic, what we need desperately to do is to stop acting like Ron Popeil and start acting like, well, citizens of a healthy democratic republic.

(Belated h/t: mw of Divided We Stand, United We Fall)

Tagged as: citizenship, discourse, Health Care Debate, kevin drum, passivity, selling