Neoliberalism

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Obamacare’s Bad Politics

by Elias Isquith on May 2, 2013

Obamacare

With the implementation of Obamacare soon to really begin in earnest, some conservatives have begun preemptively crowing over what they’re convinced will be a disastrous transition period. Considering they’ve spent the past three years gumming up the bureaucratic works as much as possible, they very well may be right.

But even if they aren’t, the American Prospect’s Paul Waldman worries that the bedtime story liberals tell themselves about Obamacare, that it will soon be just as beloved by the masses as Medicare and Social Security are today — and that Republicans will consequently shy from attacking it head-on — is going to look foolish in hindsight:

One of the biggest problems…is that Obamacare isn’t a single program like Medicare that people can come to love. It’s a whole bunch of pilot programs and new regulations, many of which involve private insurance or existing programs like Medicare and Medicaid, and when people are affected by those changes they won’t necessarily see them as being part of Obamacare…Your relationship with the insurer you choose will certainly be affected deeply by the ACA’s regulations, but most people still won’t understand exactly how.

Among the consequences are that Republicans will be absolutely free to continue to blame every problem anyone has with the health care system on Obamacare, without concern of producing a backlash from the law’s supporters. Compare that to how they talk about Medicare, a program they’ve hated since the moment it was proposed. Because they know how much seniors love their Medicare, they have to pretend they would never harm a hair on the program’s lil’ ole head…

That ridiculous kabuki Republicans are forced into is what protects Medicare from the shivs they’d love to jam into its hide. But nobody is going to shout, “Take your hands off my Obamacare!” because Obamacare isn’t going to be perceived as a thing you have. It’s just a bunch of rules governing how other things run.

I recall this argument being raised a few years ago, back when wild supposition about a bill years away from implementation was still cool. I thought it was probably right then, and still think so now.

It’s certainly a fact of American politics that the public, by and large, has no idea idea how much and what their government does. And when you’ve got a program like Obamacare, one that in so many ways embodies what is called the submerged state, a disconnect between what the public gets and what it thinks it gets — and why! — is highly likely if not outright inevitable.

So let’s stipulate that the public will never conceive of a thing called Obamacare, that Obamacare is a panoply of changes, most of them bureaucratic, that will improve people’s lives to a degree almost inverse to its presence in their consciousness. Next question is easy: why did Democrats put so much at stake for a bill that, just on the political level, is kinda-sorta terrible?

Well, this is where ideology comes in — particularly the fact that America remains very much enthralled to the ideology behind the free market. I know a lot of true-blue market absolutists would find conflating Obamacare with the free market risible; but that’s a product of temporal partisan bickering rather than a true philosophical divide. And while more than a few liberals went overboard, it’s still true that, fundamentally, Obamacare is patterned off of center-right proposals.

Living as we are in a time when, at least among elites, free-market dogma seems immune to the intellectual disfavor you’d expect after the worst financial crisis in 80 years, the prospects for progressive legislation that doesn’t take the form of the submerged state are simply lousy.

To put it simply, what chances could a less market-oriented, more statist plan truly have in an environment where Obamacare, a consummately neoliberal (i.e., liberal ends through conservative means) bill is fast-transformed into the trojan horse with a panel of Dr. Kevorkians inside? Until that question seems like an outlandish, Cassandra-esque hypothetical, the submerged state is probably the best liberals can hope to get.

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Why Matt Yglesias Is Wrong About Bangladesh

by Elias Isquith on April 25, 2013

907920 bangladesh building collapse

If Matt Yglesias sneezes you can bet there’s going to be a chorus of left-of-center tweeters ready to unleash a tidal wave of vitriol and scorn. So go ahead and guess how ugly things got yesterday, and remain today, after he wrote this:

It’s very plausible that one reason American workplaces have gotten safer over the decades is that we now tend to outsource a lot of factory-explosion-risk to places like Bangladesh where 87 [since revised to 238] people just died in a building collapse.* This kind of consideration leads Erik Loomis to the conclusion that we need a unified global standard for safety, by which he does not mean that Bangladeshi levels of workplace safety should be implemented in the United States.

I think that’s wrong. Bangladesh may or may not need tougher workplace safety rules, but it’s entirely appropriate for Bangladesh to have different—and, indeed, lower—workplace safety standards than the United States.

If you don’t feel like guessing, here’s an example:

Being a talentless hack who makes money by shamelessly propagating the highly remunerative Washington neoliberal consensus is easy: anyone can do that, and regularly they take that *fistpump* to the bank. But inuring yourself to the horrific conditions in which many people live while justifying those conditions with an incoherent mishmash of social darwinism, willful ignorance of how colonialism led to the abject poverty of “third world” countries and an arrogant tone that would make Dawkins proud, well, that’s just a masterwork of callousness.

But tell us how you really feel!

More seriously, I also did not like Yglesias’s post — but not for the reasons I’m seeing cited by most of his critics; he’s racist, he hates poor people, he thinks it’s OK for people to die so his clothes can be cheaper, etc. All of that is far more a response to the social signalling inherent in Yglesias’s response, his lack of performative empathy, than it is to what he actually wrote. What he actually wrote is in fact rather banal.

Yglesias basically makes the usual argument about development, industrialization, and the tradeoffs necessary between equality, safety, and wealth. To cut to the heart of it, albeit somewhat crudely, you could repurpose the argument like so: Awful things happened to workers in America during the Industrial Revolution, but considering the skyrocketing wealth and standard of living that happened, too, it was overall for the best. That may be callous, flippant, and rationalist to a fault — but it’s not racist and it’s not a precursor to drinking a goblet of orphans’ blood.

While fending off assaults on Twitter, though, Yglesias made an argument that, to my eyes, undermines his whole position. His interlocutor, after commending Yglesias for not wanting to be a dog rapist (don’t ask; it’s Twitter), says, “[A]wesome, we’re achieving common ground. This is how consensus is built. Next up: unsafe worker conditions are bad everywhere.” To which Yglesias responds:

Screen Shot 2013 04 25 at 12 51 08 PM

The problem with this answer — and my more-libertarian readers are going to be amused to hear me, a liberal, say this — is that Yglesias assumes the laws of Bangladesh are the product of the whole Bangladeshi people, that the people who died in that disaster were involved in their country’s decision-making process just the same as the elites. This is nonsense. It’s arguable that no democracy, anywhere, is fair or true enough to accurately say it represents the will of its people, writ large. What’s less tenable is to claim that a developing nation — one in which institutions are dysfunctional enough to allow such a disaster to occur — is a land where the common people are autonomous and free.

Put simply, it’s really, really difficult for me to envision any scenario in which the people who died in that building’s collapse can accurately be said to have made their decision to work there on their own, without the presence of individual and systemic coercion. And as long as that coercion is in-place, it’s obtuse to talk of those dead in Bangladesh as anything other than victims of an immoral status quo.

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