Stand Up Fight Back Old-Timers!

With the sequester looming, some Democrats have joined conservatives in calling for changes to Medicare, an alarming political strategy for those who care about that program, which could lead down the slippery slope to privatization.  Yuval Levin from the right-wing (and beautifully inane sounding) Ethics and Public Policy Center presented the typical conservative position in the New York Times Tuesday when he argued that raising Medicare’s eligibility age to 70 and means-testing benefits for wealthy Americans is a wonderfully reasonable “compromise” position that will “[target] benefits to those who most need them.”   Funny how that targeting always involves cutting benefits rather than increasing them.

Amazingly, some leading Democrats have offered similar opinions.  In his State of the Union address, President Obama suggested the nation “ask more from the wealthiest seniors,” echoing his earlier statements of support for means-testing Medicare benefits.   Obama also tentatively agreed to an increase in the Medicare retirement age for wealthier seniors during “grand bargain” negotiations in 2011.  Senators Max Baucus, Richard Durbin and James Clyburn have also signaled they’d be open to means-testing Medicare as part of a broader deficit reduction deal.

Strategies of the National Rifle Association (NRA) and National Organization for Women (NOW) prove that allowing seemingly incremental and innocuous concessions like these would be a major strategic setback for supporters of universal social programs.  The NRA is fucking nuts.  The organization has effectively silenced any federal research on the effects of guns on mortality by using their political influence to reduce Center for Disease Control firearms safety research by 96 percent since the mid-1990s.   It vigorously opposed Clinton’s assault weapons ban, opposes the current effort to ban a few types of assault weapons, and even opposes the modest background checks recently proposed by the president.   In short, the NRA refuses to support any new gun regulations, even if they make sense on the surface and would save lives.

The National Organization for Women is also unrelenting in pushing their agenda.  NOW strongly opposes mandatory ultrasounds, fights against any restrictions to Planned Parenthood funding, strongly went after proponents of a proposed DC abortion ban for women after the 20th week of pregnancy, has weighed in against parental notification laws and opposed “partial-birth” abortion restrictions.   NOW fights back extremely hard against all attempts to restrict abortion rights, using its full rhetorical and financial arsenal to fight its enemies.

The NRA and NOW recognize that, although some proponents of gun control and abortion restrictions really do want to take a small number of limited and arguably sensible policy steps, many other gun control activists and pro-lifers want to drastically restrict gun and abortion rights.  Uncontested assault weapon bans and background checks would embolden many gun control activists to push further, just like unopposed late-term abortion restrictions and parental notification laws would encourage pro-life activists to advocate for even stronger anti-abortion laws.

The NRA and NOW use full force, with no compromise, and have been largely successful.  If believers in keeping our “entitlement” programs universal and democratic hope to replicate this success, they should be deeply disturbed by the signals emanating from Democratic leadership, and should be doing everything within their means to kill any changes in the retirement age or introduction of means-testing.

The Grassroots Are Growing Right

GOP lawmakers in state capitals around the nation are in the process of instituting radical right-wing economic programs after a series of electoral victories over the past few years. Kansas has privatized Medicaid services, instituted wide-ranging cuts to social programs for the poor and is set to dramatically cut income taxes with the goal of abolishing them altogether. Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal has proposed replacing his states corporate and income taxes with a sales tax while cutting health services for the poor. And many governments in the nation’s 24 states where Republicans control both the legislative and executive branches are putting forth similar proposals. This is on top of the recent passage of right-to-work (for less pay) laws in Indiana and Michigan, and collective bargaining restrictions in Wisconsin.

The boldness and successful implementation of these hard-right policies highlights the relative strength of conservative ideology and the tea-party led conservative grassroots movement. Conservative political thinkers have been banging the same anti-tax, pro-privatization, anti-public services drum for forty years now, and their message is clear. Does it make sense that giving rich people more money to squirrel away in their Scrooge McDuck gold vaults and depriving bright poor youngsters of health and education funds will encourage economic growth? No! Does it make sense that cutting hundreds of thousands of public jobs in the middle of the worst recession in 70 years will create more jobs? No! Does it make any sense that allowing workers to free-ride off union contracts w/o paying dues, thereby undermining worker power and eventually the very viability of the collective bargaining unit itself, will somehow improve workers’ lives? Fuck no! But that doesn’t stop conservative ideologues from saying that all of this (and much more!) makes perfect sense, and they’ve said it consistently and stridently enough for decades now that they’ve built up credibility. Progressive thought, with the exception of a handful of social issues like abortion rights, is completely devoid of a similar common base of beliefs, held over a long period of time, that people can rally behind.

Additionally, the right has a tea-party movement that actually believes in all the crazy shit these conservative ideologues say and has worked hard to propagate and fight for these beliefs. Mainstream media pundits love to deride the tea-party candidates and caucus, but all you have to do is recognize how dominant talk of the debt/fiscal crisis has been in Washington to realize that they’ve been largely successful. The right-wing House has not folded time and again like the progressive caucus, and they’ve pushed the center of debate further and further to the right (with Dems now talking about Social Security and Medicare cuts). At the state level, Republican-dominated legislatures are actually implementing deeply conservative policies after being put into office by voters.

In times of crisis, people look for answers. Until progressives are willing to put forward large, visionary proposals, and actually stick by them, right-wing forces will continue to steamroll workers and the middle-class across large swaths of America.