If you haven't already read Libby Watson's eulogy for M4A, I recommend against it. I'm not sure if the author intended it to be motivating polemic or an expression of collective grief or simply a rant; what I took from it was an unsettling impression of millennial entitlement that has haunted me for a full day, and consequently, here I am. Blogging.
I tried to express my discontent to my wife and then again to Twitter in very psychoanalytic forms. I am frustrated with these expressions of despair, I said, because I experienced profound personal and economic hardship in the mid-00s, including medical debt incurred from pre-ACA pre-existing conditions; I understand the stakes, and I think it's awfully big-headed of the Bernie leftists to conclude that the fight is unwinnable simply because they mistakenly thought it would be easy in 2015. It is a kind of self-indulgence, I said, to throw in the towel after not even a decade of "struggle" as paid campaigners and Substack doyennes. It is tacky, I said, and also, I don't think she even knows who Joe Lieberman is.
All true, especially that last point, but all only glancing at the real problem, with moral cowardice at least as deep as Watson's own. In the end, I do think giving in to despair is often a form of entitlement, a longform hissy fit made possible by angel investors' ill-gotten capital. But if I'm being honest, I don't think Libby Watson's hissy fit will have any effect on healthcare justice, for good or ill. What it represents, and exacerbates, is a mindless form of rhetorical emptiness that is everywhere these days, fueled by people who are friends with one another and wrote at the same publications, and who are, unfortunately, America's next vanguard for whatever we imagine the "left" to be. In short, I glommed on to this blog because it is broadly representative of the moneyed intransigence of America's only answer to far-right fascism. And that is fucking terrifying.
The essay's despair centers around an assumption that is not examined much at all: that had Bernie won in 2016, we would have Medicare for All. That the United States, the world's most powerful empire, can pay for healthcare for its 330 million inhabitants; thus, forcing it to do so is simply a matter of electing the right president. Libby Watson and her ilk, from the tepid Atlantic tradcaths to the DSA "anarcho-communist caucus" podcasters, are looking centuries of brutal racial capitalism in the eye and saying, hey, this isn't a fifty-foot wall. This is just a fence. It should be easy to hop. And then, when the wall proves to be a wall, they collapse in disbelief and go back to blogging, with a tone they understand to be appropriately funeral.
It's tempting to ascribe this to socioeconomic factors. The parts of the Bernie left that get paid for pods and blogs are mostly white and from stable upper-middle-class families. The violence they have experienced, however sordid, is firmly in their pasts. They have extensive experience slumming with the working class because they took jobs organizing for the AFL-CIO, and their parents direct deposited enough money each month that 'slumming' remained an appropriate descriptor. In their thirties, their patchwork jobs turned into middle class, salaried positions that they told themselves didn't make them PMC because, like, they work for The Intercept, man. And they have a union.
All of this is true, but I don't think it really explains the vacuous nature of their cultural criticism. You can be a nepotism baby who works for a new media publication without closing your eyes to the challenges of our times. Rather, I think the issue is a little to the left of 'more money than sense'. Pardon my pun.
To me, the relevant part of this kind of writing is the idea of possibility. It is very popular, two years into the pandemic, to talk about the possibility of eliminating COVID. It's possible, people claim, and point to China and New Zealand, Japan and Taiwan. We don't have to live like this. We could have saved so many people.
The heartbreaking part is that in some ways, this is true. We know what causes COVID. We know how to treat it and how to prevent it. We have the technological capability and production capacity to provide vaccines to everyone in the world, to improve ventilation in every building on the planet. If the entire world, all eight billion of us, banded together to execute this strategy, we could do it, and it wouldn't even take that long. All it would take is every single major world power agreeing on a set of policies with unprecedented transparency and cooperation.
All it would take to get Medicare For All is for three chambers of government representing millions of people, many of whom hate one another, to go against the interests of the moneyed class who elected them and destroy a multi-billion-dollar industry while enacting a massive transfer of wealth.
Sure! Easy!
To be honest I am baffled about why leftists want to believe this. They seem profoundly resistant to acknowledging that the horrible problems they claim to care about are, in fact, horrible, deeply embedded in the fabric of society, and hard to solve. If fully automated luxury gay communism was easy, surely we'd be there already? But if you try to point out that scientifically possible and socially feasible are the same thing, they call you a centrist. There is very little room in the modern left's worldview for, say, communists who happen to believe their fascist enemies are powerful and intransigent.
This worldview is deeply demotivating, as the blog makes clear. It causes an endless state of childlike cognitive dissonance. The average voter in West Virginia doesn't think black people or loose women are citizens, but if Bernie had campaigned in WV then Manchin would've gone for M4A: HUH???? You can only believe this if you are extremely resistant to evaluating politics in a material framework, which is ironic considering a lot of these commentators claim to be Marxists.
On a practical level, in other words, the Bernie left's worldview sucks shit, but I also think it is very bad for art, for public intellectualism, and for the spirit. To be constantly dodging the conundrum of "sometimes bad things happen to good people", or "sometimes you will die before seeing the better world you fight for" is to deny reality; the only writing you can produce with such a mindset will ring hollow. These are literary themes. Spiritual and religious themes. They are, quite literally, the foundational problems of multiple world religions. Arguably, being given the intelligence to cure COVID and the spiritual sickness to refuse to do so, the grace to grieve for your fellow human beings and the awareness of how wrong their deaths are, is what makes us human. I don't want to get all Christian up in this, my first blog. But what exactly are we doing, online and with each other, if we deny the contradictions that define humanity?
I can tell you what we're not doing: we are not organizing or building power. We are not progressing meaningfully to a better tomorrow. We are doing worse than ignoring the tools we need to dismantle capital; we're destroying them, denying them, because we find their truths inconvenient.
Healthcare in the United States is an inhuman, horrifying, bureaucratic nightmare. It's also deeply embedded in every corner of society, and incomprehensibly powerful interests are against improving it. That is not an argument against M4A. The problem is very, very bad; the solution is very, very hard. The work is worth doing. But some people need to understand what the work is, ideally before incessantly posting about it.
