“Health care’s popularity drops any time Congress discusses it.”
Megan McArdle sums up the dilemma progressives face in trying to force through health care reform using single-party dominance. Quite simply, the “power to the people” pose of post-modern progressivism is increasingly exposed as a sham, and the progressive agenda revealed as fundamentally elitist — they know better than you what is good for you. Thus, the more you oppose it, the more strident many progressives become in trying to force the issue through.
The belief that the public is simply too stupid or evil to understand its own best interests is a serious barrier to progressive success. It causes them to actively reject the idea or compromise out of the belief that compromise constitutes a betrayal of a higher principle. And the belief that disagreement is can only be explained as either ignorance or actual maliciousness facilitates the move towards demonization — compromise is betrayal, dissent is heresy, and no quarter is given.
It is, however, precisely that arrogance that exacerbates the political problems progressives face in trying to force through a health care reform program. Because they have proactively rejected the mere suggestion of compromise and have moved further to characterize those who disagree as not only in error, but actually bad people, it becomes hard to spin that message. The ranks of those who actually disagree are inevitably swelled when those who merely have questions or doubts encounter the whirlwind of hatred that so many progressive activists put out. That is the reason that every time the debate over health care happens, it tends to result in a steady increase in opposition.
It is not, as many conservatives say, that America is by nature an inherently “center-right” country at all. Rather, the seemingly inevitable increase in opposition to health care reform is an inevitable result of the bad communicative choices that progressives have made. They have, it far too many cases, destroyed their own cause.
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