Previously:
Gail: The fact that self-proclaimed liberals have been responding to rightwing
bullshit claims with a laughably inept parade of wonky details doesn't mean that the best approach is to say, well, they're bullshit, but since we can't argue effectively against their assumptions, just remember that we're really smarter and nicer, too.
Somebody: People on the left often make this argument: that people otherwise drawn to reactionary ideas over what you call "wonky" liberal ones, would actually subscribe to radical left-wing notions if they were properly presented to them. How much of this is an article of faith?
I have no doubt it's *sometimes* true: a recent example is the health care bill, where more Americans supported the major provisions within it (some of which were modestly progressive, anyway), than the bill as a whole.
But, it's also often been the case that progressive or socialist policies have been presented in a conservative light to sell them to the people. This is the conservative or traditional aspect that we've seen in Stalinist dictatorships and Western European welfare states alike. _______________
Gail: What I'm calling a "wonky idea" is an acceptance of a fundamentally contradictory assumption whose contradictions you propose to solve with some technical tweaks. For example, the right claims that so-called free competitive markets are desirable for everything. I believe that the left response should be that our goal is a free prosperous society which is frequently better served by all of us acting together through government. So the right's stated solution to health care is to keep government out of it. And what did Obama care respond? Wonky -- yes, a free competitive market is the desired American way, so we'll require that the states set up these exchanges and we'll draft some minimum requirements for companies to sell insurance policies, and then each state will draft the requirements it wants the insurance companies to meet on the exchanges, and then if your employer doesn't offer insurance, you can go to these exchanges and you'll be
able to compare policies, and if the cost is greater than X% of your income, the government will subsidize you with a tax credit . . . .and so on for two thousand pages. Now that's what I call wonky ideas, and the liberals ought to quit it.
Meanwhile, the hardly radical idea of Medicare for All was consistently favored by the majority of Americans, when offered as a choice in polls and explained.
FDR envisioned a social agenda way, way, way left of anything liberals are envisioning today, and he was next to God in the majority of Democratic households for fifty years. Now we do live in a propaganda state, and actually getting out a liberal agenda, a liberal argument, seems harder than it used to be, but kowtowing to markets, punitive treatment of the poor, reduced labor costs, deference to fundamentalist religion has not been good for liberals.