OpenLeft: Missing the opportunity in the health care crisis--NO MORE!

[marmar]

Missing the opportunity in the health care crisis--NO MORE!
by: Paul Rosenberg

Sun Dec 20, 2009 at 12:30


In my earlier diary "The big stupid of health care reform", I argued first and foremost that our most basic problem in the health care fight derived from the overall deficiencies of fragmentary, short-term, ad hoc leftwing organizing vs. hegemonic, long-term, strategically pre-planned rightwing organizing. Among other things, I wrote:

Unlike us, the right builds long-term institutional infrastructure. With that infrastructure in place, it's a relatively easy task to pull together a coalition to do whatever it is you want to do. You are not assured of success, of course. But you don't have to reinvent the wheel every time you need to go into battle. And as a result you can afford to go all out, and risk losing everything, because the cost of doing it all over again is not prohibitive. In fact, if you do it right, you can actually gain more from the repeat effort than it costs you.

Compared to that, our organizing methodology is doomed to failure.

Indeed, if ever there was an issue custom-made for shifting the country into a predominantly progressive political direction, it is the issue of health care for all. Indeed, this is precisely why the Republicans rallied to defeat health care reform under Clinton-even though that effort was itself a mixed-up half-measure. If the left realized the need for hegemonic struggle, and then looked around for one specific issue to use as a vehicle to wage such struggle, we would be very hard pressed to come up with something better than universal health care. And yet, instead of seeing this struggle as something that benefits us-as an opportunity to bring more and more people around to seeing things from a progressive perspective-we see it as something that puts us into peril, in panic mode, frightened into giving everything away.

While we haven't organized around this for hegemonic struggle in the past, that doesn't mean there aren't things we can start doing right now to change things-both short term strategies and tactics to make significant gains and reset the terms of terms of struggle, and a long-term shift in thinking based on preserving the state-level single-payer option, so that we can use state-level fights for hegemonic struggle in the future. ...........(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.openleft.com/diary/16600/missing-the-opportunity-in-the-health-care-crisisno-more