You Can't Scold People Out Of Fighting Fascism
Once again, it's the tyranny, stupid.
This is a coda to yesterday’s article about how Democratic leaders found themselves so unprepared for Donald Trump’s predictable abuses. How their conception of “issue salience”—their desire to reduce the salience of Trump’s best issues—deterred them from preparing for unavoidable fights on his turf. Why their only consistent move now—the one designed to increase the salience of their best issue—is to describe the deployment of the military against American citizens as a “distraction” from GOP efforts to kick 10 million people off of Medicaid.
In the spirit of generosity and mutual comprehension, I want to reassess this frustrating dynamic, refract it through a moral lens, rather than the prism of political strategy.
My broad view is that Democrats consistently under-react to Trump, and don’t fight him on nearly as many fronts as they should. But at the moment it’s also true, in an almost mathematical sense, that the GOP threat to Medicaid is badly under-discussed relative to the stakes—in news and social media, on the street in protest movements, throughout the discourse, it has faded deep into the background.
To illustrate the point on Politix this week, we pulled up the New York Times home page and found we could scroll past dozens of stories before finding any mention of a major piece of legislation that promises to transform American society. It’s not that Trump’s faithless attack on Angelenos has driven reporting on the bill below the fold. It’s that the threat to Medicaid has fallen almost entirely off the national radar. Awareness is at a low ebb.
It’s easy to see why Democrats and liberals who care about the safety net would find this so alarming. We don’t have to pit immigrants and Medicaid beneficiaries against each other to note that kicking 10 million people off of health insurance would create a level of suffering similar in magnitude to a cruel deportation regime. Everyone who loses their benefits will be harmed; their mental health will deteriorate; their quality of life will fall; they’ll have a harder time recovering from illness and injury; no small number of them will die prematurely.
So of course it is urgent to make sure people are aware this is happening, the torpedo is live and heat-seeking. I fully appreciate why Democrats are at pains to “pivot to health care” in this instance, even if they’re doing so in a ham-handed and dismissive way. At the same time, in all their pleading, they’re missing something essential about human nature—about why some issues become salient and others do not. If they understood it better, it might help them execute a needed reset of their overall approach to opposition politics.
TYRS OF A CLOWN
I realize Trump and the GOP would never go about things this way, but bear with me: Imagine their approach to cutting Medicaid and deporting immigrants was essentially inverted.