This is not how I have understood the criticisms being thrown around Lemmy lately, but I appreciate the perspective. Even so, I’m not sure I can agree that the best solution to dealing with the right is to fight the centrists first, but I can at least appreciate your point in the specific context of the current two-party system.
Centrists are literally the people that often have the majority of backing from the very people and institutions that allow these problems to fester and grow. Their solutions are often the most unworkable in the real world and their outcomes are often right leaning simply because of how politics works in capitalist societies. Centrists have power in our political system not because of brokering any good compromise, it’s because Centrists are often the best fundraisers because they can appeal to a wide array of rich donors.
It’s a silly take if you think Centrists can be allies to any semblance of Left. The Kamala Harris campaign is literal proof of it. Raise $1.1B, spend $1.120B on literal Centrist trash positions and political strategy like paying celebrities and sending Richie Torres to Michigan, while telling everyone how you’re the smartest people in the room.
The most celebrated Centrist policy of the 20th century is the ACA (note all the other ones that were celebrated before it are not so much celebrated now because of what they actually did see NAFTA, TANF, etc). The only “left” positions in the ACA is 100% coverage of preventative medicine, mandatory contraception coverage, and making preexisting conditions an illegal qualification. In reality the real mark of the ACA is that instead of going bankrupt for hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars in medical debt, Americans are going broke for tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of dollars in medical debt. It’s literally a debt regulation that keeps private healthcare a viable and profitable system because the game of musical chairs that is our healthcare debt system was running out of chairs. 10% of Americans owe medical debt, thanks to the ACA it’s thousands to hundreds of thousands, if it wasn’t for the ACA it would be 10x larger.
Who had the most benefit from that policy? It certainly wasn’t people, who still struggle to pay for healthcare, still carry medical debt, and still are going bankrupt. It was the corporations who could continue this extractive grift because the government essentially brokered a deal between the entire market to reset the scale of the economy and no one corporation felt like it was losing out compared to the others.
You can even look at the majority of legal opposition to the ACA isn’t based in it’s left positions. For contraception you have Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Stores, Inc. and Little Sisters of the Poor Saints Peter and Paul Home v. Pennsylvania. That’s it for opposition to the left positions, the rest is about how the market is regulated under ACA:
National Federation of Independent Business v. Sebelius and other lawsuits were about the individual mandate, which was effectively ruled a tax.
King v. Burwell was about using federal subsidies in states without exchanges
House v. Price was about cost sharing and transfer payments between insurers
United States House of Representatives v. Azar was about cost sharing reducation payments and how they were allocated in the budget
California v. Texas was again about the individual mandate as a tax
Maine Community Health Options v. United States was about risk corridor payments and appropriation.
Where is the opposition to the left here? It’s not really there, because there’s not a lot of “left” policy. This is centrist infighting about who has to hold the bag (and how much bag they have to hold) for this fucked up system that extracts money from people’s health.
This is not how I have understood the criticisms being thrown around Lemmy lately, but I appreciate the perspective. Even so, I’m not sure I can agree that the best solution to dealing with the right is to fight the centrists first, but I can at least appreciate your point in the specific context of the current two-party system.
We aren’t able to use electoralism to fight the right as long as the political platform and messaging of the democratic party is 95% the same as the republican’s.
Centrists are literally the people that often have the majority of backing from the very people and institutions that allow these problems to fester and grow. Their solutions are often the most unworkable in the real world and their outcomes are often right leaning simply because of how politics works in capitalist societies. Centrists have power in our political system not because of brokering any good compromise, it’s because Centrists are often the best fundraisers because they can appeal to a wide array of rich donors.
It’s a silly take if you think Centrists can be allies to any semblance of Left. The Kamala Harris campaign is literal proof of it. Raise $1.1B, spend $1.120B on literal Centrist trash positions and political strategy like paying celebrities and sending Richie Torres to Michigan, while telling everyone how you’re the smartest people in the room.
The most celebrated Centrist policy of the 20th century is the ACA (note all the other ones that were celebrated before it are not so much celebrated now because of what they actually did see NAFTA, TANF, etc). The only “left” positions in the ACA is 100% coverage of preventative medicine, mandatory contraception coverage, and making preexisting conditions an illegal qualification. In reality the real mark of the ACA is that instead of going bankrupt for hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars in medical debt, Americans are going broke for tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of dollars in medical debt. It’s literally a debt regulation that keeps private healthcare a viable and profitable system because the game of musical chairs that is our healthcare debt system was running out of chairs. 10% of Americans owe medical debt, thanks to the ACA it’s thousands to hundreds of thousands, if it wasn’t for the ACA it would be 10x larger.
Who had the most benefit from that policy? It certainly wasn’t people, who still struggle to pay for healthcare, still carry medical debt, and still are going bankrupt. It was the corporations who could continue this extractive grift because the government essentially brokered a deal between the entire market to reset the scale of the economy and no one corporation felt like it was losing out compared to the others.
You can even look at the majority of legal opposition to the ACA isn’t based in it’s left positions. For contraception you have Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Stores, Inc. and Little Sisters of the Poor Saints Peter and Paul Home v. Pennsylvania. That’s it for opposition to the left positions, the rest is about how the market is regulated under ACA:
Where is the opposition to the left here? It’s not really there, because there’s not a lot of “left” policy. This is centrist infighting about who has to hold the bag (and how much bag they have to hold) for this fucked up system that extracts money from people’s health.
That’s what centrism is, market brokerage.