Baucus cuts $600 billion in subsidies from health care bill

[Pablo Sanchez]

Is it fair to blame this on politicians, as opposed to the media and/or the American public itself? Ever since the 1980s, I've seen the same problem in the media and in any discussion with typical Americans themselves. It's like a splash of cold water to the face for them when you come at them with any kind of genuine leftist ideas; you can tell they've never heard a real human being espouse them before, as opposed to a preposterous media stereotype.

Trying to actually assign blame is a futile effort because you can take it all the way back to the elite consensus against socialism that emerged in the late 19th century--newspapers, both political parties, industrialists, et al. working hand-in-hand against anything that was actually leftist. I don't blame the Democratic politicians for creating this mess because the current incarnation of it is mostly due to the enthusiasm with which American voters bought into Ronald Reagan and the era of yuppie greed in the 1980s, and the election of 1994 where they powerfully supported a reactionary GOP movement. The Democratic Party reacted, sensibly perhaps, by telling their progressive wing to shush while they retook the center. This might have been a useful short-term strategy but in practice it's become party orthodoxy. So I do blame them for continuing to accede to that state of affairs rather than trying to refocus the debate. Actually espousing real progressivism might be politically damaging in the short term, but in the long term it would do the country a lot of good.