This is going to be a quick diary.
Simply put, we lost public option because the other side got more people more passionate that we did. They outdid us in numbers and passion on the ground.
The other side's opposition is to public option in particular, but mainly it is opposition to "big government." That is the key.
In the past year as the economic crisis has broken out, I have started to pay more attention to economics. In doing so, I have noticed that there are a lot more conservatives out there interested in economics than progressives.
Yeah we have a lot of folks on our side, like Brad DeLong, Joe Stiglitz, Paul Krugman, Robert Reich, but there are far more on the other side. Just look at the Mises Institute website- they have a whole site that has been up for years dedicated solely to Austrian economics. There is no equivalent anywhere on the Internet for progressive or Keynesian economics. Even Krugman writes about politics more than half the time and when he does write about economics, his posts tend to be pithily short and not well explained.
When you look at the polls, the bestseller lists, and the comments section of websites, financial analysts that write popularly, historians that write popularly about money, the message is clear. The public is turning against big government, big spending, and because the opponents have the language to articulate their views.
In a crisis that is the greatest crisis to capitalism in decades, where the public feels instinctively that it was the bankers that went wild, the conservative voices have been more radical, more insistent, more passionate, and more numerous, and this is gaining them traction.
This is because they have been building up an infrastructure and messaging factory for decades, starting with the likes of Milton Friedman, F.A. Hayek, and the popularizers of Joseph Schumpeter and Ayn Rand. They have built around a very simple ideology. No matter what the facts are, no matter how often they are proved wrong, no matter how spectacularly, they will come up with an explanation that fits their view.
What does this have to do with public option? It has everything to do with public option. All of these debates-- at least on the conservative side-- originate from ideology. You guys might be motivated to fight for public option out of care for people getting the best program for the least cost, or because you otherwise analyzed the issue and think it's good policy. They are against public option solely because it is government and to them, government is bad.
Their method is more effective. To gain a strategic advantage in these fights in the future, it would take changes that would take a long time to filter through.
Progressives would have to build up an ideology by finding the right academics (they are out there) and popularizing them, creating an intellectual foundation for government intervention.
They would have to nurture psychological and framing changes towards the way people view government, towards a more populist approach where government is seen as the instrument of the community, of the people, as being on your side. This is what people like FDR did and how he got people to accept his programs to create a new Middle Class. This is why people's view of government improves during wars, and why its advantages tend to come out during wars-- ideology is suspended then.
It is all about ideology. When you have an ideology, it is like a little ghost whispering in your ear. No matter what the issue is, you don't have to do any work at all. The little ghost is there to tell you the answer. The exact same 'talking points' work for ANY issue.
If you work hard enough, are consistent enough, are ideological enough, you will change the people's view of government. Once that is done, the strategic landscape will even up.
Until then, the other side has the numbers (40 percent conservative vs. 20 percent liberal nationally) and the passion (61 percent of conservative Republicans have heard 'a lot' about the health care debate, compared to 45-49 percent of everyone else, probably b/c they have talk radio and Fox).
It is all about ideology.