This will be a harsh diary, and I expect much criticism in response, but it must be said.
The current failure by many organizations that are supposedly progressive on health care to promote national health insurance is a strategic disaster.
Among these organizations, one that is particularly important to me stands out because it claims to be a "Daily weblog with political analysis on US current events from a liberal perspective." This organization is of course Daily Kos. However, given the polling data on health reform and statistics on Daily Kos stories, it is very clear that at least compared with the public, Daily Kos is not liberal on health care reform. The only question is then: is Daily Kos redefining "liberal" to mean something that ignores public opinion (elitism), or is it just cynically and deliberately pushing a false liberalism (fraud)?
I intentionally leave out a third possibility, that the editors are simply ignorant of opinion polls on national health insurance, because that is very difficult to believe.
For a look at some other organizations that have adopted an elitist stance on health reform, see my last post Focus on the Public Option Weakens Progressive Organizations, Hurts Prospects for Change.
That Daily Kos is one of the more left wing of the major internet blogs should only make us pause at how distorted the whole health care debate really is. It's true that it has done well organizing against Republicans and Blue Dogs on health reform, and there is a lot to praise there. Certainly the views Daily Kos promotes are better than these others. It's clear that this blog has helped move debate forward within a certain allowable spectrum of opinion.
But that does not excuse the fact that the views expressed here are not "liberal" compared with public opinion by any stretch of the imagination. At best they might be moderate or centrist, depending upon how we measure opinion. More likely is that they're center right. This again may sound unbelievable, but it follows straightforwardly from the link in the introduction.
The problem is that this blog, intentionally or not, is cheating many of its members: it benefits greatly from claiming to be "liberal," which I think people naturally assume has something to do with public opinion. Its fashionable place as a huge liberal blog clearly helps draw people in (I was no exception). But at least on health care, either this claim or people's natural assumption about it is just false. That in turn hurts the growth of authentic leftism as people satisfy themselves believing they're leftist when they're actually not. If more people realized that this blog was not leftist on health care then there would be more push to create a blog that actually was.
Why do I still blog here on health care? Because it seems to be the best large blog that is open to amateurs around (correct me if I am wrong). To my knowledge this blog is the most leftist of similar blogs even though it is probably center right compared with public opinion. Fire Dog Lake for example has at least a somewhat better record, and ZNet is pure left, but anybody can't just sign up to blog there. Like our choices of legislative proposals in Congress, we have to choose from what we've got.
Yet being the best of a bad bunch still doesn't excuse being bad. There are only two good choices for the future: either an amateur blog should be set up that at least is center left on health care, or somehow the editors here need to be convinced to make single payer Medicare-for-All national health insurance a priority. That of course would necessitate more criticism of Democrats as well as Republicans for rejecting it.
I am not in a position to make a new blog, so I have tried, somewhat pathetically, to convince. Alone I will certainly fail, but if others will let the editors know they should make this a priority then there's a chance we might succeed.
Here is a message I am going to e-mail to Markos Moulitsas through the feedback system on this site.
Dear Markos Moulitsas,
Thank you for setting up Daily Kos. As what is probably the most left wing of the major blogs open to amateurs like me, it is quite useful.
However, I hope that the editors here will mention national health insurance more. Polls done this year put support for Medicare-for-All at somewhere between a plurality and a majority as high as 59%. Given that, current statistics on word use in stories probably mean Daily Kos is center right compared with public opinion. Since this does claim to be a liberal blog, there would seem to be a conflict between claim and reality on health care.
Unfortunately right now many progressive organizations have chosen to ignore national health insurance exclusively in favor of short term goals like the public option. In my opinion, this has really dismal consequences for building a movement for health reform. So I hope that you will mention this concept more and encourage your editors to do so also.
I am going to e-mail similar messages to mcjoan, BarbinMD, and Jed since they seem to cover health care issues. I am not going to write to DemFromCT since I already talked with him in the comments of the post linked to in the introduction.
If you think what I have said here has any merit, PLEASE send the editors a message about it. It only takes a few minutes.