Comedian Jimmy Dore is leading an effort to pressure left-wing Democrats in the House to withdraw their support for Speaker Nancy Pelosi unless the party leadership brings H.R. 1384, which would create a U.S. single-payer health care program (commonly known as Medicare for All), to a vote on the House floor. Dore’s strategy is clearly inspired by the right-wing Republican Freedom Caucus in the House, which in 2015 famously forced then Speaker John Boehner to resign for what they perceived as insufficient efforts to repeal Obamacare.Theoretically, Dore’s plan has merit; after all, the Freedom Caucus remains a dominant faction within the GOP, and two of its former chairs, Mick Mulvaney and Mark Meadows, served as White House chief of staff in the Trump administration. Why shouldn’t progressive Democrats use their own leverage within their party to similarly influence the Democratic Party to adopt more progressive policies, just as the Freedom Caucus pushed the GOP further right?
The problem is that, even if Pelosi were to concede and both the House and Senate were to pass H.R. 1384 (and that is assuming the Democrats win both Senate races in Georgia) President-elect Joe Biden has previously indicated he would veto the Medicare for All bill over its price tag. During Biden’s campaign to secure the Democratic nomination, his spokesperson Andrew Bates said “the chance of Medicare for All passing through both chambers any time soon is close to zero.” Of course, even if Biden were to somehow change his mind and sign the bill into law, it is incredibly likely it would be ruled unconstitutional by the conservative-heavy Supreme Court. Throughout the lengthy legislative process, it is reasonable to assume that private health care companies and the powerful pharmaceutical lobby would freely use their hefty coffers to mobilize opposition to the bill, as was witnessed during the passage of Obamacare, which only survived after the Obama administration made enormous concessions.
Dore is no fool; he also knows Medicare for All is unlikely to become law due to the constellation of private interests arrayed against it. “If it loses, then we know who is on our side and who is not,” Dore has said. It should already be apparent, however, to someone who takes even a cursory look at U.S. politics that the Democratic Party does not represent the working class or socially marginalized groups. The most salient critiques of leading Democrats like Hillary Clinton and Biden himself stem from the rightward drift of the party in the 1980s and 1990s, the heyday of the neoliberal consensus, when the exacerbation of economic inequality ran parallel with the further oppression and vilification of Black people, LGBT+ people, and others. The same Democrats who oppose Medicare for All today (or, more accurately, oppose it because their wealthy donors do) are the same Democrats who stripped welfare from the needy, passed draconian legislation that created the current carceral state, supported defining marriage as between a man and a woman, and so on. That they would also oppose health care as a human right, with public health placed before profit, comes as no surprise.
People around the world are increasingly realizing how rigged the system is against them, and their resentment of elites has been manifested in the rise of populists, be they right-wing figures like Trump or Jair Bolsonaro of Brazil, or left-wing icons like Bernie Sanders or Jeremy Corbyn of the UK. The people are already sick and tired of being sick and tired. They already know who is on their side and who is not. The problem lies not with them but with those on the left who still believe they can work within a system rigged against working people to somehow re-purpose it. Far too many on the left idolize individuals like Sanders, Corbyn, or Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, thinking that a handful of social democrats will somehow achieve a “political revolution” purely through grassroots support and clever politicking. Neither our political or economic systems nor the pervasive prejudices in our culture can be reformed out of existence, anymore than capitalism itself could be repealed by passing a bill.
The correct course of action moving forward is to abandon the Democratic Party and all other institutions that were, by design, crafted to protect oligarchs and repress anyone who was not a property-owning white man. As we near the demise of those few schemes put in place to help the unemployed and financially struggling, it is obvious nobody in Congress has the will or the power to do the just thing and provide relief to those who need it most. Fortunately, we have seen amazing work by activists and organizers stepping up and demonstrating true people power, in the form of mutual aid networks. We should prepare to follow the example of revolutionary French and Russia, working not within the existing system but outside it, in a rival alternative system (“dual power,” in the famous words of Lenin). We should look to local communities, not to Congress, to achieve a bottom-up transformation of our society. In the wake of several defeats, the left must recognize that electoralism and reformism are dead ends; the only viable path toward a better world lies, like it or not, in revolution.
Bakunin Matata! 