Home / General / Claiming victories as victories is good politics, even if the victories are partial

Claiming victories as victories is good politics, even if the victories are partial

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Good Ygelsias post on the reluctance of progressives to tout the UI expansion in the CARES Act as the huge victory it in fact was:

But it doesn’t make sense to do politics this way. One reason is because the model where you sketch out an idealized policy endpoint, then wage political combat, then win, then implement your vision just isn’t how anything actually happens. Not only was Social Security’s rollout bungled from a macroeconomic point of view (they started collecting taxes years before they collected benefits), it wasn’t until 20 years after the original Social Security Act’s passage that benefits were expanded to huge swathes of the population. Then it took 20 more years to get automatic cost of living adjustments. And the program still has some weird lacunae that leave out certain categories of state and local government workers, and doesn’t really meet the needs of the very elderly in an aging society.

Medicaid has been a policy triumph, but the initial program LBJ signed into law in 1965 was tiny compared to today’s Medicaid juggernaut that was largely the result of dogged work by Rep. Henry Waxman in the 1980s, some judicious interventions by the Clinton administration, and then the Obama-era expansion which lives on as a series of state-by-state fights.

The point is that politics is a process, and that’s especially true in a country like the United States that has a lot of institutional veto points. I won’t redo the entire slow boring of hard boards schtick, but the idea that past victories were single decisive battles won at unique moments in time is an illusion. Brown v Board of Education was the culmination of a 15-year litigation strategy that started with a law school case in 1938. But even though the NAACP won in court in 1954, real desegregation didn’t happen until the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which in turn built upon the Civil Rights Act of 1960 and its predecessor, the Civil Rights Act of 1957.

It would of course be absurd to be satisfied with any of those interim outcomes, whether on health care or retirement security or civil rights, and it’s just the same with Unemployment Insurance. But successful movements claim victories as victories, highlight the ways in which their victories have helped people and debunked critics’ fears, and move on to build the case for new things. Politicians who do the spadework of getting things done should be praised and not ignored, and while journalists should of course highlight shortcomings, we should also bring perspective to bear. We had more articles written about benefit administration problems than we did about the reduction in poverty — that doesn’t make sense journalistically and it’s not politically constructive.

CARES was really good; it’s really good that a form of enhanced benefits is being extended by the new bill; and while none of this has been perfect, it provides a real template for further improvements.

Incidentally, the large quantity and quality of changes to Medicaid between its enactment in 2009 is in itself a dispositive argument against Roberts’s ad hoc “we have to do something to damage the ACA, and this is something” re-writing of federal spending powers doctrine.

At any rate, the general point here is sound. The correct response to the CARES Act is “this was great, now let’s get rid of the caps on UI payouts,” not to act as if the statute was just a one-off $1,200 check because it owns Ice Cream Nancy or something.

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