I’m attracted to any article with that kind of title because — probably like you if you are reading this — I am so distressed that so many Americans who would benefit from universal health care are against it. This article, by political prof John Kenneth White in this Sunday’s SF Chronicle, seemed plausible to my liberal self at first sight.

The title online is “Whose America?” but in print it was “What the debate is really about: changing America,” and that referred to an America that is already rapidly changing, like it or not. His take is that white middle class people felt in the 1970s that America was theirs, but — this was the part that was interesting to me — that the New Deal had been theirs too. Social Security and Medicare were benefiting them. They were not against government programs that helped them and theirs.

But any major extension of those programs would benefit all the people who are “not us” and those people now appear to be taking over America: other races, yes, but also other cultures (especially Hispanic) and of course all those supposedly infected by feckless liberal amorality who have children out of wedlock and get high and so are poor and needy, whatever their color or ethnicity. The nonwhite or undeserving poor will benefit. So large numbers of white people, secure in their Social Security and Medicare, have turned against government programs in the last forty years.

Of course, many middle class people in the 1930s and 1960s thought something similar about those the New Deal and then Medicare were designed to help. They thought many of them — the parents, grandparents or great-grandparents of today’s white middle class — were undeserving. But memories are short.

So what’s not satisfying about this analysis? It blames at least half the population who don’t seem to be capable of seeing “the other” as part of “us.” These people must be narrow minded and ungenerous. White doesn’t exactly say that. He doesn’t talk about the ways that people do come to feel solidarity with those who they imagine are not like themselves. He seems to assume that they don’t, and that it’s a natural fact that interest and identity politics as we know them will determine outcomes.

But does he really believe that? I doubt it. It’s one of the more striking facts of history that people who were once opposed, come together in solidarity, typically when both are threatened by a common enemy. Almost every white American today has some non-British ancestor who was once “not us” to the American middle class mainstream. The Irish, Italians, Jews and so on were despised by most (not all) Anglo-Scots. Those former enemies make up today’s “white” middle class population: admittedly in many cases because they banded together in opposition to the supposedly “nonwhite” and/or “undeserving.”

But that history means that all of us in America today presumably could come together if we have a greater enemy that threatens us all. And that enemy is surely here in the form of rising healthcare costs, rising obesity and diabetes rates, America’s falling behind all other industrialized nations in health outcomes while having the highest health costs, which affects the cost of our manufactures … all these things that we know. And that’s not even whispering about our bigger enemies still, which are world poverty (and the humiliation and hopelessness that drive terrorism that are not necessary results of inequality but are deeply connected to it) and climate change, which the world economy may not be able to survive. We simply have to come together to tackle these huge enemies as one people: and that surely means as a people who look after each other as family in order to draw on all our talents and energy. If the U.S. military provides its people and veterans with health care so they can do their job, we should be providing the entire U.S. population with health care so they can do their job, which is contributing U.S. wealth and knowhow to solving these civilization-threatening problems.

But that’s not what liberal politics is about, is it? Liberal politics is about serving the interests of a sufficient number of interest groups to put together electoral majorities.

So is our failure to rise to a “we-are-all-in-this-together” challenge a result of lack of vision and leadership by the conservative white middle clas, or by liberals and the left who claim to know better? Do we liberals prefer to read op-eds about how it’s those other people’s fault, than to work out how to connect to those “narrow-minded” people with a visionary call? That call would make us feel uncomfortable as well, it would demand a great deal of generous and strategic thinking on our part. We would have to develop not just the big visionary ideas, which can seem safely idealistic and worthy, but also the nitty-gritty skills of talking with and finding ways to make common cause with people whose political assumptions oppose ours.

In doing that, we might lose our own sense of superior identity! You can’t have real, respectful dialogue with the other without your own ideas changing, if only about how good or bad the other is. Maybe we liberals and conservatives actually are more alike already than we think: both us clinging to ideas of our own moral superiority that just don’t help us to tackle the challenges of our time together.

If that’s so, then the left/liberal cutting edge is in developing

  1. visionary ideas that require solidarity between all of us,
  2. the skills to do it one-on-one, and
  3. ways to turn the connections and friendships that we create at the face-to-face level into action groups and movements to draw in more and more people.

That’s the dream of the Network of Spiritual Progressives, though it has been better so far at 1) than at 2) and 3). So the real challenge to the NSP in my humble opinion, lies in pushing forward on 2) and 3). If we at NSP central are incapable of doing that very well, as it so far appears we are, then it is entirely up to the local chapters and leaders to do it. Lots of people are doing this kind of work, some of them connected to the NSP but most not, but it does need the energy of a big vision to help these coalesce in a movement for major systemic change. The universal health care effort is so precarious because of the insufficiency so far of grassroots work at the base community level that is connected by these kinds of shared major goals. We are struggling towards it. There are many heroes. Much further to go.


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