If you read a range of left wing blogs you know that one of the knocks against Bernie Sanders is that, given the present makeup of Congress, there’s no way that he could get his proposals through even if he wins. It follows, therefore, as the night the day, that he shouldn’t be advocating for stuff like single payer.
This has been a Democratic mantra since time out of mind: don’t demand what you can’t deliver right now. It ignores the fact that if you don’t demand what you actually want, you will, almost as a matter of definition, never get it. Not now, and not some far off day in the future.
That’s not the way Republicans do things. They play the long game. They make demands that start off derided as loony and impossible to achieve. They repeat themselves over and over until whatever lie they are telling becomes conventional wisdom. After a number of years, lo and behold, they get what they want, be it the destruction of unions, a constitutional right to carry guns, or, most importantly, a transfer of wealth from the bottom 99.99% to the top .01%.
It’s probably true that we can’t get single payer, or free college tuition, from the Republican Congress we presently have. It is equally true that we will never get single payer, or free college tuition, if we never demand them. Hillary’s incremental changes are just another way of preserving the status quo.
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