DURING THE PROTESTS OF the sixties, activists on the left used to tell each other, “The issue is never the issue; the issue is always the revolution.” “Issues” are viewed as instrumental—means of accumulating the support and power that will make it possible to fundamentally change the social order. The slogans and proposals that radicals believe are necessary to advance their agendas will not always seem radical. Alinsky put it this way: “Any revolutionary change must be preceded by a passive, affirmative, non-challenging attitude toward change among the mass of our people.”1 In other words, it is first necessary to sell the people on change itself, the “audacity of hope,” and “yes we can.” Then one proceeds by proposing moderate changes that open the door to more radical solutions. Alinsky said, “Remember: once you organize people around something as commonly agreed upon as pollution, then an organized people is on the move. From there it’s a short and natural step to political pollution, to Pentagon pollution.”2
Today, Alinsky progressives—first and foremost Obama and Clinton—are leaders of the Democratic Party, which they have transformed from a party of the liberal center into a party of the political left. Clinton’s running mate, Tim Kaine, is a former Christic Institute Marxist who supported the communist guerrillas in Central America during the Cold War. Bernie Sanders, whose constituency is a vital wing of the Democratic Party, is a lifelong supporter of communist causes, despite his campaign claim that the socialism he aspires to is Denmark’s. These standout figures are just reflections of the fact that the Democratic Party has moved so far to the left in recent decades that it now operates on the sixties’ principle that the issues it advances are mere stepping stones on the way to more radical changes.
Nowhere is this principle more clearly visible than in the design and passage of the Affordable Care Act, or Obamacare, the signature legislation of the Obama administration, and reincarnation of the socialized health care program that Hillary Clinton attempted to pass more than 20 years earlier. Before it even came to a vote, public opinion polls showed that a majority of Americans rejected the plan. But despite the controversial nature and society-wide implications of the 2,700-page bill that no legislator even claimed to have read, the Democrats used their congressional majorities to ram Obamacare into law without a single Republican vote. This was unprecedented for such comprehensive society-affecting legislation. Social Security and Medicare, its predecessors, were passed with overwhelming majorities in both political parties. Their legislative sponsors understood that if such all-encompassing legislation were to be imposed by a partisan majority, it would sow deep divisions in the nation and unsettle the social contract.
When Obamacare was proposed, it was already so radical that securing a majority of Republican votes was impossible. Nonetheless, there were perhaps a dozen Republicans in Congress who expressed a willingness to support it, among them Senators Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe. But the Democrats were unwilling to make any concessions even to moderate Republican concerns because they regarded Obamacare as epoch-making legislation, a crucial building block of the progressive future; and they were prepared to use their congressional monopoly and disregard other considerations to put the cornerstone in place.
This radical legislation was so important to Democrats that the new president spent the lion’s share of his political capital during his first year in office on the effort to pass the bill. With the Democrats solidly behind him, Obama made the Affordable Care Act his focus even though the nation was in the throes of its worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. Instead of concentrating on jobs and the economy, Obama and the Democrats spent the first 15 months of the new administration pushing a massive and costly new health care program. If Obama and the Democrats were concerned about dealing with the jobs crisis, they would not have used their monopoly power to pursue a new trillion-dollar social program opposed by more than half the nation and by every Republican in Congress. But they were not as interested in addressing the crisis, let alone uniting the country, as they were in using the new legislation as leverage to launch their society-transforming schemes.
Because Obamacare represented a radical departure, a stepping stone to socialized medicine already rejected by Americans during the Clinton administration, Democrats had to resort to deception to pass it, even with their bicameral majorities. To sell Obamacare to the American public, the president employed several blatantly false claims, which he repeated over and over, most notoriously: “If you like your health care plan, you can keep it.” This particular falsehood was named “Lie of the Year” by the Pulitzer Prize–winning (and left-leaning) website Politifact.com.3 Obama also told the public, “You can keep your doctor if you like him,” another lie. He also lied in assuring taxpayers footing the bill that it was not a tax and that its benefits would not be available to people who entered the country illegally. This assertion was part of his State of the Union message, which provoked Representative Joe Wilson to shout, “You lie,” causing a blizzard of criticism to descend on him for an outburst that was deemed a rude and inappropriate offense to both the president and the Congress, even though it was true.4
The Obamacare lies were not incidental; they were instrumental. They were required because the real plan for Obamacare violated several core American principles that could only be overcome by stealth. America’s constitutional framework is based on individual rights and individual freedoms. Until the passage of Obamacare, the right of Americans to choose their doctor—someone to guide them through life-and-death decisions—was part of the American social contract. The same was true of the right to choose one’s health care plan. Obama and the Democrats were able to subvert both these individual freedoms only because they deliberately pretended Obamacare wouldn’t do just that. The same was true of the provision that provided health benefits to illegal aliens—including taxpayer subsidies if they couldn’t afford the care. Providing illegal aliens with subsidies and medical benefits is, of course, a powerful magnet for more illegal immigration. It is also an assault on the idea of citizenship as the foundation for the constitutional rights afforded specifically to Americans who, over the generations, fought to create and defend them and gave their lives to do so.
The lies were even used to deceive the Congressional Budget Office and the Democrats in Congress who passed it. In an unguarded videotaped moment during a panel discussion at the University of Pennsylvania, Jonathan Gruber, a principal architect of the plan, revealed the reasoning behind the lies: “This bill was written in a tortured way to make sure [the Congressional Budget Office] did not score the mandate as taxes. If CBO scored the mandate as taxes, the bill dies, okay? . . . If you made it explicit that healthy people pay in and sick people get money, it would not have passed, okay? Lack of transparency is a huge political advantage. And basically, you know, call it the stupidity of the American voter or whatever. But basically that was really, really critical to getting the thing to pass.”5
This is a revealing confession on several counts. First, Obamacare was a plan to redistribute wealth by transferring income from young people to old and through subsidies to those who could not afford it paid by those who could. But the Democrats recognized that even with a two-house majority and a monopoly of government power, they could not run such a socialist scheme past the American people. Not if they were truthful and made an honest appeal to American voters. Lack of transparency is a huge political advantage. Gruber, who was paid more than half a million dollars for his services and deceptions, is an MIT liberal. But this statement could have been made by any common despot. And it is this brand of despotism that characterizes the entire campaign to enact the primary legislative achievement of the Obama era.
In the short span in which it has been implemented, Obamacare has been a catastrophic failure. Insurance premiums and policy deductibles have skyrocketed—despite solemn promises that Obamacare would lower costs—while almost every Obamacare state exchange has gone bankrupt. To address this crisis, Hillary Clinton vowed in her campaign to “defend and expand the Affordable Care Act.” To accomplish this, she vowed to implement a “public option,” which is another name for a so-called single-payer plan, where the “single payer” is the US government.6