liberalism will survive obamacare

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http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/comment/2013/11/liberalism-will-survive-obamacare.html



Here’s today’s quiz: What is American liberalism, and how is it doing?

In response to the first half of the question, and bowing to the contemporary wisdom that anything can be reduced to the length of a tweet, I offer up this definition: American liberalism is belief system that combines egalitarian impulses with a conviction that markets often fail and that the government should seek to address these failures. (Actually, that’s about one and a half tweets, but never mind.)

Now to how liberalism is faring. If you’ve been reading some of the articles out of Washington in recent weeks, you may have received the impression that it’s an endangered creed, and that the troubled rollout of the Affordable Care Act might just about finish it off. I’m not just referring to the coverage in conservative outlets like the National Review, the Weekly Standard, and the op-ed page of the Wall Street Journal, which have been publishing obituaries of liberalism for decades. In mainstream and even liberal publications, some of the best columnists in Washington have expressed worries that the problems afflicting healthcare.gov amount to such a political disaster that they endanger the very idea of activist government, which lies at heart of progressivism.

For a number of reasons, I think that it is going too far. Obamacare, lest we forget, isn’t a particularly liberal reform; it originated as a right-wing counter-proposal to Hillarycare. How, then, can it be a test of liberalism? And anyway, American liberalism, like its opposite number, American conservatism, is much bigger than any individual policy or slip-up, however dire. To suggest that the problems of the A.C.A. will do irreparable damage to liberalism makes about as much sense as suggesting that the government shutdown will do irreparable damage to conservatism. It confuses politics with history and ideology.