I'm way late to this (been sick) but I just wanted to make 2 quick points... the exchanges, employer requirements, requiring payers to insure people with pre-existing conditions, and expansion of Medicare, have, I think, been successful and as the paper you point to shows, may be bending the cost curve.
Some other components of ACA (Hitech act - and now 21st Century Cures, ACOs/MCOs) have been at best a mix bag in terms of cost savings and health outcomes, and generally I don't think anyone can say the Population Health paradigm has been successful in the US. A lot of money is being spent, and what it is buying is not particularly high quality. I suppose it's good that most of your health data is electronic and standardized now, and the benefits have only narrowly been realized thus far, this may yet pay dividends as AI gets more and more utilized in the healthcare space. Unfortunately, from what I've seen and heard from people doing the studies, on net, the bundled payment, value based care, and clinical quality measure programs are not yielding cost savings or improved outcomes.
I think Matt is usually better than this when he essentially called Republicans a bunch of scumsucking rascals and then put a pretty coherent list as to why trying to cut government spending and balancing the budget seems like a reasonable idea. But as an anti-Trump conservative, I am here to learn, I just don't really think it is helpful to demonize the opposition. I get it, he has to appease his base as well. Continuously spending 2 trillion more than the government brings in really is unsustainable.
I still find it weird that progressives seem to have magical thinking when it comes to paying for social programs. If we want European style social programs, we have to have European style taxes. That has some tradeoffs, and progressives shouldn't be embarrassed to say they think the benefits outweigh the negatives. Getting the 0.1% to pay for it all ignores basic math.
"A headline like Robert Kagan’s recent Washington Post op-ed “A Trump dictatorship is increasingly inevitable. We should stop pretending” is very grabby to resistance types but also incredibly unpersuasive to people feeling conflicted."
Agreed. But cross-pressured and conflicted potential voters are some of the least op-ed interested or media-interested people around.
Meanwhile, Kagan's types of headline fills a wide subscriber/reader/audience desire to feel more important/knowledgeable/civically and morally superior than the average citizen. The desire to feel good about oneself, and better in contrast to the average, is a powerful motivator of media tastes of many NYT and WaPo readers, Vox, Nation, and Mother Jones readers, and MSNBC watchers that mundane cost-of-living policy stakes do not.
For me personally, enjoying my greater perception, progressiveness, and civic-high mindedness than my average fellow citizen, and shaking my head at the deplorability of the thoughts, opinions and votes of many local, and even sometimes national majorities has gotten a little old for me.
I'd prefer winning a little more often to being 'right' all the time. And I wish the left-of-center crowd got more effectiveness at figuring out how to persuade over how to tell its own flock it's right. And that they got more effective at getting even rather than getting mad.
Curious how this realization has played into your own life. Do you spend less time on these traditional center-left to leftist media sites? What are you doing to focus more on persuading voters you disagree with rather than getting mad?
"Curious how this realization has played into your own life." - less than it should. But I do think it saves me with some wasted arguments or ruminations about people I would never persuade, nor need to persuade. [ie, conservative ideologues completely dug in, or anyone living in an absolutelly no contest red state/red district or blue state/blue district. It perhaps gets me into a few arguments with fellow liberals or progressives when I suggest their rumination/frustration/gawking at "how can anyone think that" and desperate hope for a last minute conversion with one more factual revelation is wasted energy. I neither give a flying eff about unanimity of opinion, nor does the country require it, it just requires a sane governing majority. "Do you spend less time on these traditional center-left to leftist media sites?" Not that much less time on center-left websites, but it certainly confirms me in my decision cutting the cable cord was a good decision, and I've lost nothing in my life from missing out on cable news, and reinforced my feeling that just as I have contempt for the Fox News addicts, the elder liberals in my life are wasting their time with their addiction to MSNBC watching. As a working man, I have no time for appointment TV, I'll get news from radio and searching news aggregations on browsers and wire sites. "What are you doing to focus more on persuading voters you disagree with rather than getting mad?" Not a lot, but I try to size up who I am talking to and who else is listening. I try to counter and slap down direct bullshit. I tend not to exert myself much if the disagreeing person votes in a jurisdiction where the tide of voters overwhelmingly goes against them or for them. And where they live in a "swing-y" environment, I meet them where they, not just leading with my own priors, values and emotions, and assuming they are universally shared. I look for where they are expressing a value and then how the conservative or Republican policy option or candidate falls short by that metric. I've had civil discussions that way at least. I got one GOP Republican leaning voter (one who liked the general policy mix and emphasis and vibe of Trump....who actually had been waiting for it for over a decade, but who hated the execution---too unprofessional) to vote for Jim Webb over George Allen in the Virginia Senate race in 2006. Again - although this guy was intellectually paleocon so theoretically very open to Trump, he was an educated professional like me, also married to a Dem, so not MAGA representative.
So, I use my insights to surprisingly small political effect, in casual conversation, just trying to be aware to not try to sell people on stuff I know they won't buy. My insight mainly makes me recognize and have contempt for the futility of various tactics, and sort of fume with rage at the messages fundraising groups send me, where I think, , "Stop sending me these manipulative, hot-button appeals, alternately doom-saying and false-hopeful, based on what you think I think, to get my money; just show me what you are going to put in the freaking ad that will persuade people who are *not* like me, who are dumb as rocks, who need to be persuaded!" - that's how I would know if it is worth the investment and not just a wishing well.
"It’s silly to say the health care issue is more important than the future of democracy, but it’s a lot more clear-cut, factually, that “we should repeal the ACA” is a Republican Party policy goal and not a Democratic Party policy goal. But you really have to work hard to drag the media, against its inclinations and financial interests, to state clearly that this is at stake in the election."
Well, too bad Matt does not have the national platform that, say, Jon Stewart did, in the early 2000s, to basically shame the media into taking Crossfire off the air.
Stewart does not even quite have the same platform but does have an ability to cut through some BS quickly. Anybody here know him?
"The press often fails take the substance of what Trump says seriously, instead psychologizing and personalizing everything that he says."
"Unfortunately, the media tends to treat these kinds of questions that involve the dispositions of hundreds of billions of dollars and the health care of millions of people as relatively minor and unimportant. Cooper’s years-long struggle to obtain Medicaid coverage for the people of North Carolina has garnered dramatically less coverage than fights about which books belong in which school libraries. Some of that is a sense that culture wars are clickier than health care,"
Because our reporters and media content providers are trying to economize on effort while meeting deadlines, by basically recycling the same five or so cultural themes, and our media editors and editorial staffs deciding what goes forward, truly suck.
"And I think a lot of people have forgotten how chillingly evil the private insurance market used to be."
Used to? It is still chillingly evil. I have heard double digit stories about people being cruelly denied insurance lately and I barely know double digits amount of people.
With you a lot that "social conservatism and welfare" would be very popular. The big problem with that position is that there are approximately zero elites in favour of it. This doesn't just mean that there isn't any money for campaigns, but it means that there aren't any journalists in favor, so it won't get reported fairly, it means that it won't get discussed on social media, it means that there aren't people from normal politician backgrounds who support it - there are very few lawyers or Ivy League grads who support this sort of position.
"Medicare for all citizens who want it" would be really popular. Making immigrants deal with the insurance market would protect it from the usual "giveaways to illegals" opposition.
But the Democrats would hate it because it favours citizens over immigrants, and the Republicans would hate it because it's spending tax money (which means they can't cut taxes as much / as easily) and it would take away a lot of the profits from the healthcare sector.
I think a piece of American subtext is just risk preference is much more varied than I think is usually discussed.
I don’t think I realized till Covid how much variance there is here but like it’s something that makes me wish we had even like the scary conservative death panel and equally shared miseryversion of socialism.
I debated this a lot on Facebook in the mid 2000s, and my take is there's just no business model for healthcare. The stuff you want (paying for healthcare) is a *cost* to insurance companies, so they don't want to do pay it. What they have isn't a market so much as a cross-subsidy (from tax breaks and employers).
Most people want the government to cover "catastrophic" care - this is what Trump promised*, and more-or-less what Paul Ryan said with his high-risk pools. But of course the sickest 20% of people account for 80% of health care spending. If you socialize 80% of something, you have socialized it. And then you really ought to cover routine care so people stay out of that 80%. So that's probably 90% of it.
People often look at car insurance or property insurance as a working insurance model. But of course there's a limit to their liability. If my car is totaled, they write me a check for the value and move on. My life is an open-ended commitment.
I'm not a socialist, but this is what finally convinced me on socialized medicine. No business model, no market.
* To Matt's point about Trump being a moderate, he really did say this and a lot of people really did believe him.
The uncomfortable truth is that better preventive / routine care doesn't reduce costs much, if at all. As but one example, smokers are cheaper in the long run, because a higher percentage of them die before the rest of their body requires expensive end-of-life care.
The argument for preventive care (and most, but not all, healthcare spending) is that it extends and improves lives, which is sufficient for me to support a universal health benefit. It isn't a cost issue.
ACA repeal is important. Promising to undermine democratic institutions is important. Proclaiming that you'll destroy the international security structure that has kept the peace is important. Abortion is important. Threatening the rights of powerless minority groups is important. Putting hyper-religious Christian nationalists in positions of power is important.
Yup. All true.
My question is, how do you win the election? I wish Matt had answered my question when I posed it to him last week so I'll ask it again: if you can *only* highlight three issues that can be stated in a simple sentence (like above) and those issues you'll pound home continuously and with discipline until Election Day, which issues do you choose and which do you relegate to the bench? Because that's the way electoral persuasion works.
Something I think people don't know about the ACA is that it made it newly POSSIBLE for some of us to buy private insurance. When I was 25 (pre-ACA), I tried to buy insurance and was only able to get a temporary plan because I was above the cut-off for weight for my height. This is why a private market for insurance doesn't really work. Were the insurance companies wrong to refuse to insure me, from a profit-making perspective? Probably not. But it's a lot easier for me to exist knowing that, if I lose my job, I can still have health insurance.
I am curious why a Trump dictatorship is "incredibly unpersuasive to people feeling conflicted". I think most people are just skeptical of how close we actually are to a Trump dictatorship, and it might be hard to convince them. But if a bunch of normies truly felt like we were close to a Trump dictatorship why wouldn't they go to the polls to prevent that? are dictatorships popular?
A lot of different pro-democracy interest groups will be running ads at swing voters on this issue. My guess is that the Biden campaign will let them do the bulk of that work, while they try to hit voters with the Biden administration's accomplishments.
The latest Pod Save America episode covered the Kagan op-ed. They think the dictatorship angle stretches too far into hyperbole and everyone can see right through it. (EDIT: Didn't finish my thought... I assume Matt shares the same view. It's more of the same from the big-words people who just make up new definitions for racism, apartheid, genocide, etc.)
Right, I agree it's tough to convince people. But if you actually did convince them it seems like it's pretty scary and would motivate people. Also it happens to be true that we are very close to a Trump dictatorship!
Their view and one I share is we've already seen a Trump presidency and it wasn't a dictatorship. Let's use words with commonly understood meaning when describing things instead of making up new definitions to sound scarier.
(EDIT: For those that missed the Kagan op-ed or can't see behind paywall, here's some of the passages the Pod Save America guys took issue with:
"In Weimar Germany, Hitler and other agitators benefited from the squabbling of the democratic parties, right and left, the endless fights over the budget, the logjams in the legislature, the fragile and fractious coalitions. German voters increasingly yearned for someone to cut through it all and get something — anything — done."
"Indicting Trump for trying to overthrow the government will prove akin to indicting Caesar for crossing the Rubicon, and just as effective. Like Caesar, Trump wields a clout that transcends the laws and institutions of government, based on the unswerving personal loyalty of his army of followers."
"Today, there is the whiff of a new McCarthyism in the air. MAGA Republicans insist that Biden himself is a “communist,” that his election was a “communist takeover” and that his administration is a “communist regime.”
"The Trump dictatorship will not be a communist tyranny, where almost everyone feels the oppression and has their lives shaped by it. In conservative, anti-liberal tyrannies, ordinary people face all kinds of limitations on their freedoms, but it is a problem for them only to the degree that they value those freedoms, and many people do not."
"But not even the bluest states are monolithic, and Democratic governors are likely to find themselves under siege on their home turf if they try to become bastions of resistance to Trump’s tyranny. Republicans and conservatives throughout the nation will be energized by their hero’s triumph"
We are now arguing a different point which I won't bother trying to convince you of. But my point remains
> But *if* a bunch of normies truly felt like we were close to a Trump dictatorship why wouldn't they go to the polls to prevent that? are dictatorships popular?
I wonder how much reluctance there might be on the part of Democrats, and even sympathetic media, to focus on health care because of a danger of message undiscipline. In the 2020 primaries just about every democrat trotted out some version of Medicare for All that both had no chance of getting past any conceivable version of the Senate, and would have been highly disruptive to most people's current insurance (not to mention SCOTUS skepticism). And what democrats may fear now is that drawing attention to healthcare might hurt Republicans, but will also bring out all the progressive groups to criticize the current ACA and demand M4A.
Progressive energy around healthcare today seems to be more about stuff like expanding ACA subsidies and lowering prescription drug costs. That's less ambitious than M4A, which may turn off the Bernie folks. However, the good news is that this other stuff is practicable and really popular.
"Why do so many Republicans want to collaborate with Trump? Not just for fun. Because they have policy ideas that they know cannot withstand public scrutiny."
This is the crux of everything with the GOP - whether Trump, or Pro-Life activism, or the Anti-Woke movement, Gay/Trans-mania, or whatever else they are doing - everything, literally everything they do and say is and always has been a distraction from the fact that the GOP would lose every election until the end of time if it actually talked about its actual policy agenda.
No wonder some of them are starting to openly state they think Democracy is a failed idea, and that dictatorship could be really swell. They are as tired of their own lies as we are.
I'm way late to this (been sick) but I just wanted to make 2 quick points... the exchanges, employer requirements, requiring payers to insure people with pre-existing conditions, and expansion of Medicare, have, I think, been successful and as the paper you point to shows, may be bending the cost curve.
Some other components of ACA (Hitech act - and now 21st Century Cures, ACOs/MCOs) have been at best a mix bag in terms of cost savings and health outcomes, and generally I don't think anyone can say the Population Health paradigm has been successful in the US. A lot of money is being spent, and what it is buying is not particularly high quality. I suppose it's good that most of your health data is electronic and standardized now, and the benefits have only narrowly been realized thus far, this may yet pay dividends as AI gets more and more utilized in the healthcare space. Unfortunately, from what I've seen and heard from people doing the studies, on net, the bundled payment, value based care, and clinical quality measure programs are not yielding cost savings or improved outcomes.
I think Matt is usually better than this when he essentially called Republicans a bunch of scumsucking rascals and then put a pretty coherent list as to why trying to cut government spending and balancing the budget seems like a reasonable idea. But as an anti-Trump conservative, I am here to learn, I just don't really think it is helpful to demonize the opposition. I get it, he has to appease his base as well. Continuously spending 2 trillion more than the government brings in really is unsustainable.
I still find it weird that progressives seem to have magical thinking when it comes to paying for social programs. If we want European style social programs, we have to have European style taxes. That has some tradeoffs, and progressives shouldn't be embarrassed to say they think the benefits outweigh the negatives. Getting the 0.1% to pay for it all ignores basic math.
A Slow Boring article for you! https://www.slowboring.com/p/european-countries-have-really-high?utm_source=%2Fsearch%2Ftaxes&utm_medium=reader2
"A headline like Robert Kagan’s recent Washington Post op-ed “A Trump dictatorship is increasingly inevitable. We should stop pretending” is very grabby to resistance types but also incredibly unpersuasive to people feeling conflicted."
Agreed. But cross-pressured and conflicted potential voters are some of the least op-ed interested or media-interested people around.
Meanwhile, Kagan's types of headline fills a wide subscriber/reader/audience desire to feel more important/knowledgeable/civically and morally superior than the average citizen. The desire to feel good about oneself, and better in contrast to the average, is a powerful motivator of media tastes of many NYT and WaPo readers, Vox, Nation, and Mother Jones readers, and MSNBC watchers that mundane cost-of-living policy stakes do not.
For me personally, enjoying my greater perception, progressiveness, and civic-high mindedness than my average fellow citizen, and shaking my head at the deplorability of the thoughts, opinions and votes of many local, and even sometimes national majorities has gotten a little old for me.
I'd prefer winning a little more often to being 'right' all the time. And I wish the left-of-center crowd got more effectiveness at figuring out how to persuade over how to tell its own flock it's right. And that they got more effective at getting even rather than getting mad.
Curious how this realization has played into your own life. Do you spend less time on these traditional center-left to leftist media sites? What are you doing to focus more on persuading voters you disagree with rather than getting mad?
"Curious how this realization has played into your own life." - less than it should. But I do think it saves me with some wasted arguments or ruminations about people I would never persuade, nor need to persuade. [ie, conservative ideologues completely dug in, or anyone living in an absolutelly no contest red state/red district or blue state/blue district. It perhaps gets me into a few arguments with fellow liberals or progressives when I suggest their rumination/frustration/gawking at "how can anyone think that" and desperate hope for a last minute conversion with one more factual revelation is wasted energy. I neither give a flying eff about unanimity of opinion, nor does the country require it, it just requires a sane governing majority. "Do you spend less time on these traditional center-left to leftist media sites?" Not that much less time on center-left websites, but it certainly confirms me in my decision cutting the cable cord was a good decision, and I've lost nothing in my life from missing out on cable news, and reinforced my feeling that just as I have contempt for the Fox News addicts, the elder liberals in my life are wasting their time with their addiction to MSNBC watching. As a working man, I have no time for appointment TV, I'll get news from radio and searching news aggregations on browsers and wire sites. "What are you doing to focus more on persuading voters you disagree with rather than getting mad?" Not a lot, but I try to size up who I am talking to and who else is listening. I try to counter and slap down direct bullshit. I tend not to exert myself much if the disagreeing person votes in a jurisdiction where the tide of voters overwhelmingly goes against them or for them. And where they live in a "swing-y" environment, I meet them where they, not just leading with my own priors, values and emotions, and assuming they are universally shared. I look for where they are expressing a value and then how the conservative or Republican policy option or candidate falls short by that metric. I've had civil discussions that way at least. I got one GOP Republican leaning voter (one who liked the general policy mix and emphasis and vibe of Trump....who actually had been waiting for it for over a decade, but who hated the execution---too unprofessional) to vote for Jim Webb over George Allen in the Virginia Senate race in 2006. Again - although this guy was intellectually paleocon so theoretically very open to Trump, he was an educated professional like me, also married to a Dem, so not MAGA representative.
So, I use my insights to surprisingly small political effect, in casual conversation, just trying to be aware to not try to sell people on stuff I know they won't buy. My insight mainly makes me recognize and have contempt for the futility of various tactics, and sort of fume with rage at the messages fundraising groups send me, where I think, , "Stop sending me these manipulative, hot-button appeals, alternately doom-saying and false-hopeful, based on what you think I think, to get my money; just show me what you are going to put in the freaking ad that will persuade people who are *not* like me, who are dumb as rocks, who need to be persuaded!" - that's how I would know if it is worth the investment and not just a wishing well.
"It’s silly to say the health care issue is more important than the future of democracy, but it’s a lot more clear-cut, factually, that “we should repeal the ACA” is a Republican Party policy goal and not a Democratic Party policy goal. But you really have to work hard to drag the media, against its inclinations and financial interests, to state clearly that this is at stake in the election."
Well, too bad Matt does not have the national platform that, say, Jon Stewart did, in the early 2000s, to basically shame the media into taking Crossfire off the air.
Stewart does not even quite have the same platform but does have an ability to cut through some BS quickly. Anybody here know him?
"The press often fails take the substance of what Trump says seriously, instead psychologizing and personalizing everything that he says."
"Unfortunately, the media tends to treat these kinds of questions that involve the dispositions of hundreds of billions of dollars and the health care of millions of people as relatively minor and unimportant. Cooper’s years-long struggle to obtain Medicaid coverage for the people of North Carolina has garnered dramatically less coverage than fights about which books belong in which school libraries. Some of that is a sense that culture wars are clickier than health care,"
Because our reporters and media content providers are trying to economize on effort while meeting deadlines, by basically recycling the same five or so cultural themes, and our media editors and editorial staffs deciding what goes forward, truly suck.
"And I think a lot of people have forgotten how chillingly evil the private insurance market used to be."
Used to? It is still chillingly evil. I have heard double digit stories about people being cruelly denied insurance lately and I barely know double digits amount of people.
With you a lot that "social conservatism and welfare" would be very popular. The big problem with that position is that there are approximately zero elites in favour of it. This doesn't just mean that there isn't any money for campaigns, but it means that there aren't any journalists in favor, so it won't get reported fairly, it means that it won't get discussed on social media, it means that there aren't people from normal politician backgrounds who support it - there are very few lawyers or Ivy League grads who support this sort of position.
"Medicare for all citizens who want it" would be really popular. Making immigrants deal with the insurance market would protect it from the usual "giveaways to illegals" opposition.
But the Democrats would hate it because it favours citizens over immigrants, and the Republicans would hate it because it's spending tax money (which means they can't cut taxes as much / as easily) and it would take away a lot of the profits from the healthcare sector.
I think a piece of American subtext is just risk preference is much more varied than I think is usually discussed.
I don’t think I realized till Covid how much variance there is here but like it’s something that makes me wish we had even like the scary conservative death panel and equally shared miseryversion of socialism.
I debated this a lot on Facebook in the mid 2000s, and my take is there's just no business model for healthcare. The stuff you want (paying for healthcare) is a *cost* to insurance companies, so they don't want to do pay it. What they have isn't a market so much as a cross-subsidy (from tax breaks and employers).
Most people want the government to cover "catastrophic" care - this is what Trump promised*, and more-or-less what Paul Ryan said with his high-risk pools. But of course the sickest 20% of people account for 80% of health care spending. If you socialize 80% of something, you have socialized it. And then you really ought to cover routine care so people stay out of that 80%. So that's probably 90% of it.
People often look at car insurance or property insurance as a working insurance model. But of course there's a limit to their liability. If my car is totaled, they write me a check for the value and move on. My life is an open-ended commitment.
I'm not a socialist, but this is what finally convinced me on socialized medicine. No business model, no market.
* To Matt's point about Trump being a moderate, he really did say this and a lot of people really did believe him.
The uncomfortable truth is that better preventive / routine care doesn't reduce costs much, if at all. As but one example, smokers are cheaper in the long run, because a higher percentage of them die before the rest of their body requires expensive end-of-life care.
The argument for preventive care (and most, but not all, healthcare spending) is that it extends and improves lives, which is sufficient for me to support a universal health benefit. It isn't a cost issue.
The dog that never barks in these conversations is anyone trying to provide an argument that the ACA has improved health outcomes.
Part of me thinks people who vote Republican deserve to suffer the consequence of their vote and beliefs
All of me thinks that healthcare is a human right
ACA repeal is important. Promising to undermine democratic institutions is important. Proclaiming that you'll destroy the international security structure that has kept the peace is important. Abortion is important. Threatening the rights of powerless minority groups is important. Putting hyper-religious Christian nationalists in positions of power is important.
Yup. All true.
My question is, how do you win the election? I wish Matt had answered my question when I posed it to him last week so I'll ask it again: if you can *only* highlight three issues that can be stated in a simple sentence (like above) and those issues you'll pound home continuously and with discipline until Election Day, which issues do you choose and which do you relegate to the bench? Because that's the way electoral persuasion works.
Interesting question, thank you for posing it!
Matt does want Democrats talking more about healthcare: https://www.slowboring.com/p/democrats-should-talk-more-about
Something I think people don't know about the ACA is that it made it newly POSSIBLE for some of us to buy private insurance. When I was 25 (pre-ACA), I tried to buy insurance and was only able to get a temporary plan because I was above the cut-off for weight for my height. This is why a private market for insurance doesn't really work. Were the insurance companies wrong to refuse to insure me, from a profit-making perspective? Probably not. But it's a lot easier for me to exist knowing that, if I lose my job, I can still have health insurance.
I am curious why a Trump dictatorship is "incredibly unpersuasive to people feeling conflicted". I think most people are just skeptical of how close we actually are to a Trump dictatorship, and it might be hard to convince them. But if a bunch of normies truly felt like we were close to a Trump dictatorship why wouldn't they go to the polls to prevent that? are dictatorships popular?
A lot of different pro-democracy interest groups will be running ads at swing voters on this issue. My guess is that the Biden campaign will let them do the bulk of that work, while they try to hit voters with the Biden administration's accomplishments.
The latest Pod Save America episode covered the Kagan op-ed. They think the dictatorship angle stretches too far into hyperbole and everyone can see right through it. (EDIT: Didn't finish my thought... I assume Matt shares the same view. It's more of the same from the big-words people who just make up new definitions for racism, apartheid, genocide, etc.)
Right, I agree it's tough to convince people. But if you actually did convince them it seems like it's pretty scary and would motivate people. Also it happens to be true that we are very close to a Trump dictatorship!
Their view and one I share is we've already seen a Trump presidency and it wasn't a dictatorship. Let's use words with commonly understood meaning when describing things instead of making up new definitions to sound scarier.
(EDIT: For those that missed the Kagan op-ed or can't see behind paywall, here's some of the passages the Pod Save America guys took issue with:
"In Weimar Germany, Hitler and other agitators benefited from the squabbling of the democratic parties, right and left, the endless fights over the budget, the logjams in the legislature, the fragile and fractious coalitions. German voters increasingly yearned for someone to cut through it all and get something — anything — done."
"Indicting Trump for trying to overthrow the government will prove akin to indicting Caesar for crossing the Rubicon, and just as effective. Like Caesar, Trump wields a clout that transcends the laws and institutions of government, based on the unswerving personal loyalty of his army of followers."
"Today, there is the whiff of a new McCarthyism in the air. MAGA Republicans insist that Biden himself is a “communist,” that his election was a “communist takeover” and that his administration is a “communist regime.”
"The Trump dictatorship will not be a communist tyranny, where almost everyone feels the oppression and has their lives shaped by it. In conservative, anti-liberal tyrannies, ordinary people face all kinds of limitations on their freedoms, but it is a problem for them only to the degree that they value those freedoms, and many people do not."
"But not even the bluest states are monolithic, and Democratic governors are likely to find themselves under siege on their home turf if they try to become bastions of resistance to Trump’s tyranny. Republicans and conservatives throughout the nation will be energized by their hero’s triumph"
It just goes on and on with this nonsense.)
We are now arguing a different point which I won't bother trying to convince you of. But my point remains
> But *if* a bunch of normies truly felt like we were close to a Trump dictatorship why wouldn't they go to the polls to prevent that? are dictatorships popular?
It's fine if you don't want to grant the if
I wonder how much reluctance there might be on the part of Democrats, and even sympathetic media, to focus on health care because of a danger of message undiscipline. In the 2020 primaries just about every democrat trotted out some version of Medicare for All that both had no chance of getting past any conceivable version of the Senate, and would have been highly disruptive to most people's current insurance (not to mention SCOTUS skepticism). And what democrats may fear now is that drawing attention to healthcare might hurt Republicans, but will also bring out all the progressive groups to criticize the current ACA and demand M4A.
Progressive energy around healthcare today seems to be more about stuff like expanding ACA subsidies and lowering prescription drug costs. That's less ambitious than M4A, which may turn off the Bernie folks. However, the good news is that this other stuff is practicable and really popular.
"Why do so many Republicans want to collaborate with Trump? Not just for fun. Because they have policy ideas that they know cannot withstand public scrutiny."
This is the crux of everything with the GOP - whether Trump, or Pro-Life activism, or the Anti-Woke movement, Gay/Trans-mania, or whatever else they are doing - everything, literally everything they do and say is and always has been a distraction from the fact that the GOP would lose every election until the end of time if it actually talked about its actual policy agenda.
No wonder some of them are starting to openly state they think Democracy is a failed idea, and that dictatorship could be really swell. They are as tired of their own lies as we are.