RBO Rant: Is American Liberalism Really In Retreat?

According to a New York Times article today on father-son Mario and Andrew Cuomo, Matt Bai claims “American liberalism is again in retreat.”

His evidence is that Barack Obama, “who once embodied progressive hopes more than any Democrat” since the elder Cuomo’s day, has been “bruised by the Democrats’ electoral defeat” and is resorting to “cutting community-development block grants and corporate taxes.”

Elsewhere, Bai continues, “in state capitals across the country, a new generation of governors is seeking to roll back social programs and the gains of government workers. Chief among these governors, poignantly, is Andrew Cuomo, whose own austerity measures include billions of dollars in cuts from state spending on Medicaid and education, even as he resists new taxes — and proposes to let lapse a surcharge on the wealthy.”

Other than the obvious — the problem is the spending, stupid — the question that begs answering is why are liberals (aka progressives, socialists, Marxists) in retreat — again? Or are they?

Perhaps it could be that once Obama was elected they dusted off their aging wish lists and starting spending like mad fools with Botox Betty and Crazy Harry leading the charge?

But Bai is wrong. Outward appearances can be deceiving. The progressives have not given up by a long shot. The march towards socialist revolution continues.

Jeffrey Sachs, about whom Aaron Klein wrote just last week, penned an article posted at HuffPo that praises the Congressional Progressive Caucus’s latest incarnation of an alternative budget, unsurprisingly called “The People’s Budget.”

Before declaring the CPC’s budget “efficient” and “fair” in the way it makes spending cuts — and increases taxes on the “rich” — Sachs first calls Paul Ryan’s plan “an artless war on the poor” and Obama’s plan “a muddled proposal in the center-right of the political spectrum.”

The Red flag went up when I first saw “The People’s Budget” pop up on the Progressive Democrats of America website last week. Actually, all it took was seeing People’s in the title, a sure thing that communists, socialists, and/or Marxists are somehow involved.

Even more telling is Sachs’ claim that the CPC plan comes from the “progressive middle.” What in the world is the progressive middle? Ever heard of it? Me neither.

Sachs leaves no doubt as to where he stands. The CPC says “runaway health care costs” will be controlled “through a public option.” He agrees.

If there’s one thing the radical Left is really ticked off about with their hero in the White House is that he failed to deliver on their number one item — a government-funded (taxpayer-funded) health care system.

All I can say on this issue is, if Leftists in Congress think this is the health care system they want for us, then they should put their money where their mouths are and either move to Canada or England or any one of several countries with public health care — or give up those nice federally-funded Cadillac plans they have now and share the wealth with those who do not have any health care (i.e., the people they claim to care so much about). Put up or shut up.

Sachs is disingenuous when he says the public option is what people want. It’s not, or at least it’s not what they want for themselves.

A Quinnipiac poll from July 2009, long before the 2010 Obamacare vote, revealed, “Overall, 69 percent of respondents, who were registered Democrats, Republicans and independents, say Americans should have the option to enroll in a government-run health care option, but only 29 percent say they would want to use public health insurance themselves.”

Another issue is Sachs’ claim that the CPC plan is the best thing going. If that was true, then why has it failed to gain any traction since it (aided and abetted by the Democratic Socialists of America) has failed to get incorporated into or passed since the CPC launched in 1992 and started issuing alternative budgets?

The DSA’s “collectivist agenda” calls for:

… “massive redistribution of income from corporations and the wealthy to wage earners and the poor and the public sector”; “a massive shift of public resources from the military … to civilian uses”; and “expanding [Medicare] eligibility to people of all ages and income regardless of health or employment status” so that “the federal government can serve as the single payer” for the nation’s health care.

Sound familiar. If you search the RBO archive you can find several similar examples drafted by the Communist Party USA, DSA, PDA, and the CPC. There is little daylight to be found between any of their plans; they’re nearly identical.

As a word of caution, when you hear things like liberalism is in retreat, don’t you believe it. It only means you need to look around to see what’s really going on somewhere else. The professional Left is expert at misdirection.