@Idaho_Cowboy Your post from the other day really had me thinking. One of the problems with Republicans is they tend to rest on their laurels whenever they do get a victory. Democrats always want more, give them a tax increase and they'll squeal it isn't enough. But at the end of the day they'll sulk and say "fine will take it, but we want more".
Yeah, I think I called it "relentless incrementalism". Unlike Republicans, they'll take every little tiny victory they can get, then immediately push for more. Perfect example is how the Progressive Caucus caved on the public option when the ACA was being debated. Their preferred bill was the "Affordable Health Care for Americans Act", which included the public option.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affordable_Health_Care_for_America_ActFrom their perspective, ObamaCare wasn't nearly enough because it still was insurance-based, etc.. But they knew if they could get those subsidies and Medicaid expansion in there, they'd be advancing the concept of health care as an entitlement. Some of them even admitted that ObamaCare would fail, but it would then be easier to convince people to accept single payer. The point is that they understood that moving
in the right direction was critical, even if the move wasn't as much as they wanted. So, the progressives agreed to support the ACA rather than have no bill at all. And that turned out to be a very smart move by their caucus.
It should be possible for a politician to have a deep abiding love of freedom and be willing to work at it incrementally too, but they seem very rare. They get something minor done and they say: this is enough, look what we did.
The left
never stops. The only way to fight them is the same way -- bits and pieces at a time if necessary. We have never before, in our entire history, reversed an individual entitlement program. Ryan's bill actually
did that. Not the full repeal of the entire bill that hard-liners demand -- at that I also prefer personally, but it was still something of real significance. And you get that, and then
immediately press for more, via rulemaking authority and
more legislation. And it's easier to do that then because the GOP will have established some credibility that it can actually pass things that don't lead to the horrible results predicted by Democrats. Once that ball gets rolling, it's much easier to keep it rolling and accelerate it.
But you've got to get it rolling in the first place.
That's how you obtain actual change, as opposed to achieving
nothing but sitting back smugly in your moral superiority. Maybe we'll be lucky, and some kind of agreement that moves things in our direction will eventually be struck.
