Elizabeth Warren represents a dangerous compromise

Elizabeth Warren is a once-in-a-generation candidate. She is poised on the edge of history, inching ever closer to becoming the first female president. She recently surpassed Bernie Sanders in some major polls, meaning she may be leading the field of candidates who are not notorious pedophiles vying for the chance to run against Trump in 2020.

It is quite unfortunate, therefore, that Warren is running on a platform of unnecessary and unacceptable compromise.

Warren on health justice

Warren has totally abdicated leadership on health justice. Sure, she is a cosponsor of the current senatorial version of Medicare for All. However, that is a rather low bar to clear. Noted corporate shills Cory Booker and Kirsten Gillibrand are also cosponsors. Rhetorical support for M4A is quite fashionable nowadays, but it does not necessarily imply material support. Booker was interviewed by Politico in May on Medicare for All. Immediately after calling for passage of the Sanders bill, he pivoted to saying “we’re not going to pull health insurance from 150 million Americans who have private insurance that like their insurance.” So Booker actually opposes passage of the Sanders bill, since that legislation would, in fact, abolish private insurance. Because Medicare for All polls higher than the previous president does*, candidates who oppose it must make mealy-mouthed statements like “there is more than one path to Medicare for All.” Indeed, even members of Congress who openly oppose the current Medicare-for-All legislation still say they support some version of single-payer.

Therefore, we have no choice but to disregard Warren’s cosponsorship. We must look at the public record instead. When we do that, the results are not good. A search on Warren’s YouTube channel yields 0 results for “Medicare for All.” In a January town hall, Warren echoed the Booker line on Medicare for All, saying she is “open to different paths” to get there. As Tim Higginbotham outlines in Jacobin, Warren routinely sidesteps the issue of single-payer in her public appearances. If you’re fighting for health justice, you’ll be going it alone with Warren in the White House.

Now enter the senator from Vermont. Sanders has been banging the Medicare for All drum for two years now. The presence of M4A in the national discourse can be traced mostly to his advocacy. When Sanders talks about healthcare, he uses direct, rousing language about what health justice means: immediate abolition of the parasitic health insurance industry, and the immediate imposition of government price controls on pharmaceuticals. Achieving any kind of single-payer will involve a massive fight between a grassroots, people’s movement and corporate power. Sanders’s rhetoric centers that grassroots movement — indeed, encourages it.

Warren, on the other hand . . . well, she has a plan. She has policy papers! All those Wisconsinites who sat out the 2016 election will visit her website, stroke their chin, and say to themselves, “Now this Warren gal, she’s got some good policies,” then drive straight to the polls. That is the assumption which undergirds Warren’s electoral strategy. It is a losing strategy.

There is a pernicious bias in American politics that prevents us from appreciating just how bad it is to refuse leadership on Medicare for All: we fetishize the refusal to do evil and ignore the refusal to do good. It is evil to advocate changing the status quo for the worse, and it can be equally evil to refuse to change the status quo for the better. The passage of Trumpcare would have caused a similar number of deaths and bankruptcies as can be tied to the current refusal to implement single-payer healthcare.

Of course, accusing Warren of tacit support for the status quo requires justification. In many cases there is more than one way to move out of the status quo and towards a common goal. We may agree that a postcapitalist utopia is desirable, but that doesn’t mean we should launch a revolution tomorrow, so opposition to that revolution could not reasonably be equivocated with support for the status quo. In order to draw that equivalence in the case of Warren and the Sanders bill, we must first put the bill through a rigorous test. As it happens, it passes with flying colors.

1. The bill is unpopular: That is a lie. 70% of Americans, and 55% of Republicans, favor Medicare for All.
2. People don’t want to lose their employer-provided insurance: That data comes from fraudulent polling. The question “Would you like to lose your employer-provided insurance?” is dishonest; respondents assume that losing their insurance entails being left in the lurch. The relevant question is, “Starting on January 1, 2021, would you like to stop ever thinking about health insurance again and start walking in and out of doctors’ offices and hospitals without any discussion of payment?” I think the polling results on that question can be predicted in advance.
3. It will backfire: That is based on a faulty understanding of politics. Immediately upon passage, the legislation will be demonized, and conservative pundits will call for armed revolution. Then, Americans will live with the new system for a couple years and realize that there’s no going back. If the American public is inherently hostile to welfare spending, then why is it so difficult for conservatives to cut Medicare and Social Security? Because once a benefit is handed out, it becomes popular. There are many problems with the NHS in the U.K., but the public agrees nearly unanimously that healthcare should never be privatized. The main problems with the NHS come from its being underfunded.
4. It will be difficult to achieve: That is a correct proposition. In order to achieve Medicare for All, left-wing roadblocks like Beto O’Rourke, Pete Buttigieg, Joe Biden, and the Center for American Progress must be knocked down. Those threats seem paltry to me. And even if passage of a bill is difficult, is that really a reason not to try?
5. We have time to think: That is dangerously false. People are dying while those of us with the luxury to do so sit around and debate.

Indeed, the Sanders bill (which carries Pramila Jayapal’s name in the House) would implement universal healthcare within two years, and it is the only “plan” on the table that would do that. So yes, it is unequivocally harmful to sit on the sidelines of Medicare-for-All advocacy.

Warren on imperialism

Warren has a deeply troubling record on American imperialism. Certainly, war crimes are quite popular in the United States. The man responsible for the Iraq War is still showing his face in public, and the leading newspaper is currently sabres a-rattle at the prospect of destroying the other “Ira” country, presumably for the sake of symmetry. But that doesn’t mean war crimes are good. In fact, they are actually worse than murder. The Nuremberg tribunal called a war of aggression “the supreme international crime”: the invading party is responsible not only for the murders it commits, but also for the deaths that follow in the wake of the invasion, since those would all have been preventable.

Warren has a long history of applauding war crimes. In Israel’s 2014 invasion of Gaza, 2,200 people were killed, including 1,380 noncombatants and 530 child noncombatants.** This is to say nothing of the further destruction of medical and sewage infrastructure. Warren gave this heinous crime the thumbs-up: at a town hall in August of that year, she said, “when Hamas puts its rocket launchers next to hospitals, next to schools, they’re using their civilian population to protect their military assets,” a tired line that is trotted out every couple of years by the Israeli government to explain why child-murder is not actually murder when Israel does it. Warren went on to defend Israel’s “right to defend itself,” a right which Israel is most certainly not exercising when it murders children.

Warren has voted for criminal sanctions on Iran and Venezuela. American presidents approve sanctions quite casually, but it should be noted that people, notably children, die as the direct result of sanctions on poor countries such as these.

Warren has also been a vocal opponent of peace on the Korean peninsula. An overwhelming majority of South Koreans seek an end to the Korean War, an American-initiated conflagration that killed 4 million Koreans and served no defensive purpose. To be sure, I’d rather have Chuck E. Cheese leading our negotiations with Kim Jong-Un than Donald Trump. But publicly opposing American efforts to achieve peace with North Korea, as Warren has done, is a different matter. A war with North Korea would involve the destruction of Seoul, the creation of a crippling refugee crisis, and millions of civilian deaths on both sides of the DMZ. We should invade if and only if we are on death’s doorstep. Prioritizing unilateral nuclear disarmament over peace is a genocidal stance. It is also chauvinist, since it entails that the U.S. is the only nation well-intentioned enough to possess nuclear weapons. (Funnily enough, the U.S. is the only country in the world to have used nukes, with a death toll of between 130,000 and 230,000 civilians stemming from the events of August 6–9, 1945.)

It should be caveated that Sanders has made his own troubling statements on Israel. He opposes the BDS movement, and he once signed a letter calling out antisemitic behavior on the part of the UN. Sanders will likely be forced to make significant compromises with the overwhelming power of the Israel lobby and the military-industrial complex. But Sanders is also the most anti-imperialist major presidential candidate in a generation, if not in history. He called for the abolition of the CIA in 1974, he is one of the few political figures to call out the criminal blockade of Gaza, and he has been at the forefront of the movement to end the Yemen War. Warren would like to see him defeated, in favor of a more hawkish candidate (herself). This could mean a difference of thousands of deaths.

Why compromise?

In sum, Warren is a pale imitation of Sanders. The extent that Warren is good is the extent to which she mirrors Sanders — on free college, on breaking up certain corporations, on cosponsoring Medicare for All. Why settle for anything less than the man himself? Sanders has a massive grassroots movement to back him up; Warren does not. Sanders uses powerful rhetoric that carves out well-defined battle-lines in the fight for justice; Warren’s favorite line is “check out this policy paper.” Sure, Warren would be the first female president. But Michele Bachmann would have been too. I can think of only one reason why one might settle for Warren: a concession to corporate power.

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* Obama has a 56% approval rating. See p. 116 of https://harvardharrispoll.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/HHP_May2019_RegisteredVoters_Topline.pdf.

** It pains me to say “child noncombatants,” as if child combatants are any different, but the regrettable state of the public discourse necessitates that language.