We need total revolt and the total removal of profit from care
An interview on disability justice with Death Panel's Beatrice Adler-Bolton
There’s a brand of Twitter account out there (Conservative Self-Owns, accidentally based, Conservative L’s) in which frothy-mouthed right-wingers horseshoe theory themselves into common sense leftist political beliefs. The other night, I saw a clip that would be a prime subject for the page. It was of Tucker Carlson, Fox News’ most indignant clown, stoking the fears of the anti-vaxx pack. His incendiary remarks included this doggerel: “If they can force you to take a vaccine you don’t need, what can’t they do? Why don’t they, idk, make you take psychiatric drugs if you’re persistently disobedient?” While this is a prime example of a slippery slope fallacy, the bad faith argument points to a real issue: People are being forced to take psychiatric medications against their will and that is worthy of outrage. But not, as Tucker postures, because YOU may be next.
Beatrice Adler-Bolton is an MA candidate at the City University of New York (CUNY) and co-host of the illuminating podcast about the political economy of health, Death Panel. During our conversation, she covers a lot, including a good faith argument, from a leftist framework, as to why forced psychiatric care is bad. (Spoiler: it has nothing to do with the vaccine.)
The breadth of knowledge Beatrice, also a writer and disability justice advocate, spoke with was impressive, to say the least. I was often left flabbergasted, which is to say I learned a lot. One of the aims of this newsletter is to hear from a diverse group of voices on a diverse set of topics. Like me, you may know little about the burgeoning field of disability studies. Don’t be intimidated. This interview is a great introduction and, if I’ve done my job right, you’ll finish reading and subscribe to the pod.
Me: You were saying you had just recorded an episode of Death Panel. How did you begin that? What was the genesis of that?
Beatrice: Of how we do a typical episode? Or, how we plan it?
Me: I guess more like, “How did you begin doing podcasting?”
Beatrice: Oooh. That’s a much more interesting question. I kept looking for [a show like Death Panel] and not finding it. And looking for something that tried to bring not just feminist movements and left-wing movements together, but bring in health justice and disability justice in a way that’s outside of the civil rights framework into left political thought. It just didn’t exist. It came out of a couple of late nights drinking too much being like, “You know we could do it ourselves.” And we just figured it out from the ground up.
My partner and co-author Artie [Vierkant], who is also one of the co-hosts of the show, he and I are both artists and he comes from a background where he’s done a lot of video editing but neither of us had any experience with audio formats at all before. It was something we both found incredibly compelling from the perspective of being able to create a very intimate space for the listener. It’s a really good space to digest conversationally these really big issues that we try and tackle in the political economy of health, which is so nebulous. There’s this long history of artists’ projects interfacing with pirate radio or the appropriation of mass media technologies to expand more fluid, interdisciplinary art practices.
It became our whole lives from there because, sometimes, it can feel really pointless to have a studio practice that’s just within the art world. It became this part of our creative and intellectual lives that was just so much bigger than what we had been able to work with before. It’s been like going back to school, the type of research we do. It’s really intensive and a lot of fun.
Me: What’s the feedback been like?
Beatrice: Sometimes people don’t really know what to think of us because maybe the name is scary or they’re not totally sure what health care has to do with so many things. But I think the most wonderful thing has been the community created around the show. It’s from such a fantastic array of backgrounds. People are really into it. It’s one of those hidden gem restaurants that everybody knows and everybody goes to anyways and it’s not really a secret but there’s this in-community that’s really into it. I think that’s the space we’re in now.
Our Discord is super weird and cool. I would have never expected to have this independent community flourish with the show being the thing in common for a lot of people to get to know each other. It’s been incredible to get to talk to so many people about the ways in which so many of our individual health care struggles actually intersect because it can feel very solitary and lonely when you’re actually going through it. The process is so individuated: Everything’s got its own billing code, everybody has their own plan. It really discourages opportunities to not only build solidarity to push back against these austerity frameworks, but it also doesn’t really offer opportunities to have other people understand what you’re going through.
It’s such a specific process to your plan and your provider and what prescription you’re on. It’s nice to be able to find those intersections despite the fact that the health system, as it exists within its relationship to capitalism, really discourages that. So it feels unusual and special to be able to talk to so many people and collectively work towards building a stronger and better idea of what single-payer is and what it could even do.
Me: So what is single-payer and what can it do?
Beatrice: [Laughs] My elevator pitch would be that it’s a tool; not an end. It’s a means by which we can try and leverage much-needed changes and overhauls to the way that we pay for and commodify health. A lot of people think, “Oh, if we could just get Medicare for All, everything would be fine.” But that’s the kind of magical perfectionist thinking that’s going to doom all movements to failure. Policy has to be thought of as a tool, as like, what can it do? And what single-payer does is—pun intended—cripples an industry that’s had a stranglehold over the price ceiling and has had an incredible influence on how we allocate health resources and how those resources are distributed. And this is why it’s important to advocate for, in a very specific and exact way, and be very precise when we talk about what we want in health care reform because health care reform can be bad, it can racist. Just because it’s reform, doesn’t mean that it’s good.
By putting everybody under one pricing structure, it creates a bargaining body that’s massive.
It’s important to push for single-payer that includes long-term care, that doesn’t have a citizenship requirement, that doesn’t have cost-sharing, and—that most importantly—doesn’t have room for private insurance. Without those things, as a policy tool, it offers us none of the leverage that we basically would want to use single-payer to gain.
By putting everybody under one pricing structure, it creates a bargaining body that’s massive. And the reason that we don’t have single-payer is because people in power—the owning class, private insurance companies, pharmaceutical companies, whatever, the global capitalist cabal—would lose their power. We’d have incredible leverage over many of these parasitic industries that rely on the overinflation of the commodification of the maintenance of health.
We like to approach health care as a social determinance of health: housing is healthcare, food is healthcare, clean air, clean water, Green New Deal, you know, these are the kind of things that we’ve segmented and siloed off into different industries. You know: mental health care, and people who do housing work over here, and then you have people who do harm reduction, or—even worse—the more criminalized practices for helping out populations with chaotic drug users. And in that siloing of like, “These are all separate interests; health and medicine are different,” we’ve taken away the power of the bargaining that we could have to determine a more total social state of material health that encompasses a broader vision that pushes back against “productivity” and work.
It’s like, “How do we use norms and laws and policy to force in these structural interventions where leverage can be built where it currently doesn’t exist?” That’s my short pitch.
Me: All right. There’s a lot there. So are you saying that the apparatus of Big Pharma is creating all these disparate ways that we view and deal with issues in the health community?
Beatrice: I don’t think that it’s one industry in particular. I think it is all of the industries that profit off of the maintenance of human bodies. And this relates partially to an idea that’s most often credited to Marta Russell, who is a late disabilities studies scholar, who wrote about Marxism and disability and civil rights.
Her idea was called the “Money Model of Disability,” which is the idea that we value people based on their productivity and when they cannot be productive, they’re pushed out of the job market and their body is profited from. The perfect example of that is a nursing home where it becomes this venue of federal funding and private funding to get funneled through an industry to provide care. That is ultimately going to a company that is going to make money off of it.
There’s this larger picture and we’ve become this seed to generate and reproduce capital in the current formulation of how health exists under capitalism.
It’s not that it’s one industry. It’s not that it’s Pharma; it’s not that it’s hospitals; it’s not that it’s the A.M.A. [American Medical Association]. It’s all of them. It’s every place that capital and health intersect. And this is what the book that my partner Artie and I are writing right now is about. It’s actually the whole thing. And part of the game is to realize that the whole thing is the problem. That it’s all of the different industries and all of different ways that capitalism treats health as a commodity. That is so tied into our identities as workers or non-workers.
There’s this larger picture and we’ve become this seed to generate and reproduce capital in the current formulation of how health exists under capitalism. [Writer Timothy] Faust jokes that it’s like a spear: it cracks the shield and creates an opening actually not just to destabilize the commodification of health care but also so many other things because health is this underlying structure under capitalism that is required for profit.
Me: I think you’re a lot smarter than I am. I’m trying to come up with questions that are not just stupid or reductive. Why don’t you tell me about the book you’re working on for Verso.
Beatrice: It’s called Health Communism: A Surplus Manifesto and the draft is due in September so we’re in the final crunch right now. It’s an argument to connect all these things that we’re told are separate in order to see through some of the common lies.
Like, that mentally ill people are dangerous, which research study after research study after research study disproves, and yet you have Andrew Yang running for mayor of New York saying mentally ill people are quote-unquote “responsible for all the upticks in violence and we need to reopen the state asylum system and start locking people up again.” It doesn’t matter how much we study it and how many studies we put out, ultimately we need more tools and more leverage to push back on these arbitrary structures that do not benefit us in any way but are integral to the maintenance of a capitalist political hierarchy.
It’s basically like, your body is actually the weapon. All of our bodies are. And our ability to have autonomy over our own health is something that is absolutely in our grasp. We just need to find the political will and solidarity to assert it.
Me: Does your art practice also intersect with your fight for better treatment for people with different abilities?
Beatrice: Not really. I’m kind of a boring painter who makes paintings about depth and light. A very pedantic abstract painter. It’s what my life was before I got sick. I got sick right at the beginning of art school. It’s always existed together and separate. My practice has changed because of things like my vision changing. But it’s not necessarily thematically related, though it is obviously influenced by the aesthetic of being someone who is medicalized and being in the hospital. It’s more that there’s inspiration that’s mutual.
There are artists like Christine Sun Kim, who is in the [79th] Whitney Biennial, who makes these diagrams and conceptual drawings. She’s Deaf. And her work is very advocacy-oriented. And mine’s very much not. But ultimately, it’s very difficult to separate out that political from the aesthetic at the end of the day. It’s all the same identity and perspective making the work.
Me: Would you be comfortable sharing…you said you got sick. How did you find that out? How did you get diagnosed?
Beatrice: It was a mess. Most people with weird, or even really common things, it can be a really long journey to get diagnosed. I have an autoimmune disease that’s really rare. It’s like this vasculitis so inflammation runs rampant and attacks different things. That makes different bad shit happen, like headaches or not being able to feel my hands or feet, or going blind. All through college, it was just catastrophe after catastrophe. I was at Cooper [Union] and then something else would happen and my hand would be so swollen I couldn’t open it and no one could tell me what was wrong with me. Everyone was like, “You’re too young. Maybe you’re stressed. Maybe you need to drop out of school.”
“Maybe you should wear white cotton gloves because your skin is too sensitive for New York City,” was what an actual dermatologist told me. I got told that I was malingering and that it was about attention. It, tragically, took going blind to get diagnosed because many people who have autoimmune diseases, they’ll have these symptoms build up until there’s one symptom that makes it click. So, finally, after five years off and on of dozens of doctor visits ending in a, “Why don’t you ask somebody else?” I met one doctor who figured it out and everything just took off from there. Thank goodness.
Me: This is a really common thing that I hear, especially from women, and I’ve been told especially even more for black women, that doctors are not helpful. That they are condescending. I’ve always had an issue with doctors.
I had cancer when I was a teenager. It wasn’t a difficult diagnosis and I think my treatment was straightforward. It was fucking shitty but it was straightforward. Something about doctors doesn’t sit right with me. We give them too much adulation. It’s a similar thing to the police: People become cops because they think it’s gonna give this important authority center. People become doctors because they think it’s gonna make them important. And then you go to school for a super fucking long time and then you think once you’ve done that that you’re a brilliant expert. Then people come in and say, “I was reading about this thing on WebMD…” and they say, “Hold on! I’m a doctor. What do you know? What does WebMD know?” What’s going on here? Why is this a thing so many people experience?
Beatrice: You’re right that it’s a very common experience. There’s that meme of doctors having a mug that says, “Your Google search is not my medical degree” or something like that. Like crime statistics, sometimes the sensational cases tend to obscure what’s actually going on which is that most doctors that I talk to are actually very uncomfortable with the position of authority that they’re given in culture.
There are definitely a lot of doctors who abuse it and absolutely are in it for the acclaim. But I think there are also a lot of doctors that don’t feel like they’re represented by the American Medical Association and are anti-capitalist and are not OK with the carcerality of their profession. One of the biggest problems, actually, is that there’s so little room for new or edgy opinions within certain professions.
The kind of respectability limits what people feel like they can have as a politic or as a life-position and my perspective on doctors has really changed since starting Death Panel. It’s the kind of show I would expect doctors to roll their eyes at maybe or be like, “What is this random anarchist-communist patient doing talking about health finance? What does she know?” And that’s absolutely been the case from some people, sure. But it’s also not. Our server is full of doctors: some in school, some out of school who are like, “I fucking hate the way my job makes me act. I hate the way that it’s shaped the way my colleagues look at the world who are maybe five or 10 years older than me or who are fully embedded in the structure where they’re benefiting off of this extractive capitalist model of health.”
There is a growing body of doctors who are really not OK with this and that gives me actually tremendous hope. I recently got to talk to a bunch of med students about disability justice. There’s this group, Physicians for a National Health Program, and they’ve been a single-payer doctor’s group and they have a student arm and they asked me to talk about disability justice. I was basically like, “You gotta start seeing your patients are peers and collaborators.” We specifically need to push back against this expertise framework that you’re pointing out is so harmful.
The separation of doctors as this separate class of people and this cult of exceptionalism both prevent them from having this political life that they absolutely should have. And if they did have, could be a great benefit to all sorts of liberatory movements. To have physicians resisting like they did back in the ‘70s in the anti-psychiatry movement. We wouldn’t have had asylums closed if the doctors weren’t like, “What the fuck are we doing? We have to stop.”
It’s well-documented that when doctors come out of med school, they tend to have a lower opinion of what the quality of a disabled person’s life is than before they entered.
We need to foster those relationships and build solidarity and bonds in patients who have very little reason to trust doctors. But I think there is so much there that can be built and the fact that there are doctors hanging out socially in our server with patients, with queer teens, teachers, they’re all hanging out and talking about politics and capitalism and creating these bonds that would have been unimaginable 10 or 15 years ago because someone would have been ostracized if they were a doctor for associating with a left politic in public.
Making that accessible to more people and pushing back on the idea that these expert physicians need to be cops by default is a really important way forward. Otherwise, it’s just gonna get worse. The way that doctors treat patients now largely betrays the fact that medical education teaches people to dehumanize the subject.
It’s well-documented that when doctors come out of med school, they tend to have a lower opinion of what the quality of a disabled person’s life is than before they entered. You have all these problems that you see so often in childhood cancer for example, where you have patients stripped of autonomy because they’re children and they can’t be seen to be making a decision that we’d allow an adult to make about treatment or about care.
There’s a paternalism that is a component of medical culture, which is absolutely not necessary. Dismantling these perceived requirements of doctors having to be this separate class of people and pushing doctors to build bonds outside of their community and question their own authority, which they don’t necessarily have a right to, I think that that’s the only way forward. If we continue to see each other in opposition as fundamentally two classes of patient and doctor, we’re playing the capitalist game for them, and we’re wasting our time fighting each other.
Me: I’d like to throw another person into the ring there. We’ve been talking about doctors and patients. Where do nurses fall into this dynamic? I see them as being an intermediary link. They’re often denigrated in status and treated worse, but does that make them easier to radicalize? (Idk if that’s the ultimate goal.)
Beatrice: I think radicalization is the goal. We absolutely need to start being honest about that if we’re gonna win anything. Socialized medicine is an on-ramp to communism and that’s where we’re hoping to go. Nurses have always been a huge part of the movement for single-payer. I think they’ve always represented a vanguard of the medical profession. But what I would love to see is also to not just uplift the credentialed employees of the medical system, but also the people who work the front desk. It’s also the people who do billing. They’re the ones who know, better than anyone else, how fucked up it is. They’re the ones doing the paperwork and getting all those denials and having to call those patients.
We need total revolt. We need total revolt and the total removal of profit from care. That’s the real goal we advocate for on Death Panel. We try to be really clear that we’re talking about a “Big Idea” and yeah, we don’t care that you want us to tell you how to pay for it. Who gives a shit?
Me: I really liked the Britney Spears conservatorship article. What made you want to write about that?
Beatrice: Well, thank you first of all. I appreciate that. I wasn’t sure if anyone was gonna care because the Britney case is so obviously fucked up that it’s hard to make the case that actually it’s worth looking at stuff that’s even more fucked up.
But Britney offers such tremendous visibility to a population of people that never get to speak for themselves. That’s the thing I found so fascinating and I really wanted to be able to convey to people how rare the testimony is and how common mispractice, particularly of imposing medication, is.
Erick Fabris is credited with the term “chemical incarceration.” He’s a psychiatric system survivor, he’s an advocate, an academic, and an ethnographer. He studies madness and he studies the way society constructs madness and mental illness and he says, “If you think about this practice, it’s so normalized.” People put their pets on psychiatric medications without a thought. We give our cats Xanax. It’s not to say that the drugs are bad. It’s that we say they’re for one purpose and yet we use them for all these other things.
The ways in which we use them, often, are in a coercive way that is imposed. That’s happening to Britney—in particular with having her autonomy taken from her through the legal architecture that justifies her infantilized position. [Ed: This interview occurred on July 15; Britney has since become free of her conservatorship for the first time in 13 years.]
On top of it, the use of sedation to control people who are deemed to be non-normative is super widespread and it’s something that we don’t talk about and that people don’t know about because we think that madness is dangerous. We want everyone to be medicated, but nobody knows what that actually means.
Me: You’re talking about one specific thing: Having medicine forced on you in order to make you more…
Beatrice: Manageable, usually. It’s usually in a situation where someone’s under observation and they’re in a psychiatric hold and in order to be sent home they have to sign a form saying, “I agree I’m going to take meds” and it’s not really a choice if they want to or not. There’s also so many other degrees of it, too.
Me: What I’m wondering is, “Do you think we’ve internalized this lesson? Do we tend to try to make ourselves docile using certain medications in order to better fit into a capitalist framework?”
Beatrice: Yeah. The research question that’s designed a lot of medications, particularly in the psychiatric space, has been trying to find ways to medicate normalcy under a very narrow definition of what normalcy is.
I’m someone who takes psychiatric medications so I’m not anti-medicine and I’m not saying they’re not real or necessary. It’s just that there are certain driving forces between what problems we’ve been trying to solve in science that are driven by these capitalistic drives more than anything else.
It’s not a problem of Pharma; it’s a problem of all science really. The way we look at the world is colored by a lens of capitalism. When we see someone not feeling well, our definition of them not feeling well is not really about them, it’s about what effect that has on their productivity as a worker.
If I’m like, “Oh, are you not feeling well? How bad was it?” And you’re like, “I had to stay home from work.” Culturally, that connotes more serious illness and the longer you’re out of work, the more serious you think an illness is. This larger problem of how we think of the worth of a human-being being shaped around this economic framework in our society as a whole. So pharmaceuticals, like a lot of science, is directed around trying to restore a normalcy that is a very narrow idea of normal under capitalism.
It leaves very little room for mental or bodily variation from the norm. This has led to Germany saying that queer people were crazy in the ‘70s and locking and medicating a bunch of queer people because they wanted to promote capitalistic heterosexuality. Eugenic experiments that we’ve done on ourselves to get to normal in the name of science. So many of the things medicalized bodies rely on day to day for survival are adapted from these capitalist frameworks.
Using them isn’t bad if it helps you survive. Who gives a shit why it’s made? But it’s important to understand that the things that become part of your body when you are medicalized have this other history and being aware of that is incredibly important. It can become very easy to devalue yourself as a person if you think in those frameworks because then taking medicine means you’re non-productive and you’re not good. Taking medicine just means you take medicine. Who cares? Does that make sense?
Me: That makes sense. You’re currently at the CUNY grad program, is that right?
Beatrice: Yes, in disability studies
Everybody has already tread over everything in academia. It’s cool to find a space where you can still be super weird and no one really cares
Me: So, was that always your trajectory or was this something that took on a new interest once you were diagnosed?
Beatrice: This was something that I took on in conjunction with starting the show, which was also realizing that there was more that I could do outside of an art practice. That there were also ideas I had about the social processes of disability that I wanted to contribute to that discipline as well having come into that identity—and my dad was disabled.
If you had asked me 20 years ago, would you be in disabilities studies I would have been like, “What are you talking about?” Or “What is disabilities studies?” probably. But it’s a really under-theorized area. Everybody has already tread over everything in academia. It’s cool to find a space where you can still be super weird and no one really cares. I don’t think I could get along in a normal academic environment. Disabilities studies is a good place I’ve grown into.
Me: You’re saying it’s a new field. When did it begin?
Beatrice: The first people trying to theorize that this should exist as a discipline started in the late ‘60s and ‘70s. But it didn’t start getting incorporated into academic architecture formally until the late ‘80s / early ‘90s. And even then it was met with ridicule, derision, and eye-rolling. The only comments from Camille Paglia about disability on record is her putting down disabilities studies as being a self-sanctifying boondoggle or some shit.
Whenever any marginalized self-identity tries to organize to study itself you meet resistance. You get the same kind of critique levied against trans studies or even things that we’d consider to be more legitimate, like the cultist discourse around CRT [Ed: Critical Race Theory, which the Right recently condemned]. People think that if you want to study these things that present our history in a less positive light, that it’s frivolous or being cringe or whiney. I think of it more as, “It’s one of the last places where I can see myself making a contribution where I wouldn’t be censoring myself to sound professional for the needs of surviving within an academic environment.”
Me: So are you saying that other academic environments are hostile toward your views? Are they way too involved in capital these days?
Beatrice: I think it’s a bit of both. There was definitely a Marxist purge of a lot of academic disciplines and thought has really suffered for it in the United States.
The Red Scare was pretty devastating. Part of it is professionalism and that sort of unwelcomeness to non-orthodox beliefs that comes with the Red Scare framework. It’s definitely that there’s hostility toward anti-capitalism and the insertion. It’s also that the way we fund research completely motivates this kind of thinking. It stops us from investigating things that don’t fit in the capitalist narrative.
The most obvious example is soda companies funding stuff that says, “High fructose corn syrup isn’t that bad for you.” Or, during the Covid pandemic, the CEO of Jet Blue being like, “It’s not a conflict of interest if I fund a study that says it’s actually totally fine to fly in the middle of a pandemic. What are you talking about?”
The scientific community was like, “Well he only gave them $10,000 so how much of a conflict of interest is that?” I think that really betrays the way that profit absolutely drives where research interest lands. It directs our intentions toward only things that reaffirm the fact that capitalism should and absolutely will continue to exist. And I don’t think that’s true. I think that’s absolutely false. Capitalism is a trend, like any other trend, and it is absolutely hegemonic until it’s not.
Me: Wait, do you know something I don’t know. Are we gonna get rid of it soon?
Beatrice: I mean, if we don’t think that way, we never will. What does soon mean?
Me: Well, I would hope within my lifetime. I’m really tired of all of it.
Beatrice: I don’t see why not. That’s my answer. I don’t see why not.
Me: This is kind of veering off but I was in Cleveland this weekend and they have an Auguste Rodin, one of The Thinkers [at the Cleveland Museum of Art]. In 1970, it got blown up. They don’t really know who did it but they think maybe the Weather Underground blew up the Rodin. It’s kind of fucked up, but it’s not totally destroyed and they keep it as a reminder.
It made me think, “Man, how do we get back to that ‘60s model of being absolutely ruthless?” The reason we’re not making any traction, in my estimation, is because we’re all tweeting, “Capitalism has to end.” And then we’re like, “All right, I did my hard work for the day.” Maybe I don’t want to go on record as advocating for, “We should blow shit up.” But, we should blow shit up. [Ed: See this poem, which I found in the interim since I said this and transcribed it, titled “I Want to Drop Out of Grad School and Suicide Bomb a Federal Building”.]
Beatrice: Sometimes, the, “Stop tweeting about it” argument is a canard. We definitely are pre-disposed to patting ourselves on the back for having just declared anti-capitalist sentiment publicly. But, on the flip side, if you think of it from the standpoint of manufacturing consent for something other than capitalism, if we think about the way the Iraq War was sold to the American public, repetition is incredibly important.
We shape our understanding of the world through language and repetition. So, on one hand, Twitter is not real life; but, on the other hand, praxis is real and trying to live it and think it all the time is doing something. It’s like the Johanna Hedva thing of like, “How do I throw a brick if I can’t get out of bed?”
There are ways to push back in your own mental framework. Just seeing through things for the racial capitalist truths that they are, that’s an important practice and it does pave the way for other people. But I do think we do need to stop being so worried about all of the feelings of the people in power and so worried about all of the challenges to our ideas and meeting everything with equal weight as we’re challenged. I’m really sick of the left even engaging in the pay-for argument when it comes to health care.
Deficit hawkary is bullshit. Reagan is dead. Let’s not resurrect him. Let’s not keep his memory alive. Let’s stop saying his name and stop feeling obligated to meet the Matt Yglesiases and the Ezra Kleins and the Fox News and the New York Times and the whoevers when they’re like, “Well, how are you gonna pay for Medicare for all? How are you gonna pay for long-term care? How are you gonna pay for all this stuff?”
I don’t care. It doesn’t matter. We’re paying for it anyway. We’re paying for it in our blood, sweat, and tears already and in literal sovereign currency on top of that so fuck you.
That’s an irrelevant question. And we need to stop feeling like we need to play respectable. We don’t need to be nice to these people. They have not earned our respect and they don’t deserve it. We need to not feel bad about being upset about the way Elizabeth Warren took the idea of Medicare for All and transformed it into something else. That’s fine. We don’t have to agree on everything. But we definitely don’t have to play ball in order to participate.
We need to stop feeling like we need to be nice and play along with the respectable electoral politics / we’re-gonna-do-this-one-Senate-seat-at-a-time smooth glide path toward reform and change. Like, no. All or nothing. C’mon. And if you don’t, there will be an accountability process with the people. We have to hold people accountable at a scale that we’re normally discouraged from doing.
There are no electoral consequences for not voting the way that your constituents want. There are only electoral consequences for not doing what lobbies want. Admonishing each other over how we’re voting is not gonna do anything.