One of the most disorienting aspects of Trumpistan is finding yourself agreeing with people like Bill Kristol. Kristol - for those of you who aren't familiar with his body of work - earned the sobriquet "the world's wrongest pundit" back in the Bush Era. The joke/truth was that you could do pretty well in life by assuming everything Kristol said was wrong and doing the opposite. Much of this had to do with Bush Era foreign policy, but still...seeing him make really cogent, relevant and accurate points about Trump is odd.
Kristol's first brush with fame was likely back in 1993 when he warned the GOP that allowing Clinton and the Democrats to create a universal health care system would create a new generation of Democratic voters, similar to the way the New Deal did. The lockstep polarization of the subsequent 25 years in some ways proceeds from that moment.
The thing is: Kristol was probably right about the politics of health care. As Jon Chait points out, the ACA has become more popular over time, not less. And the overall health care landscape has shifted to accommodate this. Any GOP hope of killing Obamacare was lost in 2012 when Romney lost. The truly "conservative" position is to make Obamacare work, not continually working to sabotage it. Health care voters are exactly that combination of working class and suburban voters that Republicans rely on. Losing them is simply electoral suicide.
The next Democratic administration combined with a Democratic Congress (capable of passing legislation) will move us one step closer to a universal single player system. Of course, that was always the goal of Obamacare, and it's what the Clintons missed in 1994 and Ted Kennedy missed back in the Nixon Administration.
As frustrating as it is to watch GOP misgovernance and sabotage, they are laying the groundwork for an electoral coalition to make a better, fairer America.
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