“It’s coming down to a choice between Federalism vs Socialism,” Senator Lindsey Graham proclaimed on Twitter earlier this week. “I chose Federalism of #GrahamCassidy.” His tweet echoed his words at a press conference days earlier, where he framed his Affordable Care Act repeal bill as the only way “to stop a march toward socialism.”

It’s unclear if the Republican senator realized that he was cribbing from socialist revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg. In a pamphlet composed a century ago while in prison, Luxemburg wrote: “Bourgeois society stands at the crossroads, either transition to socialism or regression into barbarism.” Graham, presumably, didn’t mean to liken his bill to barbarism. But increasingly, those are the terms in which Americans view the health care debate—as a choice between socialism and regression. Republicans have used “socialized medicine” as a bogeyman—and they’ve steadily lost ground on the issue. Despite Graham’s attempts to portray the idea of caring for sick people regardless of their income level as a “nightmare” scenario, just 7 percent of those polled thought Graham-Cassidy would help them.



The repeated rebukes of attempts to undo Obamacare have shown that the average American is no longer moved by the threat of the “S-word.” If we are on a slippery slope toward socialized medicine, it appears that Americans are just fine with that. For the left, there’s a lot to learn from the successful battles against going backward on health care—lessons about how Trump-era politics can be used to push “socialist” policies that move Democrats, and the American public, forward in unexpected ways.

Introduced after the Bernie Sanders Medicare for all bill made its debut with 16 co-sponsors in the Senate, the Graham-Cassidy bill looked all the worse by comparison. Both bills arrived at the end of a summer of activism, a summer that has treated us repeatedly to the sight of people in wheelchairs carted out of the Senate chanting, “No cuts to Medicaid! Save our liberty!” The health care movement has been led by the people directly affected—people with disabilities, in many cases, along with veterans of the AIDS movement. They understood the power of spectacle, initiating those dramatic clashes at the Capitol. They also know better than anyone the inequalities baked into the existing system. Their fighting skills were honed fighting for decades against those who say, implicitly or explicitly, that they don’t deserve care.

Of course, politicians have long been disconnected from the American public on the issue of health care. But the movement to defend Obamacare has drawn into stark relief the difference between what people want and what politicians want to offer. Republicans like Graham banked on the attachment Americans have to the class system we like to pretend doesn’t exist. They played on the idea, honed through decades of dog-whistles, that government programs are always giveaways for the undeserving poor and people of color. As one law professor and conservative columnist complained on Twitter, “Years from now, when your child is denied a liver transplant bc of transplant diversity goals, you’ll be sorry you allowed single-payer.”