The UAW strike shows why America needs universal healthcare: our system bankrupts industry and leaves the middle and working classes vulnerable. The President’s (and major Republican candidates’) commitment to ideology over problem-solving---not just in healthcare but across the board---opens space for a progressive coalition to emerge as the practical, empirically-minded, responsible choice. Progressives will have to take the right's ideology head-on and own the fact that government is indispensable for a competitive economy and for middle-class security.

GM faces staggering “legacy costs” that have rendered it unable to compete with its Japanese rivals. (It’s ironic, as Timothy Noah has pointed out, out market-based healthcare system affects GM more than any other employer, given that Michael Moore denounced its practices in Roger and Me as he now denounces the market-based healthcare system.) What’s bad for GM in this case is bad for GM’s workers, and universal healthcare would be good for both. This same week, the President reiterated his promise to veto the expansion of a popular and successful children’s health insurance program. Why? Not because it won’t work, but actually, it seems, because the program would work. “The bill goes too far toward federalizing health care," he proclaimed, "and turns a program meant to help low-income children into one that covers children in some households with incomes of up to $83,000 a year.” Exactly, Mr. President: our system leaves lots of people who should be comfortably upper-middle class insecure, and this bill provides the beginnings of a solution.

The rigid ideology that decreased regulation and increased privatization are goods in themselves, rather than means to some other end, has consequences in other areas as well. Americans, it turns out, have some of the slowest broadband in the developed world. Japan’s, for example is over 20 times as fast. And those French, who were always being told need to face facts and deregulate (see this typical column by Roger Cohen noting “paralyzing French hypocrisy”), post similar numbers. In addition, these countries have more subscribers per capita than we do. And why? As Paul Krugman noted in a recent column, American policymakers have “ignore[d] the reality that sometimes you can’t have effective market competition without effective regulation.” Other countries force internet providers to act as common carriers, which has allowed competition to flourish, while, in the United States, companies that own the lines can act as a monopoly. “If you’re lucky,” writes Krugman, “you have a choice between the services offered by the local cable monopoly and the local phone monopoly. The price is high and the service is poor, but there’s nowhere else to go.”

This commitment to business over empirical thinking (at the cost of functioning capitalism) has hurt the U.S. economy and most everyone in it, both huge corporations and average employees. Student loans provide another excellent example: it's cheaper and more efficient for the government to issue loans directly, but we've hiked up costs and created inefficiencies just so private actors can be involved (and get a piece of the pie). Progressives can use patriotic arguments, along with empirical ones, to restore rationality to our political discourse and, in the process, win over new constituencies. Oh yeah, and make life better for lots of people.