If this health-care-reform thing happens, people will find Reasons Why It Happened. Look at what happened when Scott Brown won in Massachusetts: people tried to look for a Large Trend or whatever that explained why the Republicans were taking over. Brown won with 52% of the vote — certainly a solid lead, but not exactly a landslide. Many things could have caused a three-percent swing in votes. Coakley could have been a better candidate, for instance. But once Brown won, journalists had to opine on What It All Means — because it had to Mean Something.

Now here we are on the eve of what looks like the greatest progressive victory since Medicare. I, for one, am incredibly excited. I’m excited both because 32 million of the least fortunate Americans will have a safety net beneath them that’s a bit stronger; and because I hope that this will energize progressives toward future victories.

So now the press will have to come up with explanations. Health reform succeeded because Nancy Pelosi is one of the greatest Speaker in House history, for instance. The Republicans failed because the Tea Party movement, while important, was ragtag and ill-focused. Etc.

But we were all alive over the last year. We saw where this could have failed any number of times. It could have failed if House Democrats had fallen apart after Scott Brown’s victory, as it looked like they would. It could have failed last summer if the Tea Party thing had freaked people out more than it did. Had it failed at any of those moments, the press would be looking for reasons. Nancy Pelosi would still be the Speaker, but now she’d be the worst Speaker in House history — squandering a massive lead, etc., etc. Flip a few Congressmen the other way, and suddenly the narrative changes massively.

I’m not saying that this victory — should it happen — is entirely arbitrary; of course it’s not. What I *am* saying is that, if it were as inevitable and foreordained as the narrative will make it out to be, then no one would have panicked over the last year.

I like simple explanations as much as anyone else. I like, for instance, the Larry Bartels model that predicts presidential elections on the basis of macroeconomic factors like the unemployment rate. So far as I know, there’s no such model predicting victory in this health-reform debate. The only explanations that people can advance are post-facto ones.

Which doesn’t bother me a bit, in this case. My side looks like it’s going to win. (If it doesn’t, I will do the appropriate amount of crow-eating.) If this will have any effects, they will be positive effects for my side. Victory is like that.

What I’m curious about is how long-lasting the effects of a victory — any victory of this magnitude — are. It’ll help us, but for how long?

What would people like to attack after this? Financial-system reform?

Via Matt Yglesias’s Twitter feed: a really disgusting round of conservative class-baiting, mocking those who lack insurance and suffer as a result.

It’s really quite simple, and it’s really been quite simple for at least this past year: there are those who care about protecting the uninsured, and there are those who don’t. There are those who think it’s a problem that 30 million or more Americans suffer and die needlessly, and there are those who don’t. If you see it as a problem, you search for ways to solve it; if you don’t, you don’t.

Of course there are those who believe that government just cannot solve the problem. But these folks have proposed remarkably thin gruel in response; e.g., the Republican “plan” that will only cover 3 million people. The only reasonable conclusion is that Republicans don’t think there’s an actual problem.

If they could come right and say that they don’t care about the uninsured, at least we’d have some honesty. But they know that Americans want health coverage for their uninsured countrymen. So they have to come up with “solutions” that don’t actually solve anything and cost very little. Health insurance, in this mode, is about marketing rather than solving problems: Republicans can continue to market themselves as the party of fiscal discipline and mock Democrats as “tax and spend”, all without actually doing anything.

So again, the choice is simple: either you think it’s a problem that tens of millions of your fellow-Americans lack insurance and can go bankrupt just by getting sick, or you don’t. If you do, there’s one political party that’s trying to solve it, and one that views the uninsured as a marketing tool. If you believe that the uninsured are a problem, but you have problems with the Democrats’ plans, do all you can to fix those plans. Don’t look to Republicans for a solution, because all they have to offer is empty sloganeering.