On December 6, Democratic Senator Mary Landrieu of Louisiana lost a run-off election to Republican Rep. Bill Cassidy.  Time magazine explains why:

“Landrieu didn’t lose because of a superior opponent, but because of her association with a deeply unpopular President and his health-care law. Landrieu—the daughter of a former New Orleans mayor and the sister to the current one—lost more so than Republican Rep. Bill Cassidy won. Even Cassidy, who cruised to a win Saturday, acknowledges that to some extent. When asked to define the campaign’s turning point, he pointed to Landrieu’s support of the Affordable Care Act, which passed four years ago.”

There were other factors in her loss of course. But the idea that an otherwise good, probably superior, candidate lost primarily because of her support of Obamacare remains baffling to me. To be clear, I’m not naive. I understand the politics of the matter, so I am not baffled at that level. It’s just that I remain convinced that Obamacare is a fundamentally good idea — at least one that significantly improves the prior status quo. It doesn’t deserve the intense level of hostility and resistance in inspires among the opposition. Not even close.

The basic idea of the Affordable Care Act (aka Obamacare) is this: There is an individual mandate, which means you must have health insurance. For those who can afford it, you (or your employer) pays for the insurance. For those too poor to afford it, government subsidies fill the gap.

What does the average citizen get in exchange for this?

You get guaranteed insurance coverage no matter what. Even if you lose your job and remain unemployed for an extended period of time, you remain covered. In fact, if your income drops significantly, your costs go down.

Plus, you are guaranteed that you cannot be turned down for insurance because of a pre-existing medical condition. No longer can an insurance company tell you that because you have a heart condition, or whatever, they won’t sell you insurance.

Additionally, there are more peripheral, but still important, benefits — such as allowing your children to be covered by their parents’ insurance until they are 26. This can save a family money at a time when their kids may be in school — or just getting started in a job — and unable to pay the cost on their own.

As for the people who are getting subsidized by the government, this will likely save taxpayers money in the long run. Why? Because poor people will no longer have to depend on emergency rooms in public hospitals as their primary source of health care. Seeing a general practitioner in their office (covered by Obamacare) is much less expensive than a uninsured visit to the emergency room. The overall savings here are likely to be huge.

Yes, it means that some people will be “forced” to pay for insurance that might otherwise have unwisely chosen to go without any. But it is essential that the system works this way. Otherwise, people will choose to get insurance only when they are sick (thus always getting more in benefits than they pay in) and the system would soon go bankrupt. In any case, people who already have insurance will be able to keep it, often at a lower rate than they were paying before.

That’s it in a nutshell.

Sure, I understand that this is a best-case-scenario vision of what Obamacare does. The devil, as they say, is in the details. And there are problems at the detail level. For example, for some individuals, the cost of insurance under Obamacare has turned out to be significantly more than they were paying before. In most cases, the reported problems are not intended consequences of the Act. They are the result of an imperfect implementation of the plan. No major legislation is ever perfect the first time around. Obamacare is no exception.

This doesn’t mean the solution is to repeal the act or gut its essential provisions. If Obamacare doesn’t work well in every instance, let’s improve it so it does. Let’s fix the legislation so it works as intended. In less contentious political times, this is exactly what would happen. But we do not live in such times.

It seems that the majority of those who oppose Obamacare do not view it even as a potentially good idea that needs fixing. Rather, they view it as a terrible idea that needs to be completely trashed. In many cases, I believe this is because the opposition has no clear idea what Obamacare does and does not do. They oppose it because they oppose everything President Obama does, or because they view it as an intrusion by a government that can’t be trusted, or as an expensive program that will raise taxes without any compensating benefit, or because its labeled as socialism. But these are sound-bite emotion-generating criticisms designed to get knee-jerk opposition from the Republican base.

Unfortunately, the attacks work. Which is is really frustrating — because I remain convinced that the vast majority of Americans, including most people who oppose Obamacare, would support the legislation if they could shed their political biases and really look at what it accomplishes. The truth is the vast majority of Americans will be better off, financially and healthfully, under Obamacare. It’s certainly a improvement over the pre-existing unfair and increasingly expensive system that still left millions uninsured. It’s not as if Obamacare is a case of “it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.”

Polls have shown that most people support the individual components of Obamacare — if the question is asked in a way that does not link the component to the legislation. Similarly, recall that the basic ideas behind Obamacare were originally proposed by Republicans. Heck, even health insurance companies now see Obamacare as a potential win. And yet, opposition to Obamacare remains so viscerally intense that it can be the determining factor in a Senate election in Louisiana. Obamacare deserves better.

Sadly, it may yet turn out that Obamacare never gets the chance to prove itself — thanks to the fear-mongering and distortions by a Republican Congress abetted by conservative political action groups, a conservative-friendly Supreme Court and talk radio hosts intent on using the issue for political gain. If that happens, it will be a loss for all of us.

So here we are. The federal government has been shut down.

The shutdown was not the result of a failure to reach a compromise between our two political parties. The shutdown was orchestrated entirely by the Tea Party, a minority wing of the Republican party. It was abetted by the remainder of the Republicans in Congress, who apparently do not have the fortitude to stand up to their extreme right flank.

Let’s be clear. A shutdown was the goal of the Tea Party from the very beginning. As I tweeted the other day:

“There is no debate over the shutdown. A majority of both houses would vote to end it today…if the House were allowed to vote on it……the ONLY issue is Tea-Party representatives wanting to use a shutdown as a means to extort a defunding of Obamacare.”

“When your opponents pass a bill and the bill withstands four years of repeated congressional and legal challenges…including the Supreme Court…what do you do? Admit that it’s time to move on? Not if you’re a Republican. Nope, you blackmail to shut down the government unless you get your way.”

Actually, it may be even worse than that. While Tea Partiers would have welcomed a Democratic concession to dismantle Obamacare, I believe most of them in Congress (although perhaps not their supporters at home) understood that this would never happen prior to a shutdown. Obama and the Democrats would never agree to such blatant extortion. So, instead, the Tea Party aimed to carry out a shutdown as the most likely way to achieve their goals. The potential destructive effects to the country would be acceptable collateral damage.

The idea that the Republicans and Democrats are playing some game of chicken, that both sides are equally to blame would be laughable if it were not repeated so often in the media. As @WillMcAvoyACN said on Twitter:

“Why is the debt ceiling a negotiating point? Why is paying our bills something Republicans think we should compromise for?”

I provided my own analogy to make the same point:

“If Democrats threatened to shut down the government unless all Republicans resigned from Congress…would the media criticize Republicans for an unwillingness to compromise? I mean…couldn’t Republicans at least consider a compromise where only half of them resign?”

Or, as Brian Tashman put it:

“…these notions of ‘compromise’ are based on the absurd premise that simply funding the government is itself a concession on the part of Republicans, and Democrats now should return the favor by agreeing to their objective of undermining the health care reform law.”

The totality of this is still hard for me to fathom. What is so terrible about offering the chance of health care to millions of uninsured Americans that makes it worth the risk of wrecking our economy, while breaking almost every accepted boundary of good governance, in an attempt to stop it? The word “crazy” keeps popping up.

The bigger question is: How did such a small minority wind up with the power to do this in the first place? How did our democracy get so derailed?

The answer can be found in a confluence of several shifts in our political landscape, shifts that have been building for decades:

• The increased willingness of some in Congress to use any routine function of government, from passing budgets to raising the debt ceiling to continuing funding, as a means to extort political gain. The result is a never-ending crisis, where the rest of what Congress should be doing is left to languish.

• The increased use of the veto in the Senate, especially by Republicans, to the point where majority rule no longer exists.

• The continuing polarization of political parties to the point where the most leftist Republicans are still to the right of the most right-leaning Democrats.

• The ability of corporations and rich individuals to spend unlimited amounts of money on elections, thanks to the Supreme Court.

• The increased gerrymandering of voting districts to an extreme that leaves most congressmen in “safe” districts where winning their primary guarantees their election to office.

• The rise of right-wing talk radio, Fox News and other extremist media (on both sides) that wall people off from ever hearing opinions that differ from their entrenched biases. Rather, it serves to confirm and inflame their biases.

• The increased acceptance of “truthiness” in news and in political ads, where fiction is claimed as fact and is left unchallenged.

• The increased cowardice of the general media, to the point where every political debate gets reported as “he said, she said” with equal blame assigned to both sides even when no such equality exists.

And more. The end result is a serious threat to the foundations of our democracy. I know this sounds alarmist. It seems every day someone claims that something is destroying our country. It makes such claims easy to dismiss as “the sky is falling” hyperbole. I can only hope this turns out to be true here. But I fear not.

Don’t believe me? I’ll conclude with excerpts from what several others (with more credentials and authority than myself) have written on this subject in the past few days:

The Shutdown and “He Said-She Said” Reporting by Joshua Holland

“This showdown is by far the most dangerous of a series of fiscal ‘crises’ that have been contrived during the Obama presidency.

Beltway reporters who see their professed neutrality as a higher ground bear an enormous amount of responsibility for encouraging this perversion of democratic governance. With a few notable exceptions, the media have framed what Jonathan Chait called ‘a kind of quasi-impeachment’ in typical he said-she said fashion, obscuring the fact that the basic norms that govern Congress have been thrown out the window by a small cabal of tea party-endorsed legislators from overwhelmingly Republican districts. The media treat unprecedented legislative extortion as typical partisan negotiations, and in doing so they normalize it.

But it’s not normal. Republicans are demanding that Democrats unwind their signature achievement – a piece of legislation that took 18 months to pass, survived a Supreme Court challenge and a presidential election – in exchange for a stopgap budget resolution. On Saturday, they tacked on a provision that would limit access to contraceptives.

The second reason the standard-issue Beltway framing is wrong is it doesn’t capture the nature of the so-called ‘negotiation.’ A negotiation is between two parties that want different things and come to some compromise. Nobody should want a shutdown or a default and passing budgets and paying the federal government’s debts aren’t Democratic priorities. Rather, what we are seeing now is a ‘negotiation’ in which Republicans are demanding a lot and offering absolutely nothing in return.”

Our Democracy Is at Stake by Thomas Friedman

This time is different. What is at stake in this government shutdown forced by a radical Tea Party minority is nothing less than the principle upon which our democracy is based: majority rule. President Obama must not give in to this hostage taking — not just because Obamacare is at stake, but because the future of how we govern ourselves is at stake.

What we’re seeing here is how three structural changes that have been building in American politics have now, together, reached a tipping point — creating a world in which a small minority in Congress can not only hold up their own party but the whole government. And this is the really scary part: The lawmakers doing this can do so with high confidence that they personally will not be politically punished, and may, in fact, be rewarded.

 The Reign of Morons Is Here by Charles Pierce

“There has never been in a single Congress — or, more precisely, in a single House of the Congress — a more lethal combination of political ambition, political stupidity, and political vainglory than exists in this one, which has arranged to shut down the federal government because it disapproves of a law passed by a previous Congress, signed by the president, and upheld by the Supreme Court, a law that does nothing more than extend the possibility of health insurance to the millions of Americans who do not presently have it, a law based on a proposal from a conservative think-tank and taken out on the test track in Massachusetts by a Republican governor who also happens to have been the party’s 2012 nominee for president of the United States. That is why the government of the United States is, in large measure, closed this morning.

We did this. We looked at our great legacy of self-government and we handed ourselves over to the reign of morons. This is what they came to Washington to do — to break the government of the United States.

What is there to be done? The first and most important thing is to recognize how we came to this pass. Both sides did not do this. Both sides are not to blame. There is no compromise to be had here that will leave the current structure of the government intact. There can be no reward for this behavior. I am less sanguine than are many people that this whole thing will redound to the credit of the Democratic party. For that to happen, the country would have to make a nuanced judgment over who is to blame that, I believe, will be discouraged by the courtier press of the Beltway and that, in any case, the country has not shown itself capable of making. For that to happen, the Democratic party would have to be demonstrably ruthless enough to risk its own political standing to make the point, which the Democratic party never has shown itself capable of doing. With the vandals tucked away in safe, gerrymandered districts, and their control over state governments probably unshaken by events in Washington, there will be no great wave election that sweeps them out of power. I do not see profound political consequences for enough of them to change the character of a Congress gone delusional. The only real consequences will be felt by the millions of people affected by what this Congress has forced upon the nation, which was the whole point all along.”