Personal investment.
The answer lies in how the Obamacare bill differed from the current legislation and how politics has evolved since then.
Start with the obvious distinction: The 2017 bill involved a straightforward repeal of a single federal program, whereas the Big Beautiful Bill is a witch’s brew of priorities ranging from immigration to health care to green energy to tax cuts. If you want the public to get excited about policy, it needs to be easy for the average joe to understand.
The 2017 repeal bill was. It also targeted a program with which Americans were unusually familiar, having spent lots of time thinking about it in the years preceding the repeal push. And it wasn’t any ol’ program: It was Barack Obama’s signature legislation, his most prominent achievement.
Obamacare was his legacy, for better or worse, and Trump seemed keen to target it for that reason. Millions of Obama voters seemed to resent the idea of an accidental president who’d lost the popular vote the year before getting to exploit his fluky victory by sledgehammering their hero’s greatest triumph. They sacrificed their House majority in 2010 to pass health care reform; what would that sacrifice have amounted to if the reform ended up being undone?
Quite simply, Democrats were emotionally invested in Obama’s success, and that emotion came spilling out when Trump and the GOP tried to turn it retroactively into failure.
The partisan conflict over the Big Beautiful Bill isn’t as sharp. Medicaid is an ancestral welfare program that was established before most Americans were born, one that isn’t going away entirely if Republicans get their way this time. And there are many more moving parts for casual voters to try to keep track of with the current legislation, denying them the galvanizing clarity of a frontal assault on a sacred cow.
Liberals just don’t have as much skin in the game on this one.
Looking out for No. 1.
Another difference pertains to the targets of each bill.
In case the result of last year’s election didn’t make it clear, American voters look out for No. 1. Tell them that they might get cheaper groceries by electing a twice-impeached convicted criminal who attempted a coup the last time he was president, and they’ll vote for the criminal. That logic also helps explain the outrage over the 2017 Obamacare bill and the lack thereof over the Big Beautiful Bill now.
Eight years ago, the middle class was the bloc that stood to lose from congressional action. The poor already had a form of health-care coverage with Medicaid, but the broad middle was at risk of seeing subsidized plans on the new insurance exchanges go up in smoke. If that happened and revenue for insurers dried up, the ability of those insurers to cover preexisting conditions—among the most popular of Obamacare’s reforms—would dry up as well. People who are chronically ill would be left high and dry, and there were a lot of those.
There were enough, in fact, that practically every American was either at risk of losing coverage themselves or knew someone who was. So the middle class looked out for No. 1 and rallied noisily against repeal, not unlike how support for gay marriage rose over the previous decade as formerly closeted gays came out to friends and family. Americans are willing to stick it to some disadvantaged class when they’re out of sight and out of mind, but not when they’re personally invested in their happiness.
Too bad for the poor, the targets of the Big Beautiful Bill, who mostly areout of sight and out of mind to the middle and professional classes. To those of us who have the luxury of following politics closely because we’re financially comfortable, Medicaid is an abstraction. “They’ll get over it,” Mitch McConnell reportedly said last week to his Republican colleagues about public upset over cuts to the program. We will.
Realignment.
There’s another way to understand the surprisingly low-key outrage “vibes” around the current bill, though. Does either party have a strong incentive to feel outraged about it?
Normally, Democrats would take up the cause of the working class when one of their welfare lifelines is about to be gutted by Republicans—and plenty have. But it’s no surprise that the grassroots left isn’t aflame about it. Even more so than in 2017, Democrats have become the party of the upper class. Their voters are at lower risk than they used to be of waking up one day to find that they’ve lost their health insurance.
Not only have they become the party of the upper class, but elements of the lower-income base on which they’ve traditionally depended for their margins helped reelect Trump last year. Why should a yuppie lib devote his Saturday to protesting Medicaid cuts on behalf of an impoverished cohort that prefers to be led by a corrupt Republican? Members of the working class made their bed by choosing an authoritarian criminal over Kamala Harris. Now they should lie in it.
In theory, it’s the populist right that should be protesting the Medicaid cuts, as it now purports to speak for those same “forgotten” men and women of the working class. But aside from a precious few who inexplicably take populism seriously as a governing philosophy, rank-and-file Republicans care much less about the poor than they do about Donald Trump. If forced to choose between the president gaining a big “win” by shafting blue-collar America and seeing him humiliated by a congressional revolt on blue-collar America’s behalf, they’ll take door No. 1 every time.
Case in point: J.D. Vance, supposedly the most serious populist in government, is treating Medicaid as an afterthought in stumping for the Big Beautiful Bill. “The thing that will bankrupt this country more than any other policy is flooding the country with illegal immigration and then giving those migrants generous benefits,” he wrote. “Everything else—the CBO score, the proper baseline, the minutiae of the Medicaid policy—is immaterial compared to the ICE money and immigration enforcement provisions.”
If Vance believed that, he and Trump could scrap the bill and focus on immigration enforcement as the key to fiscal stability. But he doesn’t believe it. It’s a preposterous lie: Irrepressible entitlement spending, not benefits for illegal aliens, is what’s bankrupting America, and J.D. knows it. But he also knows that grassroots Republicans are unserious enough about populism that they won’t blink when he hand-waves away Medicaid upheaval as “minutiae” if doing so is necessary to get the president a win.
In fact, insofar as the right has spared a thought for the bill’s impact on the poor, it might like the idea of gutting the program. “Many Trump supporters seem to be operating on the assumption—this is becoming a theme—that it’s other people whom the cuts will hit,” our friend Andrew Egger wrote today. “Point out online that Trump’s own base stands to hurt from the provision and you’ll be swamped by a wave of MAGA derision: We see through these media lies! We know they’re only taking Medicaid away from fraudsters and illegals!” That’s what happens when populism based on cultural tribalism is asked to demonstrate class consciousness.
In the end, neither side has a reason to care about the cuts, the left because it’s too rich and the right because it’s too cultish. No wonder there’s less public angst about this bill than there was about Obamacare repeal eight years ago.
Post-policy.
But realignment isn’t the only reason Americans might plausibly be less outraged today than they were in 2017. To a degree now that wasn’t true then, protesting Congress seems vaguely pointless, almost anachronistic. The angst “vibes” are weaker because the fatalism “vibes” are stronger.
That starts with how executive power has grown at the expense of legislative power under both parties. Last month, I argued that voters, especially younger ones, seem to have developed an attitude of “learned helplessness” toward lawless presidential action. Trump sets most policy for the country now, and the Republican-run Congress doesn’t dare check him, no matter how indefensible his choices are. After watching their representatives lamely roll over on everything from tariff madness to TikTok to undeclared war with Iran, it’s understandable that many adults who don’t follow politics closely would have casually assimilated the belief that resistance is futile.
And for those who do follow it closely enough to feel moved to protest, what would be the point?
Absent a truly fearsome broad-based public backlash to the Big Beautiful Bill, Republican lawmakers will still have more reason to fear Trump and their own voters than they will the general electorate. Tanking the bill guarantees them a presidential-backed primary challenge that’s more likely than not to succeed, along with the usual raft of death threats from MAGA’s most excitable fascists for anyone who displeases Mr. Trump. Passing the bill risks nothing more than a slightly tougher race next November.
You can’t effectively pressure lawmakers in a democracy when one party is a cult. As you digest the news that the bill cleared the Senate today, bear in mind that the deciding vote in favor came from Alaska’s Lisa Murkowski—the same Lisa Murkowski who admitted in April that she and her Republican colleagues “are all afraid” of the president. That wasn’t true in 2017, when he was new to politics and had yet to consolidate power over the right and the executive branch. Unless the fear factor changes, protests are pointless.
Exhaustion.
I suspect that 10 years of authoritarian populist nonsense have also sapped the will of Americans to resist.
Some would say that’s always the M.O. with authoritarianism, tiring out critics through the sheer volume of things to be outraged about. I could have written today about the humiliating absurdity of Trump again cashing in on his office by hawking his own fragrance, but there are only so many hours in the day, and ultimately, the criticism doesn’t matter. He won’t be shamed. His presidency resembles the Big Beautiful Bill inasmuch as the sheer variety of badness is so overwhelming that you’re apt to feel confused and even paralyzed by what to do about it.
You’re forced to prioritize among the outrages. And it makes sense to prioritize protesting the irreversible civic threat from authoritarianism over protesting policy changes like the Big Beautiful Bill that can be undone by some future Congress.
Beneath all of this lies a dark possibility, that Americans simply don’t take their government or their country as seriously as they did even eight years ago.
I certainly don’t. Electing Trump once was a mistake, but electing him twice was an inexcusable self-inflicted wound from which the United States will never recover. Not coincidentally, Gallup published a poll yesterday that found pride in being an American falling to new lows among Democrats and independents in the wake of his reelection. Both groups held relatively steady in that metric from 2005 to 2015, but the rise of Trump in 2016 triggered a slide, and his victory last year pushed it down into uncharted territory.
Who cares about America anymore?
It was one thing to protest Obamacare repeal in 2017, when the loser of the national popular vote was trying to foist an unpopular program on an unwilling public. Protesters could tell themselves that they were saving the people from Trump. But now? The public was willing enough to see what he’d do policy-wise to hand him a popular vote victory. Protesting the current bill would amount to trying to save the people from themselves. Why bother?
The Big Beautiful Bill captures the unseriousness of modern America more elegantly than any legislation I can think of. Republicans are rushing to pass it by Friday for no better reason than that the president wants something to crow about on Independence Day. It’s been stitched together with mismatched parts like Frankenstein without rhyme or reason beyond dialing in on something that can attract 50 votes. Its own authors are so checked out that they’re surprised to find out what’s in it. Even the name stinks of an embarrassing Trump marketing gimmick, the fiscal equivalent of some chintzy new fragrance thrown together to monetize the rubes who love him.
The president doesn’t care about policy, his supporters don’t care that he doesn’t care, and his party in Congress doesn’t care about anything except keeping their jobs. Under the circumstances, it seems foolish for anyone else in America to care, either.
