If enacted, the American Health Care Act (AHCA) will be the most devastating attack on New Deal/Great Society programs that the United States has seen in the last forty years. It will shape the experience of working-class life, as well as the political, ideological, and economic terrain of class struggle more than perhaps any other single piece of legislation in the post-financial crisis era.

To fully capture the bill’s implications, we must recognize how we got to this moment and how this history can shape our resistance efforts. The AHCA’s predecessor, the Affordable Care Act (ACA, better known as Obamacare), midwifed the current legislation in ways that unions, health-care justice organizations, and the Left must understand. The far right capitalized on Obamacare’s failures, convincing significant sections of US society to support more extreme forms of austerity.

Paradoxically, the rightward trend in mainstream American politics offers the US left a historic opportunity to build mass resistance to neoliberalism.