“SOCIALISM CREEPS IN AS AMERICA SLEEPS”—editorial headline in Investor’s Business Daily, December 22, 2009
Puh-leez. “Creeping socialism”—can’t the opponents of universal health care come up with something other than a cliché to describe their opposition to a bill that, even now, on the brink of passage, is heavily compromised and scarcely resembling what was originally advertised?
(Oh, and why does socialism always creep? Why can’t it gallop? Or at least make the phrase alliterative, Spiro Agnew-style, and say that it slithers?)
Few Capitol Hill participants in the health care debate have crowned themselves with glory, but throughout this entire process the GOP, to its shame, has been a uniquely obstructionist force. All it can do is stand there and mouth scare words or phrases, such as “Socialism.”
Go ahead—name me one concrete proposal the Republican Party has made this year toward extending coverage to the desperately uninsured. You can’t, can you?
That’s because the party hopes, with its hopeless intransigence this time around, to do what it did in 1994 against Bill Clinton: use a legislative debacle to jump back into the political game following an election where they lost the Presidency and both houses of Congress. This electoral revanchism is all part of what The New Republic’s Jonathan Chait calls “The Rise of Republican Nihilism.”
I write this sadly, as someone who believes that neither party has a monopoly on anything close to the truth, and that the two-party system is a necessity for keeping assorted rascals from running completely unchecked. Nevertheless: The Republicans are playing a dangerous game—increasing the cynicism of ordinary Americans, even while further endangering (as if they hadn’t done enough in this direction under the prior administration) the economic security of everyone.
Let there be no mistake: in our extreme medical insurance environment, affordable health care has not become so much an economic issue but a moral right. Yet the GOP has decided to get on the wrong side of history, unlike 1964, when enough of its members joined with Democratic liberals to enact landmark civil-rights legislation.
Investor’s Business Daily (IBD) is supposed to be written by journalists, who are supposed to be trained to avoid clichés. But keep enough company with multiple members of a certain type and you become infected with groupthink.
So now the editorial writers at IBD are parroting a business and right-wing party line dating back more than a century. A sidebar to Chait’s article, “Women’s Suffrage and Other Visions of Right-Wing Apocalypse,” lists some choice examples of such ostrich-like rhetoric.
Here’s my favorite, from a figure who remains an inexplicable conservative darling, Ronald Reagan, carrying a 1961 attack on Medicare to what can only be termed the realms of sci-fi fantasy:
“The doctor begins to lose freedoms; it’s like telling a lie, and one leads to another. First you decide that the doctor can have so many patients. They are equally divided among the various doctors by the government. But then the doctors aren’t equally divided geographically, so a doctor decides he wants to practice in one town and the government has to say to him you can’t live in that town, they already have enough doctors. You have to go someplace else. And from here it is only a short step to dictating where he will go.”
What???!!!!
To be sure, significant problems exist in the current health-care legislation. And Mitch McConnell and Co. have a point: a nearly 2,000-page bill, rushed through committee, with only a handful of senators and White House aides understanding the fine points, is not a well-thought-out package.
But they’d sound a wee bit more credible if they’d subjected the similarly prodigious, rushed-through Patriot Act to the same level of scrutiny.
It’s not enough to be against something; you have to say what you’re for. If the GOP wants to be trusted with the responsibility of governing again, they need to step up and explain their positions. On health care, they haven’t, they won’t, and they deserve to pay the price at the polls for their willfulness.
To understand what’s at stake as Congress approaches its moment of truth, consider the following searing piece from Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen, inspired by an anguished visit to a loved one at the hospital, and especially this passage:
“This is the only economically advanced nation where people can go bankrupt from medical bills. This is the only rich nation where people can die from lack of medical care—because they can’t afford it or because it’s not available."
At Christmas, the mind turns inevitably to Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol. Bob Cratchit’s family in that holiday tale represented the kind of people—living on the knife-edge between survival and grief—who are becoming more and more prevalent today.
In Dickens’ time, the Cratchits (in Scrooge’s midnight nightmare) would have fallen into their personal abyss simply because not enough people recognized the consequences of massive, impersonal economic forces, such as the schools, the workhouses, the jails, and the courts.
Where is the contemporary novelist who would do to the U.S. health care system what Dickens did to Victorian Britain’s legal system in Bleak House—i.e., capture the beast in all its Brobdingnagian, soul-crushing complexity?
Well, below—again, from Cohen—is a good place to start:
“Behold the uninsured. Look at them in their terror. See their faces as they are denied coverage for pre-existing conditions or their look of despair because they cannot afford any insurance at all. Watch them ignore symptoms of sickness, pass up examinations or wait, often for hours and hours, for free medical services.”
I would love to see what Dickens would have done with the pundits and politicians who scream about “creeping socialism.” They’re a novelist’s—even a caricaturist’s—dream.
Puh-leez. “Creeping socialism”—can’t the opponents of universal health care come up with something other than a cliché to describe their opposition to a bill that, even now, on the brink of passage, is heavily compromised and scarcely resembling what was originally advertised?
(Oh, and why does socialism always creep? Why can’t it gallop? Or at least make the phrase alliterative, Spiro Agnew-style, and say that it slithers?)
Few Capitol Hill participants in the health care debate have crowned themselves with glory, but throughout this entire process the GOP, to its shame, has been a uniquely obstructionist force. All it can do is stand there and mouth scare words or phrases, such as “Socialism.”
Go ahead—name me one concrete proposal the Republican Party has made this year toward extending coverage to the desperately uninsured. You can’t, can you?
That’s because the party hopes, with its hopeless intransigence this time around, to do what it did in 1994 against Bill Clinton: use a legislative debacle to jump back into the political game following an election where they lost the Presidency and both houses of Congress. This electoral revanchism is all part of what The New Republic’s Jonathan Chait calls “The Rise of Republican Nihilism.”
I write this sadly, as someone who believes that neither party has a monopoly on anything close to the truth, and that the two-party system is a necessity for keeping assorted rascals from running completely unchecked. Nevertheless: The Republicans are playing a dangerous game—increasing the cynicism of ordinary Americans, even while further endangering (as if they hadn’t done enough in this direction under the prior administration) the economic security of everyone.
Let there be no mistake: in our extreme medical insurance environment, affordable health care has not become so much an economic issue but a moral right. Yet the GOP has decided to get on the wrong side of history, unlike 1964, when enough of its members joined with Democratic liberals to enact landmark civil-rights legislation.
Investor’s Business Daily (IBD) is supposed to be written by journalists, who are supposed to be trained to avoid clichés. But keep enough company with multiple members of a certain type and you become infected with groupthink.
So now the editorial writers at IBD are parroting a business and right-wing party line dating back more than a century. A sidebar to Chait’s article, “Women’s Suffrage and Other Visions of Right-Wing Apocalypse,” lists some choice examples of such ostrich-like rhetoric.
Here’s my favorite, from a figure who remains an inexplicable conservative darling, Ronald Reagan, carrying a 1961 attack on Medicare to what can only be termed the realms of sci-fi fantasy:
“The doctor begins to lose freedoms; it’s like telling a lie, and one leads to another. First you decide that the doctor can have so many patients. They are equally divided among the various doctors by the government. But then the doctors aren’t equally divided geographically, so a doctor decides he wants to practice in one town and the government has to say to him you can’t live in that town, they already have enough doctors. You have to go someplace else. And from here it is only a short step to dictating where he will go.”
What???!!!!
To be sure, significant problems exist in the current health-care legislation. And Mitch McConnell and Co. have a point: a nearly 2,000-page bill, rushed through committee, with only a handful of senators and White House aides understanding the fine points, is not a well-thought-out package.
But they’d sound a wee bit more credible if they’d subjected the similarly prodigious, rushed-through Patriot Act to the same level of scrutiny.
It’s not enough to be against something; you have to say what you’re for. If the GOP wants to be trusted with the responsibility of governing again, they need to step up and explain their positions. On health care, they haven’t, they won’t, and they deserve to pay the price at the polls for their willfulness.
To understand what’s at stake as Congress approaches its moment of truth, consider the following searing piece from Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen, inspired by an anguished visit to a loved one at the hospital, and especially this passage:
“This is the only economically advanced nation where people can go bankrupt from medical bills. This is the only rich nation where people can die from lack of medical care—because they can’t afford it or because it’s not available."
At Christmas, the mind turns inevitably to Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol. Bob Cratchit’s family in that holiday tale represented the kind of people—living on the knife-edge between survival and grief—who are becoming more and more prevalent today.
In Dickens’ time, the Cratchits (in Scrooge’s midnight nightmare) would have fallen into their personal abyss simply because not enough people recognized the consequences of massive, impersonal economic forces, such as the schools, the workhouses, the jails, and the courts.
Where is the contemporary novelist who would do to the U.S. health care system what Dickens did to Victorian Britain’s legal system in Bleak House—i.e., capture the beast in all its Brobdingnagian, soul-crushing complexity?
Well, below—again, from Cohen—is a good place to start:
“Behold the uninsured. Look at them in their terror. See their faces as they are denied coverage for pre-existing conditions or their look of despair because they cannot afford any insurance at all. Watch them ignore symptoms of sickness, pass up examinations or wait, often for hours and hours, for free medical services.”
I would love to see what Dickens would have done with the pundits and politicians who scream about “creeping socialism.” They’re a novelist’s—even a caricaturist’s—dream.
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