I got an email today

May 21, 2009 01:21

that was asking me to sign an e-petition in support of President Obama's health care plan. It is a sorry state of affairs when I feel compelled to refuse to express even the minimal support that is represented by an online petition, but Obama has so far been a huge disappointment on this issue.

One of the things that is constantly said about Obama is that he is someone who places a huge premium on bipartisanship. He describes himself as a "ruthless pragmatist" who is more interested in getting something accomplished than scoring political points. The politics that he follows are those of consensus, moderation, and gradual progress. If you were to ascribe a motto to this particular style of politics, it would be "don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good." This is a phrase that Howard Dean used constantly in his book, and it made sense at the time. Dean had accomplished pretty significant things in Vermont, and had done so by eschewing a need for total capitulation, by refusing to adopt an all-or-nothing mindset. He worked with the Republicans in his state, and got a great deal accomplished. Obama, too, made working with his opposition a feature of his political career in Illinois, and has since made it something that defines him as a politician.

My problem with this philosophy is that it has a tendency to creep. We're today no longer adopting the good over the perfect, we're accepting any compromise over no compromise. I could be persuaded that people aren't ready for a modern health care system. The AMA and Republicans have done their level best over the last half century to prevent the imposition of any sort of universal system in the style of the European democracies, and the scare-tactics, red baiting, and outright lies have had years of recent repetition without any significant pushback by Democrats/liberals. I could even be persuaded that the total reform our system needs can only be accomplished piecemeal, bit by bit--I'm willing to accept that even in the face of American history, which tends to follow a "punctuated evolution" model, where significant policy changes happen very rapidly and are then tweaked in the following years (examples can be found throughout the history of the country, but the New Deal and Great Society are the two most obvious liberal instances).

What I am not willing to accept, however, is the idea that no real change can be made to improve the system initially. I have absolutely no sympathy for any industry that cannot compete with a self-sustaining government alternative, and I am even less sympathetic to the idea that progress needs to be held back even more in order to preserve the profits of industries that are only slightly less contemptible than predatory lenders and war-profiteers. If we institute what is currently being discussed (mandatory coverage, but no public plan) then all we will have accomplished is putting off the date when we institute real reform. What in the world is the point of compromise when you give away everything to arrive at a deal?

This brings me to a larger point, which are the limitations of pragmatism. As defined in American politics, a pragmatist is someone who will pursue policies that are believed to be effective, regardless of their ideological origin. What this definition ignores are the normative views that lead to varying answers to political questions. If I, for example, believe that health care is a human right, I will have very different policy goals when contrasted with an incorrect individual that believes health care to be just another market. When I am looking at their proposed policies and procedures, I should be trying to determine which combination is going to best solve the problem that I set out to deal with: which solution, in other words, best adheres to my normative goals. If you have two or more functioning, relatively coherent schools of thought, it is definitely possible to pick and choose policies that happen to serve a given end even if they were designed to accomplish something else. An example of this would be adopting comprehensive sex ed and increasing the availability of contraception to reduce abortion rates, even if the initial goal of the ideological proponents of those programs was to, say, reduce the rate of STI transmission. If it had worked, deregulating the airlines as a way to reduce costs and improve service would be an example in the opposite ideological direction.

Unfortunately, things in America are different. We don't have even two schools of reasonable thought. The sad reality is that when an ideology has spectacularly failed in almost every regard, the useful policy initiatives that you can adopt are going to be incredibly limited in number. We have seen this in the Republican/Conservative (they are increasingly interchangeable, much to the chagrin of "true" conservatives/republicans) solutions to virtually every problem over the last few decades. Just looking at proposed solutions since Obama has taken office, we see that their answer to every economic question is "cut taxes and deregulate." Their proposal to make autocompanies more competitive was to slaughter unions. Their solution to the health care crisis is to totally deregulate the insurance companies, while shifting costs to individuals and reducing even the paltry coverage now given to the poor. These are the people that make up the "other side" of the argument. They don't have numbers on their side; they don't have morality on their side; all they have are the decades of fear-mongering that until now have been enough to sap the political will to enact real change.

Ultimately, you have to stand behind a set of principles. You have to draw a line in the sand, and be willing to say "Look, if you are not willing to entertain the idea of even modest changes compared to what we need, then we are not going to continue to indulge you. If you are unwilling or unable to compromise in good faith, then you really are going to be sitting on the sidelines of this process." Obama holds most of the cards. He has the budget reconciliation process, and the immense power of the bully pulpit. 2010, thanks to incompetence from the Republican party (exceeding so far even the incompetence of the Democratic party, no small feat), is looking like another overall win for Obama's party. He even has the experience to know ahead of time that the people across the table are not acting in good faith. In addition to all of that, he has the opportunity, the public support, and righteous reasons to shoot for the stars. Why he is willing to settle for a disgraceful watering down of what we need, and what the people want, I'll never know.

If he really is going to go down that road, the least he could do would be to feel ashamed at the monumental failure that such a compromise would represent. To me, that would include not having the temerity to ask his (former, in some cases) supporters to endorse such garbage.
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