THE PLANK AUGUST 31, 2009
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It's becoming more obvious each day that the conservative assault on Barack Obama's legislative agenda, including his incrementalist efforts towards universal health coverage, isn’t much about the details. It is, instead, a counter-revolutionary campaign to revive 1980s-era middle-class resentments of particular beneficiaries of government social programs. Beneath the hysterical talk about Obama's "socialism" or the "Democrat Socialist Party," conservatives are actually revolting against the ancient targets of the New Deal and Great Society, and indeed, against the very idea that “interference” with the distributional implications of free markets is ever morally legitimate.
Consider a long, classic column published at National Review last week by the Hoover Institution’s Victor Davis Hanson, entitled "Obama and Redistributive Change." It’s an angry screed against the egalitarian underpinnings of progressive politics, past, present and future. It goes over-the-top in suggesting that Obama is determined to wipe out absolutely every distinction in wealth and status among Americans. But the self-righteous fury against any "redistributive" activity by government seems perfectly genuine, representing as it does a rejection of virtually every way of ordering society other than laissez-faire capitalism:
When radical leaders over the last 2,500 years have sought to enforce equality of results, their prescriptions were usually predictable: redistribution of property; cancellation of debts; incentives to bring out the vote and increase political participation among the poor; stigmatizing of the wealthy, whether through the extreme measure of ostracism or the more mundane forced liturgies; use of the court system to even the playing field by targeting the more prominent citizens; radical growth in government and government employment; the use of state employees as defenders of the egalitarian faith; bread-and-circus entitlements; inflation of the currency and greater national debt to lessen the power of accumulated capital; and radical sloganeering about reactionary enemies of the new state.
Hanson is clearly looking beyond our current political debates at much of the history of civilization, and it infuriates him. But if Obama’s health care reform efforts represent a drive to "enforce equality of results," what existing government program can’t be described the same way?
Social Security is redistributive. Medicare is redistributive. Public education is redistributive. Public investments in highways, bridges, dams, and other infrastructure are most definitely redistributive. The land reforms that accompanied the rise of every society, dating back to feudalism, are inherently and overtly redistributive. Even defense spending is redistributive, insofar as the benefits of national security are rarely captured by current taxpayers.
Beyond government and politics, it’s not only "socialists" who have embraced “redistributive” thinking. The Hebrew lawgivers and prophets; Jesus Christ; Mohammad--all were blatant redistributionists. All denied that wealth or status was invariably the product of productivity and virtue, and rejected the idea that redistribution was theft.
If Hanson and the many conservatives who so often sound like him want to openly take the posture that much of American--not to mention, world--history is a long, disastrous saga of tyranny in the pursuit of "enforced equality," they are free to do so. But they should at least acknowledge that the rage against Barack Obama is really just displaced rage at democracy; at the mild forms of collective social action embraced by most Americans during the last century; at the longstanding policy positions of both major political parties; and at many of the very people they are calling upon to kill Obama’s agenda--including Social Security and Medicare beneficiaries, people with government-protected mortgages, farm-price-support recipients, military veterans, and public employees tout court. At an absolute minimum, Hanson should rush to publish a column savaging Republican National Committee chairman Michael Steele for trying to position the GOP as the Party of Medicare this last week.
6 comments
"incentives to bring out the vote and increase political participation among the poor" oh the horror, lets have Democracy by invitation only, bring back the poll tax! Lets not forget that little cockroach Hanson called Rumsfeld the greatest Defense secretary in American history.
- blackton
August 31, 2009 at 6:42pm
ed: [The conservative assault] is...a counter-revolutionary campaign to revive 1980s-era middle-class resentments of particular beneficiaries of government social programs. george: This is right in the bullseye in my view. Sad to say, conservatives will continue to play both the race card and the middle-class-is-under-assault card to great effect as long they can rely on the sort of systemic ignorance that still runs rampant on the Archie Bunker fantasy islands. Many progressives get riled up because the Republican Party [all right wing nuts now] spew flagrant lies about ObamaCare. As though THAT was the main problem. On the contrary, the lies are flagrantly successful because the locus of problem is clearly in the minds that absorb them like a kleenex absorbs pus from an infected wound. And this brings me back to a point I raised in a previous talkback: Sharon Begley in last week's Newsweek: Opponents of Obama's health-care reform have un-leashed all the bogeymen and pushed all the emotional buttons. "All the horror stories are being told by the Republican side," says Nunberg. The Democrats have struggled to make an emotional connection with the public, even though it is possible to do that without lying. [Drew] Westen [author of The Political Brain] suggests the Democrats "should say that, since health insurance is tied to employment, 'the current system takes away your freedom to quit your job.' " Berkeley linguist George Lakoff thinks the White House could win hearts and minds by emphasizing that in the current system, "insurance companies deny you care." And the administration could score extra points by describing people who have been bankrupted or killed by that denial. There is no shortage of examples, from Blue Shield denying high-tech cancer surgery that oncologists said was patients' only hope, to Cigna nixing a liver transplant that was a 17-year-old's only chance of survival. She died. (Wall Street rewards insurers for denying claims; a company with a claims-paid rate of, say, 80 percent is viewed as better run than one with a rate of 85 percent.) "If you told the story of how greedy insurers deny coverage to sick people, you could whip up emotions in favor of reform," says Westen. Not surprisingly, proponents of health-care reform are somewhere between furious and incredulous that the White House has been so ineffectual at countering the lies. "The White House's philosophy seems to be, don't counterpunch till you're on the ropes," says Westen. "Even now, the president refuses to call out anyone by name who is trying to undo his signature issue." george: I have brought up Weston's book a number of times myself because it is a brilliant deconstruction of the Gore and Kerry campaigns. These two gents were like stick men with bulging brains. They simply did not connect with "ordinary Americans" and allowed the ingenius Republican smear machine to pulverize them over and again. In some important respects, Obama fits right in here. He seems genuinely passionaite about "solving" the nation's health care problems. But that's not the same thing as connecting with citizens who are invested emotionally in having the problems solved. As long as Obama allows the conservatives to maintain control over the muddled masses by aiming their emotions at the blacks, the lazy poor and the illegal immigrants out to take "Our Country away from us", he will continue to get nowhere. Only faster and faster as time goes by. Obama has little or no credibility with the "just folks" crowd. And I know this because I live smack dab in the middle of them. He woefully lacks this empathetic tug with the working class in the way that David Brooks or George Will do. In other words, self-consciously. In my heart of hearts, I think Obama's "community organizer" days are long buried in the past. He strikes me now as no less the liberal pointy-head intellectual than Brooks and Will strike me the same from the right. He comes off as a complete fakir. His miraculous power is only the campaign trail. Now in office, he only walks on water rhetorically. The acts grows stale. The polls go down. george walton d/a
- iambiguous
August 31, 2009 at 6:52pm
It's a bit difficult to argue that the president isn't "connecting" with people who scream "don't let government take over health care!" and in the next breath "keep your hands off Medicare too!" How do you connect with people whose problem is an intense and deeply rooted stupidity, that they cling to as if it were a family heirloom? I mean, some things are real and not pure ideological speculation. One example: Medicare is a U.S. federal government program, passed by LBJ in the 1960s. If you don't know that, or if you believe that somehow Medicare is some kind of private gift from doctors and hospitals who are just feeling good that day, how is Obama meant to "connect" with you? How do you "connect" with people who voted against you, would vote against you again, and hate everything you do, and are prepared to disadvantage themselves to nurture that hatred? How do you "connect" with people whose only desired connection is to wave an assault rifle in your face? How about shifting some blame onto a Democratic congress that seems unable to use its own majority to pass the most significant national reform that the Party has fought for for decades?
- ironyroad
September 1, 2009 at 1:53am
Don't even get Hanson started on all of the redistribution of Egyptian and Caananite wealth and income that was implemented by God and Moses back in the 1920s BCE.
- wildboy
September 1, 2009 at 9:58am
*Oh, I do hope I could see the article and the comments when I am writing the comment - I guess I could open a different window, but honestly, why not have this comment section at the bottom, like it used to be ...?* Enough kvetching. I guess the most amusing thing in Hansen's drivel - and much conservative commentating and punditry - is the totally unself-conscious ironies abounding in their bile. Redistrisbutive politics? It's not as if the nation's health has not been redistributed upwards for the past thirty years. Vilification of wealth? Oh, perish the thought - was it not conservative columnists who decried the fact that the uppity nigger running for President made four million dollars from his book? The participation of the poor in the political process? I thought it was Eastern Seasboard Elites who wanted to keep inbred, illiterate, white trash West Virginians from participating in the political process (or is Hanse really worried not about the "poor" but about certain types of "poor" people - niggers, gooks and dagos - and would welcome the KKK guarding the voting booth?). The man is a veritable Colbert in the making.
- icarusr
September 1, 2009 at 10:24am
The problem conservatives have with the issue of wealth redistribution is that it assumes wealth is sort of like rain, it falls heavily on some and not on others. We need more emphasis on wealth CREATION.
- rvogel
September 1, 2009 at 4:51pm