Is the notion of government acting as a force for the public good in the process of being permanently destroyed?
Let’s get into our Wayback Machine, and ask Sherman to set the date to June 23, 2005. That was when the Supreme Court handed down its decision in the Kelo v. City of New London case.(1) For those who aren’t into legal policy wonkery and don’t recognize legal decisions by name, the case pitted small property owners against a city which took their property and handed it over to a large developer in the name of the public good. The little guys argued that eminent domain had traditionally been used for only for specifically public purposes like the creation of roads, parks, airports and such. The city argued that the private development of beachfront property was an economic benefit to the public at large and could therefore be indirectly considered to be a public good. They won 5-4, with the “liberal” faction of the court providing the majority.
And this has quite a bit to do with the current debate on health care “reform.” Read on.
On June 23, 2005, the blogosphere erupted in rage against this decision, and the really interesting thing was that there was very little difference at all between the left and the right on that night. Both were close to being united in favor of the little guys, though a few on the left felt that since the “liberals” on the court were in favor of the developers, maybe we should at least consider their viewpoint.
For a reference point, consider Democratic Underground(2 as a representative of the left blogosphere. There are links from there to Free Republic, because some brave souls tolerate the sewage stench just to keep up with what the opposition is saying. The rage level was pretty much at the same pitch at both DU and FR, but as you might expect, the reasons behind the rage were very different. The freepers, like most radical conservatives, hold feudalism as their ideal and advocate the utter destruction of the very notion of public goods. Any government action taken to further public goods is intrinsically evil to them. They are every bit as much against eminent domain for the sake of parks or libraries. They think of property owners as heroic small-time armed warlords, real he-men who prove it by shitting in the reservoir every time they get the chance.
The DUers, on the other hand were enraged that the public good was all of a sudden taken to be identical with some huge well-heeled private interest. They believe that the government ought to be defending little people, and in the business of directly providing, or at least overseeing the provision of, public goods that benefit the little guy. They thought it was an outrage that government should be acting on behalf of big corporate interests, thereby discrediting and undermining the notion of eminent domain in the provision of real public goods.
And now there are very similar arguments going on in the blogosphere about health care “reform.” Conservative wingnuts hate any notion that the government should be involved in health care, which in their opinion should not in any way shape or form be considered a public good. They hate the idea of single payer, or even strict government oversight of health care, every bit as much as they hate the notion that the government should be an enforcer for private insurance. They hate anything that Obama is in favor of, simply because Obama is in favor of it. They’d hate “reform” even if the legislation proposed that insurance companies write them personal checks for $10,000 every year.
On the left we have people dismissed by so-called “pragmatists,” as idealists who just ought to get with the program of government being an enforcer for the private insurance industry which is mainly responsible for our current health care mess. In return for taking single payer off the table, we were promised a public option available to anyone. Then that got stripped down to where almost no one would have been able to take advantage of it, then that got thrown out for early entry into Medicare for some, and now even that has been thrown out. There is nothing left but mandatory private insurance, sweetened by a few sops to the public interest, not a single one of which needs to be linked to mandatory private insurance in order to be enacted.
In 2005, very few on the left defended Kelo vs New London, but in 2009 we have many more people who consider themselves Democrats or progressives who are willing to defend government as an enforcer for unaccountable private interests which are far more powerful than a single developer.
Maybe the sudden urge for submission to authority is enabled by Democratic majorities in Congress plus the presidency? Whatever the reason, Dems had better wake the hell up before they deliver the entire country to a really ugly right wing populist uprising. You think that Palin and teabagger rallies are scary now? You ain’t seen nothin’ yet. Enacting health care “reform” as it stands right now will permanently convince most of the non-politically active public that the government has completely given up any aspirations to providing public goods.
You probably all remember the story of a week or so ago describing the IRS attack on a single mom earning $10/hour over the issue of EITC rebates. Seems that since she moved in with her mom, all of a sudden the IRS says that she can’t possibly be supporting her family. Naturally it was the Bush administration that sicced the IRS onto EITC recipients, but what do you want to bet that the fake Republican populists won’t be using this as a prime example of how the elitist librul big gummint is always oppressing the little guy. That tactic is working fine for them as they pose as the defenders of Medicare against gummint intrusion—never mind that they despise Medicare and would have eliminated it yesterday if they could.
What about this for a post-“reform” health care story? “Poor 55 year old Joe Blow, a diabetic who used to have a good job with good insurance, got laid off and can only find work for $10/hour. Pelosi and her Obamacare thugs made him buy basic coverage, but it doesn’t cover his insulin—it’s actually just catastrophic coverage. He can’t pay for his insulin if he pays his premium, because even subsidies don’t help when your premium is three times as much because of your age. He decided to go for the insulin, so now the big librul gummint IRS is after him taking 2.5% of his money. See what happens when you have gummint involved in health care?” You think the slimy fake populists won’t spin it this way? They will, and everything will become the fault of Democrats.
The well-paid punditocracy has taken to calling single payer advocates who are furious at being forced into mandatory private insurance as “leftbaggers.” Suddenly, it’s 2005 again, with a few of our well-paid apologists for corporate power explaining ever so patiently to the rabble why being chained by law to murderers by spreadsheet is the only practical way we are ever going to get access to actual health care. Or maybe 1999, when they explained to the public how all the WTO protesters were really spoiled trustfundie professional protesters who refused to understand how “free” trade and outsourcing helped “the poor.” (And those “poor” in developing countries who had been killed and maimed by their governments for protesting against the same things for the previous ten years? Non-existent, apparently.)
As in 2005 “leftbaggers” and teabaggers actually do have one thing in common—inchoate rage at being fucked over. The major difference between us and them is that we are high information and they are very low information. They don’t know who is screwing them or why, and we have all the URLs that anyone could possibly want to explain corporatism. Sure, racism is a part of the teabagger thing—when has racism ever NOT been a part of right wing populism? But the main things that bug them are that underemployment is looking to be a permanent “new normal,” and the government seems to be all about bank bailouts and now “messing around with their Medicare.”
Where this is leading is to complete popular dismissal of any notion whatsoever of public goods guaranteed by government as even being desirable. Democrats in office over the past 15 years seem to have gotten us only telecoms and finance deregulation, welfare “reform,” NAFTA, and now complete corporate dictatorship over health care. And on the horizon, there is a “commission” to investigate the “entitlements” of Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. Of course they will be looking for ways of expanding and improving these programs! (And I’m Marie of Roumania.) Will we get to the point where there are no public goods at all, only rampaging right wing populist militias in a Blade Runner society? Or will be administration and Congress get in back in touch with the real world as experienced by us peons?
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(1)For more information about the Supreme Court case, see
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kelo_v._City_of_New_London(2)I am taking DU as a representative of the left because we use a standard bulletin board format with a lot of topic subheadings, which I find more congenial than the formatting of Daily Kos, where I can never find anything. I read Kos mainly when others send me links to it. Some examples—
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=104&topic_id=3946212http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=104&topic_id=3949414http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=104&topic_id=3942605------------------
Things sure have changed since 2005. The pro-Kelo faction back then was maybe 5 people. And not even a one of them would have tried to pull off an argument like “Why are you throwing the liberal Supreme Court members under the bus? Don’t you understand that they are all that is standing in the way of keeping Roe v Wade?”
The pro-mandate faction looks to be more like a third of the board. Is it just me, or have appeals to authority gotten all out of hand over the past couple or years? Looks like the general attitude for quoting well-known sources has switched from “X is a good writer and said this much better than I could have” to “X is an Authority! How dare you throw him/her under the bus?”
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