Anyone who looks at present course of American politics as a model for modern governance engages in the rather quixotic exercise of searching for a tiny pearl among a herd of chortling swine and those who, for whatever reason, pretend to be swine. Perhaps because America has enjoyed such a protracted run of relative safety and prosperity, its current politicians suffer two degenerative illusions.
First, they believe their nation invulnerable to challenge in the global order. They harangue about terrorism but do not really see it as other than a costly nuisance. It will beget expenditure of trillions of dollars to enlarge the already behemoth military corporate network just for the sake of fighting an amorphous, minor foe. Money and profit are to be had from portraying this sometimes lethal sideshow as a major war when it is not.
Because, most American politicians do not see any serious foreign threat, they view domestic political opponents as their most ardent foes. When borders seem inviolate from external threat, internal opposition becomes the wretched bogey. This is because most politicians are irrational bundles of hopes and hatreds. Hatred rarely dissipates. It usually gets redirected at another target. Such is the human condition. Some people feed on anger as if a choice buffet. For them, to live is to hate.
Second, because they have personally been successful, these politicians believe their peculiar notions and actions contributed to national greatness. They dub themselves architects of the national order. Thus, they acquire a sense of personal superiority that may have a most tenuous link to reality. Never do they contemplate that national progress may have come despite their ideas and actions.
Every nation is an imperfect mixture of fitness and indirection, of wise action and embarrassing folly. Great nations tip the balance toward the positives. Yet, every nation holds the sublime and ridiculous within. Thus,
not every well-heeled citizen is great. Princes are to be found in the gutter and buffoons walk the most princely courts and tony boardrooms. Many American politicians are not javelins of achievement. So many are but polished mud — the incidental beneficiaries of a national greatness to which they contributed little but of which they have tasted much.
To study their nostrums is to engage in a fool’s inquest akin to listening to a lottery winner give counsel on how to build a complex financial empire. Anything these folks hold of worth, they did not create and anything they create is of little worth. These people cannot advance a nation any more than a toothpick can prod uphill a massive boulder.
What this sanctimonious group of men with ambitions and appetites far exceeding their abilities does best is cling to position. They thwart change and reform whenever possible so that people occupying lower aspects of the economic ladder do not invade their club. Often the rich man is not concerned he will lose his fortune. He is often more concerned the poor will become rich, thus revealing him for what he is: nothing more than a poor man in disguise.
Unfortunately, American politics is densely populated by these baser characters. Politics does not function to make things better. It is now a game of tricking the people to see one political group’s pursuit of its elite interests is better for the nation than another group’s dash toward its own narrow desires. All tricks are to be employed in this contest for this is no longer about reality. The game is one of deception; prestidigitation is the field upon which it is played.
Thus, the Democratic Party has adopted traditional Republican Party economic doctrine only to falsely retag it “liberal or progressive.” Democrats engage in this false flag operation not because the adopted notions are condign. Democrats embrace these notions because they are so simplistic that they average person can easily understand them; most people more readily believe to be true that which is easier to comprehend. More importantly, these notions also benefit corporate donors upon whom the party relies.
The Democrats speak of the people but that is the craft of a cunning ventriloquist. The master puppeteers have the party dancing a jig that conflicts with the tune of their rhetoric.
Meanwhile, the Republican Party has not been satisfied with winning the important battle over nation’s political ideology. The national political economy bears the Republican stamp even if the one doing the stamping is a Democratic President. But that President is Black and this fact has accelerated the Republican descent into an orgy of bias.
Republicans seek to redraw a national tableau so estranged from reality that it courts danger. Anything that does not accord with rule by conservative White men, Republicans reject as foreign and subversive. However, the Republicans fight the tide of demographic inevitability. Soon, the White majority will become a minority as the growth of the Latino community and, to a lesser extent, the Black community outpaces that of White America.
The Republicans cannot escape this fact. Because this process is inescapable, they fight it with greater vigor than reason. Like the pro-slavery confederates during the American Civil War, the Republican Party believes it fights to save a noble way of life from assault by lesser humans. In effect, today’s Republican Party is the cultural equivalent of the confederate leadership that sparked gruesome civil insurrection. Like those rebels, Republicans fight with desperate courage, knowing that fate runs against them. Like the rebels, they proclaim they would rather die than surrender. Again, like rebels of lore, they will eventually break and surrender to the inevitable. Until that moment, they will engage in political guerilla warfare against the Democratic Party establishment that now holds the White House.
Thus, American politics has become a battleground between the sophisticated corporate establishment and Money Power allied with the economically conservative/socially centrist Democratic Party and the arch-conservative White cultural alliance represented by the Tea Party faction of the Republican grouping.
Despite their growing numbers, other political constituencies and ethic groups are mere platoons and expendable foot soldiers in this historic encounter. Because they have been convinced that their fate rests upon joining one or the other of these competing power nodes, these other groups are lesser than they should be.
The evolution of and political contest over health insurance reform (Obamacare) must be viewed in this context. Having outflanked Republican attempts to shutter government, President Obama should now face sunny days and moonlit nights ahead. Instead, he walked into an ambush over the rollout of his landmark measure.
The current major trouble is with the website created for people to enlist in Obamacare. People cannot access the site. If not enough people register, then the entire system will collapse because it was built on an unnecessarily risky economic model. It was built on such a model because the Democrats who constructed it had as their overriding priority the interests of the corporate world instead of the people’s health.
Roughly 50 million of 300 million Americans are uninsured. This is the highest percentage among developed nations. For the richest nation on earth, it is a travesty. Ostensibly, the basic benefit of Obamacare was to provide insurance to people heretofore uninsurable because they had pre-existing illnesses or could not afford then existing insurance plans. (Yes in America, insurance companies could refuse to insure someone if seriously ill before. They could also terminate a person’s insurance if medical costs exceeded a certain amount.) The plan would insure to this prohibited group by forcing uninsured but healthy people to purchase insurance.
Expanding the number of healthy people who purchased would increase revenues of the private insurers. This revenue would allow for them to incur the costs of medical payments for people with extant medical conditions. In essence, Obamacare is an indirect government tax or redistribution scheme wherein one set of private citizens are to help fund the health care of another set. If it works, then the number of uninsured will be reduced by 20-25 million people.
Unfortunately, for the plan, not enough healthy people can access the website to purchase the insurance. If the site’s technological problems are not timely cured, the entire plan might collapse because there will be an insufficient number of healthy new insurance buyers to pay for the influx of people with preexisting conditions. If this happens, the system might implode or government will be forced to subsidize it.
Now we come to the real fault in the system. All other developed nations have health care systems funded by government. In fact, America funds health care for senior citizens under the Medicare program. This program works well. If the nation would merely expand the principles of Medicare to the rest of the population, America would be in line with the rest of the developed world. Its citizens would be much the better. However, big insurance companies would no longer occupy the enriched position they now hold. Some highly paid executives would be cast from the penthouse into the unemployment lines. This could not be allowed to happen.
The plan to reform health care hit a detour. Instead of reforming health care, it merely reforms how citizens procured health insurance. The plan was devised not so much to help people but guarantee insurance companies a certain level of profit.
This overly complex plan was developed because mainstream Democrats dared not look at the most effective and straightforward solution. Government should operate the health care system as in other nations. Democrats flinched not due to Republican opposition but because their corporate donors threatened to pull the plug if the Democrats placed public interest over those of the corporate structure.
Consequently, Democrats inaugurated this heavily bureaucratic scheme. To work, the multiple parts of this plan must move in complete synchronicity. However, the first portal – website access – now fails, placing the entire edifice in jeopardy. The situation is like inviting guests to a party at a faraway mansion only to find, after travelling the long distance, that no one can open the entry gate.
Ironically, President Obama unnecessarily exposed his flank to mortal danger through an abundance of misplaced caution. Not wanting to offend the corporate network, he agreed to serial tactical compromises when drafting the health reform law. One layer of bureaucratic complexity was laid upon another in an attempt to assuage the insurance firms. However, the President’s team did a poor job assessing the overall impact of this patchwork, piecemeal aggregation. The tactical compromises, when amassed, constitute a risk to the operation of the law and thus the man’s political legacy. This is a classis instance of starting with so much that the person believes he can eagerly give away half of what he has yet still retain all of what he needs. Before too long, he has yield so often that he winds up with half of almost nothing.
Chaos with the website has rejuvenated Republican atavists. They should have been contrite after fumbling the government shutdown. They have quickly returned to the attack. They rant that the website fiasco demonstrates government can’t operate complex systems and should not attempt big things. This is pure sewage but people tend to be duped by enthusiastic repetition of categorical statements regardless of the inaccuracy thereof. War is the most complex venture known to man and the American government is singularly adept at that enterprise. Had government funded and treated the website like it does the Pentagon, things would not be as they now are. Additionally, the government managed the space race and the construction of the very internet for which the website was built. One transient technical failure does not mean the government is inherently capable of such efforts any more than the bankruptcy of one firm peal the demise of the private sector.
Hard-line Republicans have exploited the initial troubles with the new program to revive calls for President Obama’s impeachment. The man has done nothing remotely illegal or impeachable but most Tea Party members believe he must be impeached. Their goal is not to allow the Black man to finish his term in office. They seek to impeach him not for what he has done but for what or who he is. They will cite Obamacare as the battle cry for this rude and foolish gesture.
Their racial hatred is so intense that some Republicans can barely contain their anger. During a meeting between Republican Congressmen and President Obama, one Republican reportedly told the President he “could barely stand to look at him.” No other president in recent history has tasted such disrespect, particularly when the substance of his policies is not far off the Republican compass. Something else is at work.
Recently, a Republican Party official in North Carolina gave a television interview wherein he described Black people as lazy and wanting government to given them everything. That the vast majority of Blacks work for a living and get paid less for doing equal work did not seem to discomfort the man.
Worst, the Republicans have again trooped out a Black man to cover their own racism. During last year’s presidential campaign, the buffoonish Herman Cain served as the prop. This year, the Republicans selected a person with a better intellectual pedigree and no skeletons in his personal closet, Dr. Ben Carson, the globally renowned surgeon. Speaking before an eager Republican cohort, Carson described Obamacare as “the worst thing since slavery.” With that, he legitimized every extremist claim against Obama. If Carson were as unskilled at medicine as he is unacquainted with the history of his own race, the man would be barred from coming within twenty miles of the nearest hospital. His statement was abject. What ambition or motive drove Carson to say such a shameless, false thing is unclear. Hopefully, it was for something valuable; otherwise, it is difficult to understand why he would so publicly sell his integrity.
To criticize Obamacare for its failings is appropriate; to equate it to slavery is the cheapest slander a Black man could do. The moment Carson uttered his remark, he estranged himself the majority of Black Americans. For his efforts to please the conservative throng he will find his reward a bitter one. He will find himself on the growing heap of black opportunists discarded by the Republicans upon finding their latest Black marionette had little traction with most Black people.
All in all, American politics is a dismal mess. President Obama’s victory on the government shutdown thrust straight into an intense fusillade over the actual rollout of his signature health law. His penchant to compromise principle at the drop of a hat placed himself in this awkward position. Last week, he was on the offensive and hopefully prepared to move a bit more boldly and a bit more to the left of his usual cautious stance. Now that he has been again bitten, he will likely return to his haltering way.
Obama’s self restraint will encourage the Republicans not to curb themselves. They will highlight the trouble surrounding Obamacare, hoping their attention adds to its woes and sends it to an early demise due to lack of sufficient public participation. In the meantime, they will also use it as leverage to push the President on other issues, particularly further trimming the federal budget which has already sunk too low to sustain the current level of economic activity. If he takes their bait, he will agree to measures capable of deflating the American economy as will has sabotaging his health measure.
Already, he has presided over the contraction of the number of federal government employees and a reduction in food assistance for poor people, both firsts for any American president. This conservatism is not the legacy he should strive for because it is more malignant than helpful. But it will be legacy that he writes for himself should he persist in trying to befriend people who will be consoled only if he were to make an ungracious and quick exit from office.
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