Pardon me for writing a linkless post. This is the world that we live in, at least for the time being. Apropos of recent Lawlerian and Kenneallian comments on the allure of History and the trouble with health care, has anyone else been struck dumb walking across their living rooms by footage of these town halls? Here are figures straight out of the nightmares of refined public opinion: funny-looking, funny-talking rubes, gesticulating, utterly unable to couch a statement or ironize a put-down, so dreadfully serious about their importance as citizens. Citizens! In the mouths of refined public opinion today that word, formerly associated with revolutionary utopia, now tastes atavistic, like a bad flashback or a vow of revenge. In a wild inversion of Aristotle, politics is now thought of as an activity for lower life forms.
Politics is for Dummies: a motto for an era, of ‘Historic’ moral and social crisis: Neither the American people nor their bumbling, petty representatives in Congress can be trusted to orchestrate and execute a national health care system worthy of the name. Not that we wouldn’t trust them if we could. It’s just that neither citizen politics nor legislative policymaking are able to produce what the very idea of a national health care system leads us to envision. Politics is as disgustingly natural as sausage-making — something which, if it cannot be eliminated, must be kept from getting naked.
‘Real America’ turns out, in a horrible reversal of irony, to be all too real, triggering the mythical liberal disgust reflex as no Reality TV marathon could do. It’s not that refined public opinion doesn’t believe in ‘Real America’. Rather, that so many ‘Real Americans’ still exist is cause for great loathing, and that they want to seize control of policy by practicing politics is cause for great fear. ‘Real Americans’ are shockingly, dismayingly real in their uncouth natural being, in the way they let their nature show. Their dress, their bodies, their speech all undermine the type of nobility cultivated by the culture of the bouffant and the pantsuit and the eye lift and the catchphrase and the parsed statement and the consultant and the expert: Their lust for political participation is an unnerving reminder that we still have not done enough to beat ‘Real America’ back into the past and lock the door…
This is the narrative that’s emerging from our national health care debate, which as of right now is going extremely badly. The battles over bioethics are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the painful conflict between liberal nobility and conservative nature. Conservatives can prevent themselves from being overwhelmed by fear and loathing for nature because they can live — sometimes, despite appearances to the contrary — with dignity. But consider the conflict between liberal nature and conservative nobility. The same situation now appears reversed: liberals accuse conservatives of denying human dignity in pursuit of a silly, illusory, and harmful vision of noble independence. Liberals are disgusted by conservatives who think the ideal society is rooted in good conservative folk of a lower class than they would ever want to be a part of. And conservatives are disgusted by liberals whose ideal society is planted on a democratic vista of good, but hopelessly lower-class, liberal folk. And the disgust rubs off on those multitudes, who, each side believes, are being kept in an all-too-natural condition. Both politics and the absence of politics can appear grotesquely natural. These two visions invite two possible conclusions: either adjudicating between them shall or shall not be a political undertaking. But in each case, the deeper question is: political because of our inescapable species nature, or political because of something else?
August 12th, 2009 | 9:49 am
I’d like to suggest a revision of your diagnosis: it’s not that liberals are horrified by the health-rejectionists’ embrace of citizenship as such. There’s plenty of room for active, angry citizens in the liberal imagination. It’s that they can’t quite understand what these people are so angry about. It’s not a matter of racial discrimination, labor exploitation, or an unjust foreign policy. So the whole dispute is, unlike Reality TV, completely off-script.
And I’m torn myself. On the one hand, it’s invigorating to see so many people willing to spend their time and energy engaging in actual politics. And those who note historical precedents for unruly citizens’ movements are quite right. On the other hand, the motivating issue is evidently not insurance reform, or even a single-payer system. So what is it that’s got so many otherwise normal people literally shaking, weeping, screaming with rage?
August 12th, 2009 | 10:04 am
What’s interesting about this political phenomenon is the depth and breadth of the uprising; we’re way into the ‘Wal-Mart Shopper’ crowd where the participants include the unemployed, underemployed, union members and retirees all of whom appear quite willing and eager to tar and feather some corrupt Democratic congressman who hasn’t bothered to read the so-called ‘health care plan.’
Perhaps we’ve reached critical mass of the “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take any more” crowd? And, wouldn’t be ironic if it were the habitues of ‘Wal-Mart’ that saved the elites from the ravages of ‘socialized’ medicine?
August 12th, 2009 | 10:11 am
Hey, at least you aren’t condescending to them.
August 12th, 2009 | 10:37 am
Mr. Goldman,
Fear.
See the Peggy Noonan column recently, among others. When you have Congressmen admitting they have not read and cannot understand a health care bill, that does not tend to inspire a great deal of confidence. Moreover, we have a President who not only HAS no experience as an executive, and has broken nearly every campaign promise that attracted centrist voters, but is ACTING like he has no experience.
-J.
August 12th, 2009 | 10:37 am
So Sam mediates between what appears to be the extremes of James and Ivan. The anger isn’t well focused. but that doesn’t mean it’s unreasonable. Ivan is right that the Democrats seem to think that it’s unreasonable to oppose policies based on expert consensus. And James is right that these meetings aren’t so edifying. The big problem seems to be that the opposition is leaderless.
August 12th, 2009 | 11:04 am
Also, one might look at the Paglia column (maybe the last time I’ll ever say that) from Salon, referenced elsewhere on FT today:
“As with the massive boondoggle of the stimulus package, which Obama foolishly let Congress turn into a pork rut, too much has been attempted all at once; focused, targeted initiatives would, instead, have won wide public support. How is it possible that Democrats, through their own clumsiness and arrogance, have sabotaged healthcare reform yet again? Blaming obstructionist Republicans is nonsensical because Democrats control all three branches of government. It isn’t conservative rumors or lies that are stopping healthcare legislation; it’s the justifiable alarm of an electorate that has been cut out of the loop and is watching its representatives construct a tangled labyrinth for others but not for themselves. No, the airheads of Congress will keep their own plush healthcare plan — it’s the rest of us guinea pigs who will be thrown to the wolves.”
August 12th, 2009 | 12:07 pm
There’s this unwritten assumption behind both this post and its comments that undergirds a lot of conservative commentary– that, in general, we can assume the basic popularity of conservative ideas. What particular evidence does several dozen angry shouters amount to in terms of popularity?
August 12th, 2009 | 12:24 pm
Jonathan, if Congressmen’s failure read and understood the bills they pass were sufficient provocation, we’d have had a revolution a long time ago. Probably Bob is right that this is just a “mad as hell” moment for the Walmart crowd. And I guess that would be okay, if the energies it unleashed didn’t seem to be wholly negative. Frum is right: defeating Obamacare would be a Pyrrhic victory if it means sticking with the current system. My fear is that some of the wilder anti-government rhetoric is going to make that very difficult.
I’ve resisted saying anything about healthcare itself, because I don’t understand it either. But it’s pretty evident that the problem is that we want it to be better, cheaper, and more or less universal. Probably we can achieve any two of those goals. But not all of them–and Republicans are as unwilling as Democrats to say so.
August 12th, 2009 | 12:25 pm
The glib Gibbs blames it all on the cable news networks. Tune into MSNBC and one hears the programmed liberals sneering at the rubes and their scheming financiers. Tune into FOX and one hears the programmed conservatives manning the barricades against the evil liberal. Tune into the network news, a kind of Highlights Magazine for the new Juvenile Adult and you simply get a commentary upon the debate without any real explanation of the issues behind the debate. Check the newspapers and there is largely more of the same.
Meanwhile, we find ourselves saddled with a government that seems to have a near perfect record of building mountain ranges out of molehills while the business class they are bailing out seems to have developed a similar reverse-Midas touch.
And we wonder why there are people somewhat alarmed by what they see.
August 12th, 2009 | 12:36 pm
1. Sam: I, too, am somewhat torn, but perhaps for different reasons. It’s true that some upstanding American citizens really are rubes. For us, I think, being political means being unable either to avoid interacting with them as fellow citizens or to do so safe in the knowledge that they are mere rubes. (I do guess this is true for us for reasons that would be opaque from the perspective of classical political theory.) But do you back into a reaffirmation of my diagnosis if what upsets the left so much is indeed the prospect of unscripted (I’d say, that is, really political) face-to-face encounters? Angry theater is, on my read of things, fake politics, to the point of actually concealing anti-politics. It’s also a tremendously limiting vehicle for individual political practice, even of the raw or coarse sort seen on display at the town halls. For the individual, angry theater tends to point either to Cindy Sheehan, Travis Bickle, or go home and watch ‘yourself’ on TV. Poor political options all.
2. Freddie: I hear you, but consider that I actually assume that conservative ‘ideas’, in general, are basically ‘popular’. The ‘rise of the vulcans’/'Neocon project’, whether good, evil, or meh, is a colossal — and, I wager, fleeting — aberration from conservative standard operating procedure, and virtually the only rule of American politics since Day One has been that labor movements will always be marginal and fail. There simply is no tradition in America of liberal popular movements. Yes, I too know about Debs & Co., and I’m not underscoring this in order to mock the concerns or the intellectual seriousness of liberal populism. I am saying that relative to Europe, the only real comparison case, popular politics in America is not liberal. One time around, apparently, it was progressive — and here Alan Wolfe is as right as anyone that progressive and liberal are in fact more frenemies than allies — but the Progressive movement led by TR to trample out the rotten vintage of the Grant legacy bears almost no relation to the left progressive movement of today. Finally, you have to concede that the ‘several dozen angry shouters’ really do speak for a LOT of people, even if a minority — indeed, a freakish non-coalition of people torn between libertarianism, paleolibertarianism, paleoconservatism, and conservatism. Right?
August 12th, 2009 | 12:57 pm
Well, first I’d like to point out that I really don’t advocate the public disruptions–it’s pretty uncivil and generally counter-productive. I think part of what accounts for the visceral response is the personal and palpable issue that health is–questions regarding the body manage to be both very important and very private at the same time and the publicization of such an issue predictably stirs the emotions. Also, there seems to be a growing intimation on the part of the public that a very significant and impactful piece of legislation might pass without them understanding the details or having much of a say in the process. The response to these paroxysms of frustration haven’t been all that encouraging either–genuinely upset voters are being told their anger is “manufactured”, or they’re part of some conservative cabal, or they’re just plain idiots. And Peter hits the nail on the head–much of the frustration (though this is rarely reported) has been directed versus the GOP who are clearly complicit in their feeling of powerlessness.
August 12th, 2009 | 1:02 pm
James, I think that what upsets some commentators on the left is that they don’t have the conceptual vocabulary to describe what’s going on. Which is what encourages risible accusations of astro-turf, racism, etc. On the other hand, the same is true of our angry friends. They spout cliches about socialism or lies about death panels because they’re unable to articulate what (I suspect) they’re really mad about: the negation of politics by mass media, technocracy, and the old-fashioned indifference of the governing class. We may be on the verge of an outbreak of authentic populism. Which has the potential both to refresh the political system or to get seriously ugly.
August 12th, 2009 | 1:20 pm
I agree with you 2.3 trillion percent there, Sam.
“Or both,” cheer our paleolibertarian friends…
August 12th, 2009 | 1:22 pm
Sam, I think, comes closest to an accurate understanding of this phenomenon.
But where Sam derails is in the comment:”They spout cliches about socialism or lies about death panels because they’re unable to articulate what (I suspect) they’re really mad about: the negation of politics by mass media, technocracy, and the old-fashioned indifference of the governing class.”
The unwashed know exactly what’s happening. As a group they understand the truth of reality better than the elitists. They understand the derailed, second reality nature of their Leader (though, they may have voted for him), and they are resisting this swift, forced, march toward statism the only way they know how.
What they are doing is nothing less than heroic, and they are determined…God bless ‘em, and yes Sam’s right when he writes, “Which has the potential both to refresh the political system or to get seriously ugly.”
August 12th, 2009 | 1:56 pm
I don’t think we disagree, Bob: my thought is that most people understand what’s going in a pretty fundamental way. But I think they have trouble expressing it–which accounts for the rather inarticulate effusions of rage we’ve all seen on Youtube. I’m not making any kind of false-consciousness argument. Just suggesting that we’ve lost even the language in which to conduct civil (in both senses of the term) dispute.
August 12th, 2009 | 5:01 pm
The accusations of astroturf are nuts. The scenes at the town halls are what happens when you get town halls over some issue that the public is passionate about and where one side thinks that the only way it can influence policy is by protesting or arguing with those in power. I remember a televised town hall meeting years ago. Chris Shays was liberal Republican representing a suburban district. The questions were almost all antiwar, but they were delivered in a moralistic, frantic, paranoid and angry way that now seems more familiar. It turns out that in important ways, angry liberal grassroots folks and angry conservative grassroots folks are pretty similar. I also think that one reason the arguments are less than edifying is that the most of the opposition arguments I’m seeing are being cribbed from the popularizing right-leaning media (especially talk radio and Fox News). I’d be interested to see what Conor Friedersdorf has to say about the town hall meeting and the effect of the conservative-leaning broadcast media on the ability of everyday conservatives to argue the issues in front of audiences that are not already very well disposed to the conservative side.
August 12th, 2009 | 5:59 pm
[...] not against these protests, and I don’t look down on them. Real democracy isn’t often pretty, which is why even conservatives rarely involve themselves in local politics. But I think the [...]
August 13th, 2009 | 12:36 pm
Dept. of Life Intrusions
Chapter 1.
Watching t.v., I wonder why the films of dissenters seem never to include anyone with anything besides an inchoate angry retort and I’m equally curious as to why the only explanation from the left about the proposed sure-to-be-boondoggle is a simple reply to the fringe rumors of the dissenters. Nothing comprehensive is said at all. Confusion, and hence disgust reigns.
Chapter 2
Mail comes, and in it a note about a $300 a month increase in Health Premium. Disgust deepens.
Chapter 3.
Consider putting television in storage as a personal Health Care Reform. Light Cigar so as to counteract any extremes attendant the health kick. While smoking cigar, I try and recall anyone who ever approached me and claimed they were in a “Health Care Crisis”…including not a few sick people. Can’t recall any.
August 15th, 2009 | 8:08 pm
Go over to Wesley’s Smith “Secondhand Smoke” blog (or don’t you visit your fellow First Things bloggers?) and watch the video of Rep. Jackson-Lee taking a phone call while a cancer survivor asks a reasonable question in an even, moderate tone. That scene embodies how a lot of people think their government relates to them and has related to them for years and years. And you wonder why people are now starting to yell and shout?
I suppose it is unfortunate that these middle class folks haven’t spent the last few years refining their political arguments – like NYTimes, WSJ, WaPost, First Things, National Review, Weekly Standard, etc. writers and pundits.
On the other hand the writers associated with those institutions have been making moderate, well-reasoned arguments against government over-reach for years, and look where that’s got us. Other than providing the writers with nice incomes, I don’t see it having much of impact. A few “rubes” shouting down an arrogant politician, has actually prevented a national health insurance bill from being rammed through congress and just might prevent any health insurance legislation this year. I do think that, in the long run, this is a failed strategy, because the end result will be more regulation and intrusion by the all-encompassing state in our lives.
“… what upsets some commentators on the left is that they don’t have the conceptual vocabulary to describe what’s going on.” Excuse me while I strongly dissent from this. The Left has the “conceptual vocabulary to describe what’s going on” because this is what they’ve been doing for decades. Or am I misunderstanding what happened in Chicago in 1968? or the protests against Reagan? or the “Battle in Seattle” in 1999? or the response to the GOP 2004 convention in Minneapolis? What the Left is upset about is the Right using Leftists tactics because they know these tactics work.
It is certainly nice to get the intellectual fire-power and stimulation that comes from First Things, Commentary, National Review, WSJ, and numerous other journals, books and magazines. But sometimes in order to get things done or, more importantly, make politicians stop and listen the “rubes,” that is the folks who elect these Representatives & Senators, might have to get a bit unruly and, God forbid, loud.
August 16th, 2009 | 11:15 am
Daniel, I don’t think that the yelling is in itself a good thing for opponents of Obamacare. I agree that some of the uglier scenes at the townhalls show frustration and fear, but not so much the frustration and fear of the American people, as of two subgroups of the American people. At the townhalls I’ve seen on Youtube and on the news, the critics of ObamaCare seem to fall into two groups (though with some overlap).
1. People who are getting their information from the right-leaning popular media, especially talk radio and Fox News.
2. Old people who are scared that any major change to the healthcare system will result in a benefit cut for themselves.
The problem I see is that some of the overheated rhetoric will end up being a turnoff to ideologically uncommited voters who might respond to the assertion that the public plan will destroy private health insurance, but not to the assertion that Obama is a Nazi.
Fifteen years ago, a busy middle-class Rush Limbaugh listener (who did not read National Review or the Wall Street Journal) could probably make a sophisticated argument in favor of supply side economics, and one that could make a plausible appeal to the interests of someone who was not already a conservative. I don’t see many of the folks at the townhall meetings doing the same thing for healthcare.
This might seem utopian, but I don’t think so. I don’t think explaining how a public plan could destroy private healthcare insurance and consumer choice is any more complicated than explaining how cutting tax rates could lead to more tax revenue.
August 24th, 2009 | 8:36 pm
[...] know how it’s gonna end. Still, I’m sure there are many who would prefer it to all that nasty, dirty, tumultuous political stuff! Comments [...]
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