Wintry Thoughts on Political Heat

I’ve been snowbound since Sunday evening, stuck at home with kids who resent the fact that there are no snow days in homeschool, a wife who wonders why I don’t have a job in south Florida (but only on cold winter days), and two animals (a neurotic dog who keeps asking to go out and then to come in, and a kitten that is constantly hunting my various appendages).  It’s enough to make a man snap.

Well, not quite.  I’ve been keeping busy, preparing for classes that were supposed to start yesterday, reading a book for a review due at the end of the month, shoveling the driveway (the first one on the block to do so, with the only emulator being the ex-Marine across the street), and watching DVDs we rented in anticipation of the great blizzard of 2011 (8 inches of snow and ice!).

I’ve been thinking about, but have resisted writing about, the awful events in Arizona.  So much of the analysis was predictable.

But Jacob Weisberg has driven me over the edge.

Here’s his opening salvo (oops, shouldn’t have phrased it that way!):

To call his crime an attempted assassination is to acknowledge that it appears to have had a political and not merely a personal context. That context wasn’t Islamic radicalism, Puerto Rican independence, or anarcho-syndicalism. It was the anti-government, pro-gun, xenophobic populism that flourishes in the dry and angry climate of Arizona . Extremist shouters didn’t program Loughner, in some mechanistic way, to shoot Gabrielle Giffords. But the Tea Party movement did make it appreciably more likely that a disturbed person like Loughner would react, would be able to react, and would not be prevented from reacting, in the crazy way he did.

I guess Weisberg thinks this is a more subtle version of the argument that seems to begin and end with references to Sarah Palin’s Facebook page.  (Or can we also cast blame on Barack Obama’s reference to knives and guns or on the Target Corporation?)

But his next move is the one that really got my juices flowing:

At the core of the far right’s culpability is its ongoing attack on the legitimacy of U.S. government—a venomous campaign not so different from the backdrop to the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995 . Then it was focused on “government bureaucrats” and the ATF. This time it has been more about Obama’s birth certificate and health care reform. In either case, it expresses the dangerous idea that the federal government lacks valid authority. It is this, rather than violent rhetoric per se, that is the most dangerous aspect of right-wing extremism.

Aside from the fact that this breathtaking statement elides the difference between birthers and those mainstream conservatives who oppose Obama’s healthcare reform, there’s this: “the most dangerous aspect of right-wing extremism” is “the dangerous idea that the federal government lacks valid authority.”

I repeat: for Weisberg, believing in constitutionally-limited government is “dangerous,” so dangerous that he has to repeat the word “dangerous.”  Are federal judges and state attorneys general dangerous?  Are the American Founders dangerous?  Is commemorating them dangerous?  (I admit that the Fourth of July is an incendiary holiday, albeit perhaps only literally, rather than, as Weisberg’s argument, if not necessarily Weisberg himself—surely he knows better!—would have it, figuratively.)

To be sure, the Founders recognized that adhering to the principles of limited government is dangerous, which is why they pledged their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor to the effort to affirm and carry out those principles.

What is Weisberg’s alternative?  To let government do whatever Congress and the President can agree on, or what the Courts will permit?  (It seems to me, by the way, that the authority of Courts, such as it is, depends also upon this “dangerous idea,” so perhaps Weisberg, if he were being consistent, would have to favor some form of majoritarian tyranny, as articulated by the political branches.)

The remainder of his column isn’t very surprising.  There’s talk about inflammatory rhetoric, though consistency would require him also to indict the Fourth of July (as I noted above), Barack Obama (didn’t he say something about guns and knives?), and this movie .

There’s the obligatory argument in favor of gun control.

And then the closing flourish:

First you rile up psychotics with inflammatory language about tyranny, betrayal, and taking back the country.  [ed.:  I thought that was Michael Moore’s job.]   Then you make easy for them to get guns. But if you really want trouble, you should also make it hard for them to get treatment for mental illness. I don’t know if Loughner had health insurance, but he falls into a pool of people who often go uninsured—not young enough to be covered by parents (until the health-care bill’s coverage of twentysomethings kicked in a few months ago), not old enough for Medicare, not poor enough for Medicaid. If such a person happens to have a history of mental illness, he will be effectively uninsurable. To get treatment, he actually has to commit a crime. If Republicans succeed in repealing the Obama health care bill, that’s how it will remain.

I’m not quite sure what Weisberg expects of us here.  We know that Loughner has some bizarre and incoherent ideas, and that he has had some run-ins with the authorities.  If he indeed has psychological problems (as yet undiagnosed), he will be treated, now that he has committed a crime.  (I’ll leave aside the “alleged” stuff.)  How would healthcare reform have helped him in Weisberg’s brave new world?  Would he have been likely to seek assistance on his own?  Would someone have sought it for him?  Who?  Parents, friends, teachers, community college student affairs professionals?  Wouldn’t it have always been up to this 22-year-old man, barring the kind of compulsion he’d face after committing a crime?  How would the availability of insurance coverage have changed anything?

So long as we depend upon the initiative of individuals actually to seek care, the bare availability of the care doesn’t seem to matter.  Unless Weisberg has something else in mind.  And I don’t want to think about that.  I’d rather stare at the wintry scene outside my office window and share my family’s cabin fever.