Michael Gerson, in his regular column at the Washington Post, writes:
But predominantly publicly run health care is an ideological red line for Republicans. In other instances where the middle class has become dependent on government for its health care — witness Britain — the conservative case for individual responsibility and limited government has been fundamentally undermined. People hold tightly to the security of their benefits even when treated by a health system with surly incompetence. Not even the most compassionate conservative is going to accept government control of 16 percent of the economy.
If Obama’s proposal demonstrates genuine neutrality between public and private health options — empowering individuals to make a free choice — it could gain significant Republican support. If the plan is an intermediary step toward a single-payer system, Obama can expect a serious fight, even from a weakened opponent, because the deepest values of American conservatism will be at stake.
Obviously, “the deepest values of American conservatism” instruct that the alleviation of pain and suffering (not to mention surcease from the realities of personal/family financial devastation) ought only to be available to those neighbors of proper character.
To any of us who have grown up in another western country (Canada, in my case) such an ideology looks utterly barbaric in its consequences and rationale. I have received medical care in both countries and there is no significant or even noticable difference in the quality of care received. Gerson suggests that Brit medical care is marked by “surely incompetence” and so we’d have to ask him how many times he’s been to doctors in the UK and we can imagine that’s probably zero. But that claim, or others like it, are a fundamental component of the propaganda campaign the right has waged for decades (with helpful funding from the AMA and pharmaceutical companies) to discredit medical systems outside the US. That citizens of those other western nations (all of them), choosing freely in election after election, refuse utterly to move back to a US-style system is almost never mentioned at all. Where some allusion to this is made (as Gerson does here) it is tied to the notion that these citizens have become “dependent” and their characters now made mushy. That Americans, by consistent polling, demonstrate that in significant majorities wish something else than what Gerson wishes therefore doesn’t bother him much at all…they are, in their weakness, easily seduced.
It’s easy enough to find information on, as I mentioned above, the financial interests benefitting from the American status quo funding PR/propaganda initiatives. And its quite simple to witness the communication channels on which this propaganda work gets done (just turn on talk radio or grab a copy of the WSJ or pop over to NRO and NewsMax). But that it lands agreeably on the ears of so many Americans who attend to rightwing PR is a curiosity.
Clearly, there are elements of both class and race in this. But I suspect that there’s another aspect here, particularly applicable to the Christian Right and it is one which resonates with the American frontier mythologies.
From the beginning, Christian theology has had a serious philosophical problem. If god is all-good, all-knowing and all-powerful then how can it be the case that entirely sinless creatures might be allowed to suffer, often horrily, as say, a baby in a fire? The classic justification or reasoning to get around this problem is exemplified by Irenaeus who argued that the earth is “a vale of soul-making” by which he meant that God couldn’t just give us everything from the get-go because then we wouldn’t be self-actualized creatures. He had to (logically had to, you see) make existence tough and chaotic and painful and disappointing and even cruel so that we might become matured sentient creatures. How He managed to get where He is without a strict daddy doing this gig on him isn’t considered a problem.
That all sounds rather like the mythologies surrounding the making of a strong American frontier man/woman, doesn’t it? And of course it isn’t difficult at all to observe the tendencies in American Christian traditions to imagine the relationship of God to man as that of father to child.
But to be fair, we really can’t lay the blame here on Christianity (even if it is such a clear examplar of all the above) but rather to something deeper and more profound across time and cultures. The Stoics, after all, set the notion above (suffering makes you stronger/better) as the core notion of their beliefs.
One has to, in the end I think, simply acknowledge the impossibility of reconciling the human condition.
