March 22, 2010

Personal Responsibility is Owning Your Vote

Much has been (and will be) made about the partisan nature of the healthcare vote.  Republicans, proud of their unanimity in opposition, delight in casting blame for this unanimity at the feet of the Democrats; as if Democrats are ultimately responsible for how Republicans choose to vote.  The New York Times comes as close as it can to pinning the blame on Obama himself:

...there is no doubt that in the course of this debate, Mr. Obama has lost something - and lost it for good. Gone is the promise on which he rode to victory less than a year and half ago - the promise of a "postpartisan" Washington in which rationality and calm discourse replaced partisan bickering.

Never in modern memory has a major piece of legislation passed without a single Republican vote.

Republicans can (and should) receive credit for maintaining party discipline, but we have an obligation to recognize that this discipline is an institutional feature of coalition government designed to serve the political interests of members of a particular caucus, and not, as some would have us believe, an intrinsic service to the larger polity of constituents. 

Far from signaling that certain legislation may not be in the best interest of the country, party-line votes tell us absolutely nothing beyond the obvious: that the issue at hand is both political and polarizing.  If one wishes to avoid party-line votes, therefore, the only clear course of action would be to avoid polarizing issues altogether - hardly a good strategy with which to accomplish meaningful change.

But let's get back to this business of zero Republican votes and what that means.  It's hard to take seriously the idea that Obama and the Democrats are responsible, given the avalanche of concessions and obsequious gestures offered to the GOP as the bill was being built.  A more plausible explanation is that over the last few administrations conservatism's right wing has become a sideshow of fringe extremists, with the healthcare vote finally pulling the veil off of this foul excrescence.  Eight long years of George W. Bush, concomitant with the final touches being applied to the cultish myth of Reagan, created a GOP that is indistinguishable from the most authoritarian, martial, bloodthirsty snarls of Dick Cheney and Karl Rove; this is not the boring conservatism I grew up with.

Healthcare didn't garner any Republican votes because Republicans are no longer interested in dialogue with their colleagues across the aisle.  Their better, more moderate judgment has been hijacked by pundits, bloggers and teabaggers.  The legacy of this transformation, now that this historic bill has been passed, will be a huge embarrassment to future Republicans trying to widen their appeal... especially since future generations will owe their gratitude for equitable healthcare exclusively to Democrats.

Mar 22, 2010 2:52:59 AM

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Urban Planning & Turning the Other Cheek The debate about the Park51 Islamic community center and mosque is mostly an irrelevant cacophony of bigoted foolishness, and yet it provides an opportunity for us to address many important cultural issues that are of vital importance to our nation and the world as a whole. In the discussions that I have had with those who are sympathetic to my own views on the subject, there tends to be a consistent theme: those who oppose Park51 are ignorant. They're ignorant of American principles of religious freedom, of the relationship between Islam and terrorism, of religious history, etc. While there are doubtless ignorant people in every crowd, I think that the argument for ignorance in discussions of religion and/or politics is usually fallacious. It relies on the well-intentioned, self-aggrandizing yet naïve view that if only so-and-so knew the facts, they would think differently about an issue. 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Bush on U.S. Humanitarian Aid to Afghanistan Presidential Hall, Dwight David Eisenhower Executive Office Building, Washington, D.C. October 11, 2002 Unfortunately for us, we didn't have sole proprietorship of the casus belli in either war. Our enemies had a say in the matter too, and they have spoken unequivocally: they claim to represent Islam in its truest and most noble manifestation. Our enemies believe that they are fulfilling the will of Allah and his Prophet. We may not like it, but over these many years we have been fighting more non-terrorist Muslim warriors (Mujahideen and some Fedayeen) than we have the "evil" terrorist-types who populate our imaginations. Nearly ever day someone praises Allah just before firing their weapon at U.S. troops - and this has been going on for years. How long can we maintain the fiction that we are not engaged in religious war? 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