Some Schmo wrote:honorentheos wrote:Ok. Pick one Sanders initiative and I'll lay out my concerns with how a socialist executive should cause us to hesitate on ceding them power using it as an example sometime this weekend.
Universal health care.
And I'll just say up front, it wouldn't surprise me if it turns out I share some of your concerns. The devil is certainly in the details. As I said, I consider most of Sanders' rhetoric to represent aspiration. He hasn't really provided details.
At the same time, it's not healthful to assume the best or worst and give it more weight than all the other possibilities (I say this largely because I have to keep reminding myself).
I’m following up on your request that I outline my concerns regarding electing Sanders, a self-described Democratic Socialist, over one of the more moderate candidates now reduced to Joe Biden. And do so using one of the issues Sanders espouses to illustrate why it’s Sanders more than the issue that is behind the concern.
To lay it out, I first want to describe the foundation of my concerns that aren’t specific to healthcare. In some ways, they aren’t even focused on Bernie Sanders. Rather, they originate out of a question regarding what past historic moments best reflect where we are currently? And do these past events have any warnings for us in the present about which future we are choosing?
The first of those is fairly recent, and really just leaving infancy and in its full adolescent hormonal rage. That being, the move made by Republicans in the United States to weaponize anti-government sentiment that they mistakenly believed was something they could keep bottled and controlled. Instead, it escaped in 2016 into popular support for Donald Trump. Trump isn’t the worst president that this movement can and likely will inflict on the nation. He’s manipulating the Presidency for his own personal gain, but he’s basically a kleptocrat with a myopic understanding of government that serves as a check on the damage he does. If his office isn’t helping him in ways he understands through the limited lens of deal making for his own advantage combined with old fashioned racial animus, it’s not on his radar. In fact, I’d go so far as to argue the most long-term damaging aspects of his presidency are originating from people around him wielding power through him such as Stephen Miller. Miller has an agenda that is bigger than just profiting off the Presidency. The real long-term threat with Trump is what he enables, more so than who he is. What makes him scary is also not who he is or what he’d done, but rather why he has been able to do it in the first place.
As Steve Schmidt, the former Republican strategist, has argued the current change in the Republican party that came to full flower – not with Trump’s election but in McConnel and Paul Ryan lining up behind him - has destroyed what it was and replaced it with an ethno-nationalist party. In this light, even when Trump leaves office, there is a metastasized fear-driven, selfish, and anti-democratic sentiment that will give us another Trump-like but worse candidate. Followed by another, and another, and another. And sometime in the future, one of those people will not be ignorant of what they could actually do with executive power, but rather it will land a Stephen Miller-like politician with knowledge of government in the presidency. And then there will be no more United States as we have known it, but something new bearing it’s name but without it’s soul.
I bring that up, not to whip up anger against Trump, but to express concerns that the same movement is in its infancy among Democrats. Rather than enabling ethno-nationalism, the left side of American politics is coalescing around it’s mirrored twin of anti-liberal, anti-business, anti-individual sentiment. Consider this description from Schmidt of what Trump has done to reshape the Republican party and its adherents into blindly setting fire to the values and institutions of our Republic:
This present strain of know-nothingism has long been in the (Republican) party’s DNA. This cancer has always been there. This dormant cancer. But it has become fully embraced in this moment. We’re seeing at this moment a president of the United States do five things. He is using mass rallies that are fueled by constant lying to incite fervor and devotion in his political base. The second thing we see him do is to affix blame for every problem in the world. Many of them are complex, not so different from the issues faced at the end of Agrarian age and the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. We see him attack minority populations with words like “invade” and “infest.” The third thing he does is create a shared sense of victimization caused by the scapegoated populations. This is the high act of Trumpism: From Trump to Sean Hannity to Laura Ingraham, everyone is a victim. The fourth thing he does is he alleges conspiracy by nefarious and unseen hidden forces – the “deep state.” And the fifth thing is the assertion that “I am the law, that I am above it.” He just said immigrants don’t get a hearing; they don’t get a court representation.
So the party’s evolution is as much cultural as it is political or ideological. The two parties for a long time were not homogeneous ideologically. There were plenty of conservatives in the Democratic Party, and there were no small number of liberals in the Republican Party. Now, culturally, we’re in thrall to theocratic crackpots like Mike Huckabee and Franklin Graham and Jerry Falwell, where you’re able to justify the candidacy of a Roy Moore because you want to keep the Senate seat. The theocracy and crackpot sewer conservatism has taken over.
Those five points are not that different from what one hears among the left, but most particularly embodied by Bernie Sanders. 1) Mass rallies to incite fervor and devotion among a base, 2) affix blame for complex problems onto targets such as billionaires and, according to his Bernie Bros, boomers, 3) foster a sense of victimization caused by the targets above, 4) allege conspiracies and powerful threats such as the “establishment” working against the workers and lower classes, and 5) the system we have needs changed to reflect the absolute sense of right embodied in the representative of the movement.
The Democratic party is going the way of the Republican party, and soon we won’t have representation in the middle. Instead, the two major parties will be owned by the extremes who no longer share the values and belief in the institutional strength that made up the foundation of our Republic.
This leads me to the second of those historic events I think has something to tell us about today. That being, Spain in the decade leading up to the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in 1936. I can’t recommend the book, The Battle for Spain by Antony Beevor enough. Here’s a review –
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2006/ ... ianreview4
Like the bitter conflict in Iraq today, the Spanish civil war was pathologically vicious. Religious fanaticism, political separatism and foreign intervention inflamed the violence in both cases. But it was aggravated in Spain by other factors, notably virulent class hatred. Half the nation went to bed hungry each night and anarchists said that "the sins of the old corrupt system can only be washed away in blood". The affluent were no less ferocious. One Salamanca landowner boasted that on the opening day of the civil war he lined up all his labourers and shot six of them "pour encourager les autres".
The "Red Terror", which creamed the scum off the top (to paraphrase Stalin's ambassador), reminded some of barbarian massacres. Among the victims were 6,500 clergy and 280 nuns. And such was the hatred felt for the church, a medieval institution with an auto-da-fé mentality, that some priests were buried alive after being made to dig their own graves. Meanwhile Franco proved to be, as HG Wells said, every inch "a murderous little Christian gentleman". He approved a process of limpieza (cleansing) and altogether slaughtered some 200,000 people, four times as many as the Republicans. Nationalists cried "Long live death". The psychopathic General Queipo de Llano, who also encouraged rape, promised to hunt down Republicans without mercy and "if they're already dead, I shall kill them again".
One of the most valuable lessons of that era is, in my opinion, what happens when a society turns economic inequality into an excuse for radical changes in government to engage in punitive ping-pong between pro-industrialists and pro-worker policies. Rather than moderating and learning from each volatile coup-led or election-endorse change in government, each change resulted in an even more extreme mistreatment of one side in favor of the other until it finally culminated into open war. And in that open war, depending on which side held the area, a person was very likely to be dragged out and shot in the street as expression of an ever-building anger aimed at the other side.
The lesson here is there is real danger in our present situation, where the destruction of moderate views in both parties leaves us exposed to the worst possibilities of a democracy. Keep in mind, democracies were not held up as ideal forms of government even in the days of the founding fathers. Democracy was viewed as dangerous, reactionary, and in the view of Plato and others who followed, inevitably bound to pave the road to authoritarian rule because people can’t help themselves from running into anarchy that requires salvation by a strong, authoritarian ruler who will enslave them as they praise him.
The concern, then, is all of the above is table setting for the election in November, but more so, what comes in the years after that.
So, regarding Sanders and healthcare: Healthcare has been a problematic issue in the United States. As I pointed out the EA in another thread, we’ve had decades on decades of debate over the best way to fund and handle healthcare and unlike our fellow western democracies, we’ve somehow or other failed to view healthcare as a right that society to ensure and protect to some degree…but also do seem to view it as a moral responsibility leading to a bloated and underperforming web of providers, funding mechanisms, and ballooning costs. Every Democrat president in my life time has put healthcare reform on the table and prioritized it with meaningful pollical fallout as the result.
Why? What is it about the American people that leads us to resist moving to a system that would save costs overall, leave fewer people unable to receive basic healthcare services, and could be funded in a way that doesn’t bankrupt the country?
I think that’s a complex problem. It taps into our national identity and narrative about what we value. It is more challenging here than elsewhere because we are larger than most nations held up as models we should be following, more diverse as a nation, with a tension between state rights compared to federal authority and national government. The Swiss best represent the tension between state and federal power, Canada our land mass, we’re the third most populated nation after China and India, and our closest NATO ally in population is Germany at 17th with 83 million compared to our 327 million. China and India both operate as authoritarian nations with very different forms of government. Our closest ally in population, Japan at 11, has a strong ethnic national identity. Canada has a tenth of our population.
It’s simply ignorant to believe we can adopt someone else’s model. We need to find something that works for us in our unique circumstances and within our national identity. I think we need to find such a model and move to it, but we need to do so with intention, with judgement, and above all with an aim to avoid the worst possible outcome – that it causes the pendulum to swing back against the party who enacted it with violence and furthers the momentum we seem to be accruing towards implosion.
That doesn’t describe Bernie Sanders’ approach.
Assuming Bernie ends up with a sympathetic Congress, his plan would accelerate us into full “Medicare for All” in four years. Sadly for DT, Bernie would still be obligated to ramp up to this by opening eligibility by age starting with young dependent children and people 55 and older, then adding each year with people in their 20s and 30s being the last to be added to the program. That’s both ironic and, well, kinda concerning given it is precisely the group of people he’s building his base around who would find themselves being left outside of the dramatic change Sanders promised on the issue they claim matters most for practically his entire four year term.
Sander’s plan would go far beyond the Canadian plan to include prescription drugs, vision and dental care. It would turn the Secretary of Health and Human Services into one of the most powerful positions in the world. The HHS would set prices, determine what types of medical professionals we need schools to pump out, and otherwise be exactly the kind of executive-controlled system people like EA supposedly freak out about.
But here’s the rub. It would almost certainly result in an outside, separate wealthy healthcare system for for the ultra-wealthy. Why? Sander’s plan subjects providers who are part of the system to wage controls to manage healthcare prices, and prevents other forms of insurance from being created for services covered by his plan. The only insurance options his plan allows is for non-covered services like cosmetic surgery or the like. But it DOES allow providers to not participate and allow pay-as-you-go services to occur. In other words, it would allow the best doctors to contract for pay-as-you-go service to those who can afford it, and only those who can afford it. The incentive to those doctors is they would be able to get past the wage controls. The incentive to the uber-wealthy is they could have their own tier of healthcare that is almost certain to attract the most talented and capable to be rewarded for their abilities. And it leaves the pool of providers in the government’s system under the control of HSS.
In short, Bernie’s plan sets up a massive swing of the pendulum. His core base will be the last to be onboarded. It will inevitably require massive changes in taxation and class division. It will result in a wealthy, inaccessible elite healthcare program outside of the government system that will be even more obviously out of reach for most people. And it does all of this while doubling down on divisive rhetoric that is the mirror of what created the Trump movement.
