|
Edited on Wed Aug-10-05 01:00 PM by kenny blankenship
Basic 17th & 18th century Liberal philosophy (the root of much Conservative Orthodoxy into the 20th century in Britain and America) holds that we are all equal and separate. We live and die more or less on our own, or at most in organic/biological units of kinship (the Famblee). No one comes into this world with any claim on anyone else. Much like Democritus or Thales searching, with only speculation to guide them and without instrumentation of any kind, for the indivisible constituent of all matter, Classical Liberals sought to isolate and elevate the most basic unit of the human subject in which a philosophical grounding for freedom could be established: the INDIVIDUAL. The individual is born naked with none of his needs provided for him by Nature and he dies alone; all that reason can discover about his nature comes down to that; society must have originated in the conscious decision of individuals to trade obedience to contractual agreements ( laws and government ) for safety with no one member (like a king or nobleman) above the rest by his very nature or above the binding power of contracts; therefore the individual is entitled to make himself as comfortable as he can in the time intervening between birth and death, all that he produces for this end is his own, and no one is more important than the contractual laws that govern all. That is the justification for overthrowing monarchies (or at least limiting monarchs so that they cannot raid your property), and also the justification for allowing people to resist the church as well, since it allows them to define the "pursuit of happiness" as the accumulation of property without any obligation to organize their lives around preparing for the "next life", or other spiritual imperatives used to control people. Now the same rhetorical stroke that 17th Century Liberals used to cut people free from the claims of monarchy/aristocracy and church, also severs them from any idea of society with a claim on their goodwill. All society can demand of individuals (under Anglo-American classical liberalism) is obedience to laws forbidding harm to others: a negative demand of "thou shalt not". Society does not have a positive claim to press on individuals--on their affections and opinions. It cannot demand of individuals "Love one another". It cannot say "thou shalt". Classical Liberalism lacks the last imperative of the French Revolutionary slogan. Liberty yes, Equality yes, but no Brotherhood. The only party in America which makes a fetish of following the Liberalism of the Revolutionary period is the Libertarian Party. Now I think we can all agree that Libertarians have a screw loose somewhere (it's something you're bound to become aware of while talking to them: they're in love with this misty theory and the real world is of no importance to them) and they resemble neurotics in their clutching adherence to the past, and resemble autistics in their denial of the existence of other people. Extreme examples of old Liberalism like Margaret Thatcher will sometimes go so far as to declare "There is no such thing as society." There is no society because the individual is ALL; and to get back to the question of healthcare, NOTHING could be more the sole sovereign province of the individual's self-determination than the matter of his health. Healthcare is absolutely foundational. Putting the state over the individual's decisions or provisions for his own healthcare, or putting the state between the individual and access to healthcare, is something Conservatives would view as a deprivation of the individual's natural right. They would view it as on the same level with the former right of Kings to deprive subjects of their heads for arbitrary reasons. Putting it that way, they have an emotionally persuasive threat--but putting emotion and rhetoric aside, what if it worked out in reverse fashion? What if the mediation of the state between the individual and healthcare actually provided MORE access, when assessed by rational measures, to healthcare not less? Devout Conservatives would never allow themselves to even consider this possibility. It HAS TO mean LESS for them and they will never concede the opposite could be true. Practical reality can never intrude upon their principle. If confronted with statistics showing better health among populations with socialized medicine, they would just fall back to complaining that providing healthcare as a right "corrupts" and enslaves the people by conditioning them to rely on the state for what they should have to provide themselves.
If America ever embraced a universal healthcare program, it would nail the coffin shut on the ancestor worship we practice around here for GOOD. The Republican base, although it frequently makes communitarian claims, based on nationalism and Xtian fundamentalism, clings to the Classical Liberal ideal and positions itself always as the party of ideological purity that the Founders would all belong to were they alive today. They use that image of themselves as the true loyal Americans following in the faith of the Founders as a hammer to destroy the Democrats and all the beneficial ideas that the Democrats have brought to American life. And they use this as a quasi-religious justification giving big business everything it wants, including not just freedom from regulation but even immunity from civil prosecution for damages under age old Common Law. But what if America embraced a policy that was so basic in its philosophical implications that it could be held up to explain "this is who we are and what we believe"--and what if this foundational policy or program was the kind of program or policy that the Founders could never have endorsed in a million years? Universal healthcare is such a policy. It wipes away the anti-social, individualist worldview through a benign bracketing of the individual's existence by the supporting presence of his SOCIETY. That's why freeptards fear it. They believe in and love (in their sick way) a world in which you're born alone and will die alone, and you will live clutching your pile of gold in one hand your gun in the other. Think about the things they say--nothing GOOD ever comes from society to hear them tell it. Society provides them with the jobs they have, whatever education they possess that enable them to hold their jobs, even the safety and availbility of the food they eat, but still they ONLY bitch about the "threat" of bad cultural influences--pop music, Hollywood, television, etc. And government, of course, is the CROWINING EVIL of society. While populations are sparse, resources abundant and conditions primitive, that worldview can last a while. But it is running out of time just as we are running out of free land to run to. The finite nature of our resources and our growth eventually force us to deal with the social connectedness of our lives and conditions. We will have civilization forced on us as our cherished barbarisms become impractical even for the most impractical people on Earth.
If Americans are led to socialized medicine by the mounting failure of private medicine to provide for the good health of enough of us at a reasonable cost burden, then the game will soon be over for Republican manipulation of the individual and his fears of the constraints of society and government.
|
Printer-friendly format
Email this thread to a friend
Bookmark this thread
(1000+ posts)
Send PM |
Profile |
Ignore
