Foreigners

As with most matters that aren't blazingly obvious, there are good arguments for and against the Health Care bill that is now law. I've lived more than three quarters of my life in Texas, so I have a long list of friends who are very politically conservative, and I've known in my life intelligent conservatives who could marshal evidence and reasoning in a most impressive fashion to sell their side of a controversy.

I will note, in revving up to make my point, that one of my favorite advisees has a fascination with the national debt, and has accurately pegged its root cause as the runaway growth of non-discretionary spending, much of which comes in the form of entitlements. In that sense, the fact that the Health Care bill widens access to Medicaid is a fairly compelling argument against it, and one I take seriously. It's not a simple "Oh mercy, it spends a lot of money" argument, because none of the people who make that argument show any interest at all in restraining spending on their own priorities. It's an argument that an identifiable root cause of a major systemic threat is made more robust by this bill. It's a good argument, and I wish I'd heard more about it in the run-up to the bill's passage.

I didn't. Instead, I heard a lot of garbage.

Example #1 of garbage: the bill is unconstitutional. This is, to put it charitably, asinine. Congress has the power to levy taxes and charge the IRS with collecting them, and that's exactly how the mandate in this bill will work. The Republican attorneys general who are challenging the bill are pouring their states' taxpayer dollars down a rathole. I'm sure they'll make a lot of voters happy by doing so, since it'll create the illusion that their side is at least attempting to strike a blow against tyranny, but those resources will go absolutely nowhere: they won't educate or make safer a single human being, and they will not change the law.

Example #2 of garbage: the bill will result in the diversion of people's money to fund abortions over their objections. No it won't. Every possible safeguard has been written in to wall off money from abortion unless people knowingly spend their funds for such coverage. The Catholic Health Association and more than fifty thousand nuns are satisfied with those protections. The drumbeat of complaints about abortion funding reminds me of a story one of my students told a few weeks back about an acquaintance who had attempted suicide dozens of times, because she thought it was the only way she could get her parents' attention. Ending abortion is no longer a serious agenda item for the Republican Party; when's the last time you heard any new developments on the Human Life Amendment first proposed during the Reagan Administration? Instead, it's a fire alarm they pull whenever they want to bring things to a halt.

But the most rank example of argumentative garbage is this one: "In passing the bill, Obama, Pelosi and Reid ignored the will of the American people."

No they didn't.

I'm in favor of it. I'm an American.

I'll go further: the opponents of it are not as American as I am. I am a real American, and those who spearheaded opposition to it are anti-American.

To belong in this country, to be fully invested in what this country is about, you have to be willing to accept as legitimate the outcome of elections and votes even when you don't agree with them. If you only believe in democracy as long as your side wins, then you don't believe in it at all. And when you start responding to setbacks by encouraging threats and violence, then you're no different from the fifth rate tyrants in little kleptocracies scattered around the world and through the corridors of history.

One of the irreducible difficulties with democratic rule is the presence of a residue of people who are not interested in listening to reason, who are driven by fear and hatred and have absolutely zero-point-zero capacity to be persuaded by evidence or explanation. I make them sound pretty scary, but as Christ said of the poor, they'll always be with us. In fact, I think it's very important to accept them and take care of them, and to be keenly aware that they're still our neighbors and brothers and sisters. They're ours. Just because they're entirely demented doesn't make them unlovable, even though showing love to them certainly is not an uncomplicated pursuit.

But for God's sake, you surely don't want to put them in charge!

More and more, I see hatred and fear and irrationality being cultivated and choreographed for political gain, and that's turning a latent destructive force inside the system into a vein of power to try to run the system. It can't possibly work, and it will scorch the earth. But what chills me is the apparent satisfaction of those engineering the efforts with exactly that outcome: if they can't get the result they want, then let the earth be scorched. Either they will operate the levers of power, or they'll play Samson in the temple.

There are a few creeping signs that sane, wise, intelligent conservatives are waking up to how far their loudest voices have slipped in that direction, and efforts may be underway to rehabilitate American conservatism, to wean it off rage and enmity and restore it to engagement. It's certainly something I pray will happen. I would dearly love, as I've written in this blog a dozen times, to lose an argument with a conservative because they were just too good and made too much sense. It's happened before. But what I can't have any more of is making my argument to a brick wall, to the angry, implacable face of someone who has rejected me as an enemy because I disagree.

People who do that are not Americans. America is not about that. And I will not let them lay claim to it. It's not theirs; it's ours. And we won't let go of it. The sacrifices of our brave ancestors that they frequently lay claim to are not theirs to invoke: Americans have not died on battlefields, or been shot down in city streets, to protect the rights of the enraged to shut down deliberation and impose their will. They died to protect an experiment in bringing opposed political factions together in dialogue to decide together. That's worth defending at a price so high that it might astonish the ones who are spoiling for a fight.

They'd best beware.