Lord Jim wrote:To be perfectly honest Andrew, I'm giving serious consideration to using the "ignore" feature on your posts, at least until after the election. That would be a shame because I generally enjoy your input and perspective, (though I rarely agree with it) but frankly you're so consumed with bitterness over the way the vote is likely to go that it's making you act like an obsessive crank.
I've been making the same point since well before the Democrats chose their nominee, Jim. After years of the Republicans' screwing up the country, it was time for the Democrats to get their shot at running the show.
Well more than half of Americans evidently agreed: In 2006, they terminated the Republicans' control of both the House and the Senate. And in 2008, they increased the Democrats' majorities in both the House and the Senate, and they chose a Democrat for President.
What should have happened then was what America had collectively decided on: The enactment of policies primarily determined by the majority party, with input from, and some moderate level of restraint by, the minority party. In short, America had decided that although the Republicans should not be completely out of the policy-making loop, the Democrats should be at the helm.
Instead, the recalcitrant Republican minority in the Senate has waged a relentless and unprecedented campaign of pure obstructionism. Let's not fool ourselves: Never before has the filibuster been used as many times in an Congress as it has been used in the 111th Congress.
And the Republican Senate leadership does not appear to have had any agenda other than to make the Democrats look bad -- to sabotage Democratic policy initiatives at every opportunity and then blame the Democrats for the results of the Republicans' partisanship-
uber-alles scorched-earth campaign.
Look at the stimulus package. Despite a broad (though, of course, not universal) consensus among economists of various political stripes that the package needed to be a lot bigger -- twice as big -- the Republicans forced its shrinkage.
Why? Not out of straightforward opposition to the basic economic policy of using government money to stimulate the economy -- that would have resulted in straightforward "no" votes on any stimulus package. Out of pure cycnicism: They wanted a stimulus plan too small to work, precisely so that the could use its failure to engender popular opinion against the idea of stimulus plans in general. (That is exactly, as Keynes insightfully warned FDR, what conservatives tried to do in the 1930s. Fortunately for all of us, they failed.)
In economic terms, their scheme didn't pan out. Analyses by firms specializing in such macroeconomic matters -- hardly a business dominated by liberals -- have repeatedly shown that because of the stimulus package, paltry as it was in light of what it should have been, gross national product has grown more and unemployment has been less, than they would have been without it.
But in terms of public opinion, unfortunately, their scheme has had a significant effect. And that was the point all along: Good for the economy, bad for the economy, the only thing that mattered was turning public opinion against the Democrats.
Same goes for health-care reform. The Republicans didn't come up with anything even resembling a comprehensive alternative to what the Democrats were proposing until the debate had been underway for almost a year. And even then, they did so only when their lack of any comprehensive alternative was becoming an embarrassment even among Republican voters. Because an alternative plan was never the point. The point was always to screw up the health-care reform plan as much as possible and then blame the problems on the Democrats.
All of the blather about "socialized medicine" has been nothing but crap preying on widespread ignorance. True socialized medicine means that the doctors, hospitals, etc., are paid by the government. The Democratic party never proposed any such thing.
And we could provide universal coverage without even having a public insurance system. The Netherlands and Switzerland rely entirely on private insurance. Nonetheless, they cover everyone, and their life expectancies are longer, and their infant-mortality rates lower, than ours.
But the Republican leaders aren't interested in such things. Their goal is to manipulate public opinion by tossing around falsehoods like "socialized medicine" and raving about "death panels".
Interestingly, they feign apoplexy at the idea of finite resources' being allocated by medical professionals on the basis of medical need, but they do not seem at all exercised by the reality of finite resources' being allocated by insurance-company bean counters on the basis of stockholders' (or other owners') profits. Why could that be?
And on and on and on.
The upshot is that although America voted to give the Democrats a shot at solving, or at least ameliorating, some of America's biggest problems, the minority-party Republicans did everything possible to prevent that from happening. The results have been that instead of having already emerged, or at least being a lot closer to emerging, from a huge recession, we are still a long way from where we could have been; instead of having a health-insurance system that covers everyone, that costs a smaller fraction of GDP than we pay for the mess we have now, and that produces better results than ours, we have taken salutary but inadequate steps toward achieving the outcomes that would place us in the company of other first-world nations; etc.
Which is exactly what the Republican leadership, especially in the Senate, wants. Improving the lives of ordinary Americans is not the concern. Making the Democrats look bad is the concern, and if that means not doing what could be done to make the lives of ordinary Americans better, then so be it.
After FDR's election in 1932, when Americans also placed Congress in Democratic hands for the first time in quite a while, conservatives tried the same thing. But Americans were smart enough to see through the ploy. In order to give the Democrats a real opportunity to try their policies, they increased the Democrats' majorities in both the House and the Senate in 1934. And they increased them even more in 1936.
And that makes the point that I have been making all along: The only way to find out whether the Democrats' policies will actually work is actually to try them. In a civilized democratic (note the small "d") republic, America's choice to place the executive and the legislature in the hands of the Democrats would have been enough. The Democrats would have had a chance to try their policies.
And if it turned out that those policies did not work, okay, we could try something else.
But the Republican leaders are desperate not to let America try those policies. They are terrified that those policies might actually work. That would send them packing, and they care a whole lot more about that than they do about what their obstructionism is going to do to ordinary people. After all, they -- like political elites of all stripes -- sail blissfully above the travails of ordinary Americans' lives.
So if you want to think of me as an "obsessive crank," well, I can't stop you (and wouldn't if I could) from thinking whatever you want to think.
But the realities of where we Americans find ourselves at the moment suggests a more urgent question:
Why are you not enraged at and ashamed of your own party?
Reason is valuable only when it performs against the wordless physical background of the universe.
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