Stupidity, Dishonesty and Cowardice

"I cannot tell a lie"

Another video has surfaced of Jonathan Gruber saying cringe-worthy things about Obamacare.  Gruber is an MIT economist and health care expert who worked as a number cruncher for the White House during the push to enact Obamacare.  Here’s what he said last year regarding the way political pressures distorted the legislative process:

This bill was written in a tortured way to make sure CBO [Congressional Budget Office] did not score the mandate as taxes. If CBO scored the mandate as taxes, the bill dies. So it’s written to do that.

In terms of risk-rated subsidies, in a law that said health people are gonna pay in — if it made explicit that healthy people are gonna pay in, sick people get money, it would not have passed. Okay, lack of transparency is a huge political advantage. And basically, call it the stupidity of the American voter or whatever, but basically that was really, really critical to get anything to pass.

Conservatives are up in arms, particularly over the “stupidity” part, convinced that Gruber’s comments expose the dirty truth of modern liberalism:  It’s a conspiracy of snooty technocrats confident their superior brains and sociological analyses authorize them to control the everyday lives of the smelly masses, the rednecks and rubes too foolish to make the right choices, too stupid to know what’s good for them.

But let’s ignore that ridiculous argument and consider what Gruber was actually saying: that for any legislation to pass it must be politically presentable, it must not afford its opponents an easy target. And that applies to Obamacare in two ways.  First, Democrats could not allow the individual mandate to be seen – by the CBO or the public – as a tax.  Second, the essence of Obamacare is a transfer of health insurance dollars from the young, rich and healthy to the old, poor and sick; the public would never have allowed such governmental redistribution, so it had to be disguised.  And Gruber was also saying that it was easy to slip those two deceptions past an American public that doesn’t closely follow healthcare policy debates.  Charles Krauthammer charges that, “in order to get it passed, the law was made deliberately obscure and deceptive.”  Is he wrong?

It’s true, as Brian Beutler protests, that Obamacare’s legislative process was more transparent than most (compared to say Bush’s 2003 Medicare expansion or the run up to the Iraq War).  And it’s true, as Neil Irwin concedes, that certain aspects of the law itself (not the process) were deliberately obscured; and that is a “commonplace” tactic that's been employed by both parties on many occasions.  So who’s responsible for the fact that the American public does not really understand Obamacare?  Andrew Sullivan blames liberals and the administration for not making a better and clearer case for the law.  But many pundits, such as Paul Krugman, Jonathan Cohn, Ezra Klein and Jonathan Chait, have been explaining it clearly for years.  Gruber himself even wrote a comic book to make it easily understandable!  And conservatives, of course, have invested an enormous about of time and energy lying about the very law they now accuse of deceit and deception.  The national press did a bad job of covering all this, as they always do, by focusing on optics and neglecting substance.  But if any individual wanted to know more about the law, they could have quickly and easily done so – as long as they turned off Fox News.  The one actual, explicit lie used to sell Obamacare was the president’s promise that, “If you like your health plan, you can keep it.”  He knew it was a lie when he said it, but he also knew that admitting that 7 or 8 million people would have their policies regulated away – even though they’d be replaced with better ones – might have put the whole law in jeopardy.  The entire structure of American political discourse worked against an honest assessment of the law.

But let’s make the real confession.  There is one fundamental lie liberals have made and continue to make about Obamacare, and it’s a lie of omission.  The components, the details, the numbers have been endlessly examined, analyzed and debated.  But the real meaning of the law has, for the most part, not been adequately addressed.  What is its deeper significance?  What is it really about?  Redistribution.  Both Gruber’s confession and conservative complaints really boil down to this one point: Obamacare severs the connection between income and healthcare coverage; it indirectly redistributes money from the rich, young and healthy to the poor, old and sick.  The “indirectly” in that last sentence is what the current controversy is really about.  Gruber both regrets the necessity of that indirection and gloats over its devious utility.  And that gloating gives conservatives cover to deplore its dishonesty, though in reality they only lament its effectiveness.

But should we deplore its dishonesty?  Only if we care about American democracy.  Only if we wish it to be more rational and effective.  Sullivan puts it nicely:

If someone were willing to explain the ACA in simple, clear and honest terms, I think most Americans would back it . . . I refuse to believe that a democracy has to operate this way for change to occur. Gruber’s arrogance and condescension are just meta-phenomena of this deeper dysfunction. Someone needs to treat Americans as adults again before this democracy can regain the credibility it so desperately needs to endure.

But is Sullivan right that Obamacare could have withstood a thoroughly candid presentation?  Would a majority of Americans have supported it, even knowing the governmental redistribution that lay at its heart?  The answer is not clear, but I think probably not.  The idea of redistribution, explicitly promoted, would probably have been too unnerving.

We see that the distrust of Obamacare is primarily ideological.  American instincts are generally conservative: they fear centralized authority, they mistrust regulation, they insist that each person is the master of his own fate.  But American instincts constantly conflict with American interests.  Modern society would not be livable without the welfare and regulatory state that liberals have created and conservatives threaten, and Americans affirm that every time they deposit their social security checks and present their Medicare cards.  American conservatism evaporates at the door of the unemployment office.  Put more prosaically, the American people are ideologically conservative but operationally liberal, as has been noted many times.

That’s the real reason public policy is often deceptive.  Social Security pretends to give you back the money you paid in, but it actually pays more, relative to income, to those who made less.  So liberal laws must be dressed up in conservative clothing.  Many liberals, possibly including Obama himself, would have preferred single payer healthcare but considered it politically unpalatable, so they offered a market-friendly program cooked up in a right-wing think tank and instituted by a Republican governor.  Many Americans dislike Obamacare (some hate it for the evil Satanic, Islamic, Communist conspiracy it is!) while they like most Obamacare provisions.  Kentuckians, for example, hate Obamacare but love Kynect, their state’s implementation of the Obamacare exchange; but they returned to the Senate Republican Mitch McConnell, who has explicitly vowed to repeal Obamacare yet who refused to condemn Kynect when cornered in front of a Kentucky audience!  In the last election people all over the country voted for liberal policies like marijuana liberalization and minimum wage increases while voting into office conservatives staunchly opposed to those very policies.  Huh?

In effect, Americans want to be lied to.  They want it both ways: to enjoy their liberal dessert while believing it’s sturdy conservative fare.  This is the real deception at the core of this debate: the American people are kidding themselves.  They’re not stupid, as Gruber and some liberals believe, nor are they solid conservatives.  They’re inconsistent, and unaware of it.  And that encourages politicians and pundits to see what they want to see.  Conservative operatives dream of an America utterly given over to its deepest conservative instincts, but they’re woken from the dream by picketers angrily cursing any cuts to Medicare.  And liberals can never understand why Americans don’t follow them out of the laissez-faire wilderness into the social democratic Promised Land.  A consummate seduction of the American public eludes them both, though conservatives whisper sweet poetry and liberals offer alluring gifts.

But you don’t practice politics with the public you wish you had.  Ultimately, Americans want to be told the truth.  And they deserve the truth.  Liberals need to come clean.  The Democratic Party is the party of redistribution, and it should damn well act like it!  That’s not socialism or authoritarianism – conservative paranoia to the contrary – it’s the pragmatic amelioration of the worst inequities of modern society.  An economy that provides more and more to those at the top but demands more and more from everyone else does not satisfy the demands of democracy and justice.  Unfair economics is as destructive to democracy as dishonest politics.  If liberalism is not about justice for working people then it becomes little more than a loose confederation of identity groups, fighting over the scraps of a long gone shared prosperity.  It abdicates its claim to universalism, it loses its fire and its soul.  And so it has.

Gruber thought he bravely spoke the truth of American politics, that the people are so stupid that good policy must be deceitful policy.  But Gruber’s story is really one of liberal cowardice.  And there’s so much of our current misfortune that would be greatly improved with just a little more liberal courage.  Human nature being what it is, game-playing cannot be removed from politics.  But why can’t liberals successfully balance cunning and conviction?  And can they do the ceaseless, thankless work of educating the public about what they stand for and why?  And most importantly, can they learn to trust the people again?  The people are not stupid, they have as many practical instincts as conservative ones; they are amenable to prudential, fair, liberal policy that would benefit them and strengthen the country.  They’re merely waiting for leadership that both works for them and respects them.  Conservatism, in its modern incarnation as plutocratic propaganda factory, does neither.  Timid liberalism can only do the former.  Only confident and candid liberalism can do both.

Freedom, Work, Drudgery and Danger

American coal miners

If you won the lottery, would you still work?  No, you’d have the freedom to indulge yourself in worldly pleasures: travelling, socializing, thrill-seeking, etc.  But eventually you would probably find a life of indolence and hedonism unsatisfying, and would long for activity that both engaged your talents and benefitted society.  Without your millions, of course, you would be compelled to work, and the extent that a job gratified your talents would become secondary to the extent that it gratified your need for food and housing.  That is, most people work to survive and only a lucky few find work that’s deeply satisfying.  Does a garbage man find as much satisfaction in his work as an architect?  How about a cafeteria worker or a data entry clerk or a coal miner?  No, most of the work that most people do is drudgery, and most people would happily give it up if not compelled to it by economic necessity.  It’s true that all honest work imparts dignity and there is some satisfaction in simply doing your job well.  And in a society of equal opportunity – something to which our society provides at best a rough approximation – anyone with sufficient talent and determination can become a successful architect or neurosurgeon or musician.  But the great majority of people work not for the satisfaction or the dignity.  They work because survival obligates them to a life of unsatisfying and unforgiving drudgery.  For most people, work is coercion.

But imagine if some of that coercion could be lifted.  Imagine a person working an unsatisfying job only for the health insurance provided by her employer (that’s how most Americans get health insurance).  Maybe she or someone in her family requires expensive medical treatment, or maybe independent medical insurance is prohibitively expensive.  But now imagine a change in the system allows her to get cheap but good health insurance somewhere else.  Now she can afford to quit her job and give up the modest pay.  Maybe she wants to quit so she can stay home with her young children or her aging parent.  Maybe she wants to go back to college or start her own business.  Maybe she wants to retire a few years early.  Or maybe she wants to keep her job and simply work fewer hours and spend more time with her family.  Maybe she’s just happy knowing that her expanded health care options give her more choices and more opportunities, more control over her own life.  Isn’t it a tiny bit like winning the lottery?  That is, aren’t we imagining she has more freedom?

Well, you don’t have to imagine.  According to a report by the non-partisan and broadly respected Congressional Budget Office (CBO) there are millions of people who will work less or not at all because they can now obtain cheap and dependable health insurance through Obamacare.  As Josh Barro explains, “Broadly, one key goal of health policy should be to let people make work decisions without worrying about how those decisions affect their health insurance.”  That wasn’t the central intent of the health care law, but it sure seems like a positive development.  Well, there are many conservatives who adamantly don’t think so.  Welcome to the latest battle in the Obamacare wars.

At first many conservatives, blinded by Obamacare-hatred into abandoning either understanding or scruples, proclaimed that the CBO is reporting that Obamacare will destroy millions of jobs.  Some Republican politicians eagerly misrepresented the issue for electoral gain.  Even the supposedly liberal mainstream press thoughtlessly parroted stories about “lost” jobs.  There are no lost jobs, of course, only defecting workers, as clarified in this exchange between conservative Republican vice-presidential nominee Paul Ryan and CBO director Douglas Elmendorf as the latter appeared before the House Budget Committee:

"Just to understand, it is not that employers are laying people off," Ryan said.

"That is right," Elmendorf said.

There is a huge difference between being fired and quitting, as anyone who has actually held a job knows.  As Elmendorf testified:

The reason we don’t use the term “lost jobs” is there is a critical difference between people who like to work and can’t find a job — or have a job that’s lost for reasons beyond their control — and people who choose not to work. If someone comes up to you and says, “The boss says I’m being laid off because we don’t have enough business to pay,” [then] any other person feels bad about that and we sympathize for them having lost their job. If someone says, “I decided to retire or stay home and spend more time with my family and spend more time doing my hobby,” they don’t feel bad about it — they feel good about it. And we don’t sympathize. We say congratulations.

Exactly!  But some conservatives are so sure that no Obamacare news is good news they simply pretend that the “lost jobs” tale hasn’t been thoroughly debunked and persist in their misrepresentations.  Consider the semantically-challenged David Harsanyi:

“Obamacare is inducing labor demand to shrink!” doesn’t have the quite the same punch as “Obamacare is costing us jobs!” though both are accurate.

No, normal English usage compels us to call the first sentence accurate, the second one inaccurate, and Harsanyi’s point ridiculous.

Some conservatives deny that even though Obamacare will let some people quit their jobs, that won’t constitute an increase in their freedom.  Charles C. W. Cooke writes in the National Review Online that whatever else one can say about taxing one person to subsidize another:

one cannot claim that it makes either man “free” — at least not without twisting the word and the concept that it represents beyond all meaningful recognition.

That’s because the need to scramble for survival does not constitute coercion in any sense:

Does the Obama administration really plan to make the case that negative liberty is but a mirage and that, the state of nature’s “forcing” one to work being akin to actual compulsion, the state must step in everywhere to liberate the citizenry from reality’s harsh claims? One suspects not.

Let’s overlook Cooke’s rather slapdash treatment of the theoretical concepts of negative liberty and the state of nature, and rephrase his position in everyday terms: He seems to be saying that the brutish struggle for existence is an unavoidable reality of even a thoroughly free life; alleviating that brutishness does not increase one’s freedom, only one’s comfort.  Every person, every creature, in every situation, must struggle for sustenance and shelter.  This feels intuitively plausible: it seems a little odd to think of the demands of one’s own biology as coercions.  But this argument overlooks two important points.  First, there’s no reason an increase in comfort can’t yield an increase in freedom.  To the extent that it’s actually possible to moderate the struggle for survival such that one’s biological needs don’t consume one’s resources to the same degree, those needs can be coherently thought of as coercive.  If survival didn’t compel one to spend so much time hunting down wooly mammoths or waiting on tables then one would have more options, more control over one’s life, more freedom.  Second, in modern society both the freedoms and constrictions of economic life are not just natural, but social as well; they manifest the rules we’ve agreed to live by.  There is a difference between the hinter-gatherer chasing down prey on the savannah and the worker who through lack of independent means is forced to sell his labor on the open market.  In the modern world economic survival can be made less or more harsh by (among other things) actions of society or the state.  Marginally liberating individuals by subsidizing their health insurance is not like trying to counteract all of “reality’s harsh claims”; it’s not like trying to repeal old age or gravity; it’s more like a hunter-gatherer discovering a grove of abundantly productive fruit trees.  It’s more like winning a lesser lottery ticket.

But, though Cooke’s logic does not convince, it does illuminate.  Misapprehending capitalism, a social institution, as a purely natural phenomenon – like the struggle for survival – is a widespread conservative fallacy.  Perceiving all political and social issues as amenable to black-and-white moralistic solutions is another.  Put the two together and you have conservative economics.  To Cooke, when the state tries to revise the natural workings of the market it commits both arrogance and immorality.  His conservative colleague, writer Michael Goodwin, likewise considers it a sin, and the abetting of sin: Choosing to work less hours because the government subsidizes your health insurance is shameful, if not downright un-American!

In [the old, pre-liberal] America, work, any work, was honorable while being on the dole was cause for shame. Still is.

That is, liberals are blind to the moral nobility of self-sufficiency; that’s probably why they’re always plotting to ensnare people into government bondage:

This anti-job, pro-dependency tilt is the crux of the nation’s polarization. In essence, it pits those who believe in the sanctity of work against those who believe in penalizing wealth and redistributing its fruits.

Sanctity!  Goodwin beats even Cooke in the competition for most abstractly moralistic understanding of labor in the modern world.  Cooke may believe it’s natural but Goodwin actually believes it’s holy!  Goodwin attempts to describe the essence of our national polarization, but instead he embodies it.  Conservatives issue furious sermons about the naturalness and sanctity of the free market while ignoring its actual results.  Liberals actually perceive capitalism’s “harsh realities” – its coercion, its amorality, its inability to deliver universal healthcare – and hope to moderate them in limited and prudential ways that increase individual comfort and freedom.  Moralistic, dogmatic platitudes vs. pragmatic, prudential solutions.  That’s the real crux of our polarization.  Here it pits the absolutist, pre-ordained certainty that the state can’t possibly make anyone freer against the practical reality that sometimes it does just that.

And there’s all the usual handwringing about the evils of redistribution.  As Repair_Man_Jack of redstate.com puts it:

The freedom to sit on your butt and do nothing at another citizen’s expense is expressly parasitic and malignant.

Well, at least he concedes it’s freedom!  But all social insurance requires redistribution, from Social Security to unemployment insurance to student loans to Medicare and Medicaid.  Every government activity, even the provision of education and highways and the military, includes those who pay who will not benefit and those who benefit who have not paid.  You can’t have anything like universal healthcare without some redistribution; the young, healthy and affluent have to help pay for the old, sick and poor.  And once you subsidize the old, sick and poor they may find less need to hold a job or work so many hours.  To pay for Obamacare you do have to marginally increase someone’s taxes and that does marginally decrease that someone’s freedom.  That is, you’re redistributing not only money, but freedom.  You’re marginally increasing the coercion on the taxed worker so that the Obamacare recipient can work less.  But much of the revenue for Obamacare comes from taxes on the upper economic strata (and much of the rest from hospitals and insurance companies), that is, on those who already have the most freedom.  Even the extravagantly hated individual mandate to buy health insurance is really only a tax on not buying it, and a minor tax at that.  And everyone may someday need government-subsidized healthcare; indeed, every American who lives to 65 qualifies for Medicare, a program even Tea Partiers seem to love.  Why is Obamacare is any less defensible?  If you believe they’re all indefensible and the entire welfare state should be repealed, you’d better be prepared for the quite harsh economic and social conditions that prevailed before its creation.  Would that represent an increase in freedom? The person who worked 14 hours a day in deadly conditions his entire life without hope of retirement might have found some appreciation in the purely abstract freedom of his condition, but it’s doubtful that offset the all-too-real crushing coercions he actually lived under.

But from the perspective of the highly moralized conservative point of view, redistribution is robbing Peter to pay Paul, and it not only cheats Peter, it diminishes Paul.  As Jonathan Chait explains, Obamacare recipients have become the new welfare queens.  To John Podhoretz such recipients risk the loss of self-sufficiency:

This is the classic problem of a government handout: It can become more alluring to those who receive it than the prospect of a life lived without it.

Charles Krauthammer puts it rather less kindly:

In [Obama’s] new opportunity society, you are given the opportunity for idleness while living parasitically off everyone else.

Repair Man Jack gets downright visceral:

So behind all the benevolent language about being free to quit is a call to greater personal dependence instead of responsibility. Why isn’t this relief from responsibility good? It is antipodal to good because it takes a free-minded, productive and independent citizens and turns them into the human equivalent of intestinal parasites. These parasites then degrade and eat out the sustenance of others.

Jack’s fascination with intestine-eating aside, a person who works less or quits their job because of government subsidies is not a parasite.  What have we come to that American workers actually need to be defended against such vile slander?  These are people who have been working or looking for work, not looking for a handout.  Health insurance subsidies do not “turn them into” anything other than healthier, more secure, more autonomous Americans. Are people who retire on Social Security parasites?  What about capable and healthy retirees?  Should Social Security be repealed so they’re forced to get off their lazy butts and go hustle for jobs?  Or consider the G.I. Bill, which provided government-sponsored mortgages, business loans and college tuition for servicemen and women returning from World War II – did it turn them into parasites?  And just because Obamacare allows a person to quit her job doesn’t mean she has stopped working (especially if she is merely working fewer hours).  A person who stays home to take care of her children or her parents or her home is still working and still contributing to society.

But, though government assistance need not transform one into a parasite, you need not be a raving hysteric to appreciate that it might weaken one’s self-sufficiency, it might weaken one’s work ethic; indeed, it might weaken everyone’s.  Andrew Sullivan almost agrees with Goodwin about the crux of our polarization:

It’s struck me that there is an underlying anxiety to several of our current debates on economic and social issues. That anxiety is that the American work ethic – unparalleled in the developed world – is under threat. That’s the real critique of Obamacare

Though it’s not clear he’s on Goodwin’s side of that polarization:

The Protestant work ethic we have, for example, is the imperative for industrious striving, self-advancement and material gain. It is emphatically not about being happy. And at some point, if those two values are not easily compatible, something will give.

The Puritan work ethic has, to a great extent, served us well, though it does have the downsides that Sullivan touches upon.  But that work ethic doesn’t seem dead just yet.  There is an ongoing tension in American public life between the pragmatic need to ameliorate the excesses of capitalism and a political folk culture that worships self-sufficiency, and that tension is not about to ease any time soon.  And even if the liberal view of capitalism came to dominate it would not necessarily mean the death of the work ethic.  One of liberalism’s fondest dreams is that working people be fairly rewarded for their labor.  Second-guessing capitalist outcomes looks like an attack on the work ethic only if you believe the harshness of the market is a necessary corrective to the enervating human desire for sponsored comfort.  To conservatives, the unforgiving necessity for hard work is positively beneficial in that it polices a naturally weak and unambitious populace.  But American workers want just what liberals want for them: to work hard and to reap the benefits, one of which might be working fewer hours because of a health insurance subsidy.  Should we really fear that when the workers in question leave their jobs they will so casually fall into inactivity, despondency and sloth?  At base, the fierce conservative attack on the welfare state is about the Puritanical dread of corrupting, lazy irresponsibility.  They’re convinced the freed man won’t feel the need for work, the urge to create and produce and contribute we ascribed to the lottery winner; instead he’ll embrace indolence, hedonism and immorality.  So the workforce must be kept hungry; not because hungry workers will work for less (though the investor class does not object), but because hunger keeps them busy, it keeps them honest.

We see the political forces arrayed against freedom for the American worker:  There is an ideological worldview that sees exemption from wage labor as unnatural and morally debilitating, a culture that equates moral value with economic value and freedom with self-sufficiency.  There is the warped version of the work ethic that’s convinced that inside each worker is a welfare cheat just aching to jump out.  And there is the ferocity of a partisan movement in the grip of these mythologies, righteous in its insistence that moralistic absolutes override the bread-and-butter concerns of people’s actual lives.  And, most fundamentally there are the ideological blinders that prevent the clear apprehension of the coercion that plays such a large part in the lives of working people.  Cooke finds:

a great deal of truth in The Economist’s observation that “a job is an economic transaction between a seller and a buyer of labour, and can be ‘destroyed’ if either seller or buyer walks away.”

It may seem here that Cooke is toying with the pretense of some of his less scrupulous conservative colleagues that the CBO report proves Obamacare is destroying jobs.  But it’s not mendacity that tempts him to support the Economist’s laughable “observation”, it’s the constrictions of his own ideology.  In real life, no job is destroyed when a worker walks away; there is always a line of people eagerly waiting to take his place (especially during a weak recovery).  A job is a thing an employer dispenses; it cannot be destroyed by a seller of labor.  Labor is a buyer’s market; in the real lives of most people, the employer holds the power.  CBO Director Elmendorf reminds us how we pity the man who’s been fired, but congratulate the man who quits.  That’s because the quitting man has acquired the economic power to meet the boss as an equal, as one who is free of the boss’s power.  Such a man has shed one of life’s coercions.

But there is no room in conservative ideology to address that coercion; that’s why conservatives have been so exercised by a provocative tweet from the Huffington Post’s Congressional reporter, Michael McAuliff:

There's an irony in the GOP complaining that ACA lets people quit jobs. I mean, what's wrong with freedom?

Conservatives can’t imagine a subsidy recipient has been freed from a compulsion whose existence they can’t even perceive!  In their worldview it’s not only acceptable, but essential that families mold individuals, schools indoctrinate them, religion restrain them, mores chasten them, and the market allocate them.  But interference from the federal government is the darkest tyranny!  What’s actually wrong with freedom – actual individual freedom – in the conservative mind is that it dis-empowers families, schools, religion, mores and the market.  The freedom that conservatives genuinely value is the unconstrained power of those institutions to exert their traditional moral authority over their charges, to manage them.

To be fair, there is another side to such freedom that conservatives value at least as much: the individual self-sufficiency those institutions are charged with instilling and enforcing.  To a conservative, individual freedom without individual responsibility is no freedom at all.  Overlooking the semantic confusion, liberals value their version of freedom because it allows individuals to pursue their own goals and develop their individual talents and personalities.  Conservatives value their version of freedom because it produces righteous and responsible providers and protectors (yes, it still includes a profoundly male tone).  But it’s a strange sort of freedom that requires ongoing and overpowering direction and enforcement from social institutions like the church and the market.  Once again, it’s not clear how much conservatives trust truly free individuals to make their own choices.  To a liberal, if a subsidy allows an individual to develop herself more, then she simply is more free, regardless of the financial source for the subsidy.  To a conservative she has forgone her freedom, her autonomy, for a gilded cage.

Comprehensive freedom from work is, of course, both impossible and undesirable, while comprehensive freedom from drudgery is merely impossible.  The struggle for existence and the capitalist need for wage labor are, obviously, the most important and most inescapable enemies of freedom from drudgery.  But if we can allow workers to work marginally less and in such a way that it barely affects either the economy or the social fabric, then what is so wrong with that?  At bottom, conservatives reject the notion that such workers are more free because they’ve confused freedom with responsibility.  Freedom seems to be merely their word for the arrangement of interlocking, constraining institutions that punish irresponsibility and thereby enforce morality.  The conservative sensibility, with its overwrought Puritan anxieties, can’t seem to escape the fear that real freedom – freedom to say “No” to the boss or the patriarch or the minister – is dangerous.  That’s because real freedom means the redistribution of power – the power to quit without starving, power over your own time and energy – and that threatens traditional authority and the view of moral order it represents.  That’s what’s wrong with freedom, as far as conservatives are concerned.  But given the overwhelming necessity of work and the coercion it entails, respect for the labor of our fellow Americans should prevent us from begrudging them the small slivers of power and freedom we might provide.  Their respite from drudgery represents a small victory for everyone who labors.  Let’s trust them to enjoy it and cultivate it and profit from it as they will.

Redistribution, Yes!

Ida May Fuller, the first Social Security recipient

The present skirmish in the Obamacare wars concerns whether those in the individual healthcare insurance market will be able to keep their existing plans.  Most people get their health insurance through their employer or through the federal government (i.e. Medicare or Medicaid), but 9% buy it as individuals directly from insurance companies.  As Obamacare swings into operation it’s causing many of those individuals – it’s hard to say exactly how many – to lose their plans, forcing them onto more expensive plans.  It seems unfair, and it’s proving to be a political disaster for the president, especially considering his repeated promises that this would never happen. Throw in the ongoing fiasco of the federal government’s insurance exchange website and not only does Obamacare begin to seem fundamentally flawed, but – as some kind conservatives have helpfully suggested – so does liberalism itself.

Hardly.  As the indispensible Jonathan Chait has explained in numerous clarifying pieces, if you wish to make sure that (nearly) everyone has adequate health insurance then there must be some mechanism for making the young, healthy and affluent help pay for the old, sick and poor.  For example, Obamacare forces insurance companies to cover people in the individual market with pre-existing medical conditions, most of whom have been denied coverage or forced to pay exorbitant premiums.  How is that additional coverage paid for?  Partly it comes from subsidies to poorer individuals from Medicaid, which is, of course, funded by taxpayers.  But Obamacare also raises the regulatory standards of health insurance plans with the specific intent of forcing healthy individuals to pay for better plans so that insurers can provide care for more expensive patients.  (It also does so to protect consumers from unreliable plans, like those with lifetime caps and serious lapses in coverage.)

But all this is true of employer-based health insurance as well; i.e. it forces those who need health care less to pay for those who need it more (subsidized by taxpayers).  Such plans usually have a set price, regardless of age, sex or medical status, thus allowing a large group of people to pay for the small number which will actually need expensive care.  Such risk-pooling is the basis of all health insurance – indeed, of all insurance.  Obamacare, as Ezra Klein says, “basically makes the individual market more like the group markets.”  That is, it makes it more redistributive.  Yes, redistribution rests at the heart of any insurance system, public or private.  And we’re all willing to contribute to those systems because the future is uncertain; even the best actuarial tables cannot predict with any certainty who will need the benefit of insurance.  We buy fire insurance even though, as Chait so eloquently puts it, “fire insurance is a bad deal for people whose houses don’t burn.”

But let’s take that one step further: Redistribution rests at the heart of all liberalism.  This is liberalism’s open secret, and one’s view of this principle makes or breaks one’s support for the entire liberal welfare project.  Every worker pays Medicare taxes, but Medicare only supports those over 65.  Medicaid only covers those below a specified financial threshold.  Even Social Security provides slightly higher benefits to lower wage workers (relative to their lifetime income).  For political reasons liberals generally attempt to disguise the redistributive aspects of their programs; for example, Social Security taxes are paid into individual accounts.  But to modern liberalism a secure retirement is an individual and social good that humanitarianism simply and firmly demands.  Could we consider ourselves a just society if there were people who had worked their whole lives who were forced to retire in destitution?  It was exactly destitution to which all too many workers were consigned by pre-welfare-state laissez-faire capitalism.  Relative poverty causes so much harm, we should feel ashamed if it denied people the requisites of even a modestly fulfilling life: nourishment, education, decent housing, a secure retirement and medical care.  And if those with less can’t pay for those minimal goods, then – as long as it’s practical and sustainable – those with more must foot the bill.  This is the essence of modern welfare state liberalism: Taxing the affluent at higher rates and spending that money on insuring that working and poor people posses the minimal requirements of civilized life.  (This is the crucial distinction between welfare liberalism and socialism, which advocates the equalization of most or all social goods; liberalism merely advocates minimal standards and for a much shorter list of goods.)  Redistribution is part of the rationale even for infrastructure and public institutions, such as roads, bridges, hospitals, universities, crime control, emergency management.  Such things are generally regarded as benefitting everyone, but they’re partially funded through progressive taxes, and there are such things as private highways, private police, etc.

Since conservatives generally equate what you deserve with what capitalism allocates to you, they consider any non-capitalist redistribution to be inherently unjust.  Pragmatic conservatives – quite a rare species! – may tolerate a very short list of public goods and social insurance programs, but only for the sake of market efficiency or social comity.  But, as conservatives, they would never concede that anyone has a moral claim on some good for which he could not pay, such as a poor person who cannot afford a college education.  But if you accept that there are some goods for which everyone should be forced to pay, even those who will never directly benefit from those goods, then you have accepted the rationale for the welfare state.  All that’s left at that point is to argue over which goods should be on the list.  Should we have public healthcare but not public housing?  Should we have food stamps but not public day care?  We have moved from the realm of moral justification to that of policy detail.  To be sure, the devil is in the details; even liberals like Ezra Klein dislike Obamacare’s employer mandate, for example.  But if you accept, for instance, that people without children should pay taxes for schools, or people who don’t drive should pay taxes for highways, then you support the welfare state in principle.  However much you feel the urge to make moral complaints about liberal social policies, you can reasonably make only practical or economic ones.  You are a redistributionist.  Accept it.

Most Americans – with their sober and practical generosity – easily accept the logic of liberalism.  That practicality lets them support universal healthcare in general while still seeing Obamacare’s faults.  Most of Obamacare’s complexities and confusions result from using private institutions – i.e. insurance companies – for public ends.  Thus, its redistribution involves the regulation of private insurance plans in addition to the typical liberal funding mechanism of direct taxation.  But given the moral urgency of universal coverage and the redistribution it demands, the only alternative would be a single-payer scheme, in which the federal government acts as the health insurance company for all Americans and pays for the system out of progressive taxes.  Once again, we can argue over policy details, but let’s have the adult version of that argument, in which we accept the necessity of federal government redistribution. Conservatives may rail against redistribution in principle, while they lambaste Obama for cutting Medicare funds. And liberals may tout the benefits of tight regulations on individual plans while swiftly running from any redistributionist rhetoric.  But, outside the Tea Party’s tightly sealed ideological ghetto, everyone in America actually supports redistribution. They support it because human decency demands it.  They support it because they know that someday they may come to need it themselves.  They may consider it a necessary evil or a positive good, but they understand, intellectually or viscerally, that modern life would be intolerable without it.  That is the open secret not just of liberal politics, but of all American politics.

Red October

Backward to utopia!

For 16 days this month, conservatives in Congress deliberately shut down the federal government and threatened to default on the national debt, thereby destroying the world economy, in an attempt to force Democrats to repeal Obamacare and accede to their entire economic agenda.  How do conservatives justify such shockingly irresponsible and ruthless tactics?  There are three basic defenses they give and, like so much of American discourse, they revolve around the question of the proper relationship between the citizenry and the political elite.  That is, who really represents the people?

Conservatives loudly answer, “We do!”  In the first defense of their tactical radicalism conservatives claim to represent a majority of American opinion, a majority that hates Obamacare, big government and the size of the federal debt.  Call this the populist defense.  Conservatives represent the people against a governing elite that has become an unresponsive ruling class, a technocratic, snobbish, culturally alien aristocracy, imposing heavy regulations and stiff taxes on a public it disdains, while exempting its cronies and contributors.  In this view the American people are noble and the government, captive to special interests, fails to channel that nobility.  Obamacare is merely the most recent and most egregious liberal imposition.  In fact, it’s so onerous and so indicative of the further horrors waiting to leap out of the liberal imagination onto the backs of the American people that anything is justified in trying to stop it.

But the populist defense just fails.  Public opinion polls do show a majority opposed to Obamacare, but it’s a slim majority, and a sizeable part of the opposition comes from the left, from those who wish the government was more involved in health care, either through a public option or a single payer plan.  Also, individual parts of the law are quite popular.  Most Americans do agree in theory that both the federal government and the federal debt are too big.  But those anti-government convictions evaporate in the harsh sun of majority support for particular government programs like Social Security and Medicare, programs so popular that most Americans would rather raise taxes than modify them or reduce their benefits.  The 2012 Republican candidate for president promised to cancel Obamacare on his first day in office; he lost decisively.  Democrats retained control of the Senate, and Republicans lost the national popular vote for the House of Representatives (but held the House because of misrepresentative districting).  And most importantly, most Americans explicitly condemn the confrontational tactics conservative have employed.  The majority supports neither conservative ends nor conservative means.  Indeed, conservatives know this all too well; it was recognition of public disfavor that convinced GOP leaders to surrender.

The second conservative defense is less easily dismissed.  It admits that conservatives are a minority (albeit a sizeable one) and that conservatives did in fact lose last year’s elections.  But, it demands relief from the impositions of big government – Obamacare in particular – on the basis of respect for minority rights.  Call this the libertarian defense.  Conservatives bravely stand for the principle that no one, conservative or otherwise, should be coerced with individual mandates, excessive regulations, high taxes, or any other unwelcome control from the government, even a majority controlled one.  John Hayward of RedState.com (his italics):

The only way to prevent power from building to a dangerously explosive pressure is to install a relief valve in the political system: the right of meaningful dissent, which means the right of refusal.  The majority wants to do something I disagree with?  Fine, knock yourselves out.  Let me know how it goes.  You might even persuade me to get on board, one of these days.

The populist defense claims that the people want to be left alone.  The libertarian defense claims they have a right to be left alone.  In the libertarian view the American people are something of a menace, a thoughtless mob using the blunt instrument of the federal government to oppress resistant minorities.  Government fails because it’s too expansive; it interferes and intrudes more than it should, much more, definitely, than the Founders wished, more than the Constitution allows.  The Constitution was explicitly created to preclude modern liberal paternalism and conservatives are therefore permitted to override it (for example, by putting the national credit in question or enforcing Senatorial supermajorities) in order to protect it.  They’re also justified in generously amending it to return it to its original purpose of outlawing modern liberalism.  Radicalism in the service of tradition seems to be a way of life for this crop of conservatives.

Does the Constitution prohibit the welfare/regulatory state?  This is much too big a question for this small essay, but decades of Supreme Court decisions, going back to 1937, answer in the negative.  Even Obamacare’s mandate that individuals purchase health insurance under threat of a tax penalty has been deemed constitutional by a conservative Supreme Court presided over by a conservative Chief Justice.  The libertarian principle, that there are individual rights which no legislature may infringe, is a vitally important principle, one which we violate at our peril.  But it’s not obvious that one shouldn’t be coerced into supporting a health insurance system that sooner or later one will come to rely upon.  Everyone pays taxes for public schools, even people without children.  The libertarian defense is not an obvious sham like the populist defense, but unless one is an anarchist absolutist who believes no coercion is ever justified, it’s not so self-evidently compelling as to justify the radical confrontationalism of early October.

The third conservative defense is similar to the populist defense, in that it sees Obamacare as the imposition of a non-representative ruling class, but it makes no pretense of speaking for a majority.  It charges that Obamacare lacks moral legitimacy because of how it was passed.  For one thing, it was passed without any Republican votes; as noted conservative writer Charles Krauthammer puts it:

From Social Security to civil rights to Medicaid to Medicare, never in the modern history of the country has major social legislation been enacted on a straight party-line vote.  Never.

And it was passed through non-standard legislative procedures, using budgetary rules to avoid a Republican filibuster.  Red State columnist Daniel Horowitz wrote on October 4th:

Obamacare was passed through budget reconciliation.  So when they felt it was convenient for them to inject Obamacare into the budget process; namely, for the purpose of avoiding the 60-vote threshold, they were more than happy to do so.  Well, what’s good for the goose is good for the gander.  Now that we have approached the implementation date, which coincides with the budget deadline, it’s time to use that same process to uproot a law that is unworkable and unpopular.

When in the middle of the 2010 Congressional healthcare debate, the very blue state of Massachusetts sent a Republican to the Senate expressly to stop Obamacare, Democrats overrode this “unmistakable message of popular opposition.”  Democrats started this game of flouting legislative and democratic norms; when Republicans play grand obstructionists they are just responding in kind.  Call this the hardball defense.  In the hardball view the parties are ruthless gangs and the American people are the turf they fight over.  (The hardball defense, of course, does nothing to defend the conservative debt ceiling demand to enact their entire economic program; it can, at best, justify extraordinary measures only for stopping Obamacare itself.)  To Krauthammer, Democratic legislative chicanery was so dismissive of dissident views and so ruthless in its determination that it more that justifies the angry, combative Tea Party response it provoked:

It’s the Democrats who gave life to a spontaneous, authentic, small-government opposition — a.k.a. the tea party — with their unilateral imposition of a transformational agenda during the brief interval when they held a monopoly of power.  That interval is over. The current unrest is the residue of that hubris.

The hardball defense, in effect, accuses Democrats of acting like Leninists.  Yes, Leninists; but in a particular way.  Vladimir Lenin redirected Russian Marxism from a broad-based, democratic, trade union movement into a small, dedicated, aggressive vanguard party which alone perceived and expressed true proletarian class consciousness.  He believed the workers as a whole could never fully grasp their objective situation and could not become the basis of the coming socialist utopia without the strict direction of such a vanguard.  Lenin’s primary contribution to political theory is the notion that an ideologically enlightened cadre can understand and represent the people better than they can themselves.  And when an unlikely procession of historical events led to the October 1917 Bolshevik Revolution and the raising of the red flag over St. Petersburg, Lenin used that seizure of state power to impose a Communist transformation upon an unwilling society.  What Krauthammer, Horowitz, etc. are saying is that modern liberals feel justified in imposing Obamacare and other big government social programs because they believe they understand the economic interests of working people better than those working people themselves.  The Democrats won complete control of the federal government in 2009 and 2010 only because of the unlikely combination of revulsion against the outgoing Republican president plus the celebratory appeal of a black presidential candidate plus a terrible financial collapse; they used that power to force their centrally-controlled medical insurance scheme upon a people who’d made it clear they didn’t want it.  Liberals are convinced, because of their technocratic arrogance and their over-educated sanctimony, of their right to act in the interests of the little people.

Of the three defenses, this is the only compelling one.  After all, Democratic criticism of recent Republican brinksmanship is procedural; no one disputes their right to oppose Obamacare or negotiate over the budget, only whether they should do so by shutting down the government or threatening a default.  And Democratic procedures for enacting Obamacare would not make a shining example for a civics textbook.  But neither were they as unsavory as conservatives portray.  Obamacare was one of the main planks of Obama’s 2008 election platform, an election he won by a substantial 7 point margin.  That same year, Democrats increased their Senate majority to 59 out of 100 seats and their House majority to 257 out 435 seats (having received 56% of the vote).  After passing economic stimulus in February of 2009, Democrats turned to healthcare.  And Krauthammer dismisses the notion that Democrats genuinely tried to be bipartisan about it:

The Democrats insist they welcomed contributing ideas from Republicans. Rubbish. Republicans proposed that insurance be purchasable across state lines. They got nothing. They sought serious tort reform. They got nothing.

But failure to include two (seriously flawed) policy proposals does not constitute Leninism.  Democrats spent months negotiating with more tractable Republicans Senators like Mike Enzi, Charles Grassley, Orrin Hatch and Olympia Snowe, trying to get them on board by suggesting less generous and more market-centered plans.  Many Democrats, possibly including Obama, might have preferred Medicare for all, but they refrained from pushing that because of resistance from within their own caucus (not much of a Leninist monolith there), even though single payer has garnered majority support in some polls.  And yes, only Democrats voted for Obamacare, but that was because Republicans boycotted it as part of a deliberate political ploy to deny it bipartisan legitimacy. They did negotiate with Democrats at first, but it’s hard not to conclude they did so in simple bad faith with the deliberate intention of delaying the bill’s passage in order to discredit it in the public mind.  Historically, major social legislation won support in both parties because historically the parties were not ideologically consistent.  Before the great post-60’s political realignment there were liberals and conservatives in both parties.  Consider Krauthammer’s list of major social legislation: Social Security, Civil Rights, Medicare, Medicaid.  He seems to celebrate them, but he neglects one very interesting point: they were all liberal initiatives that are tremendously popular now that were strenuously opposed by conservatives at the time.  Indeed, opposition to such initiatives was what defined them as conservative!  In 1961 Ronald Reagan, then a famous actor and aspiring conservative activist, famously predicted the enactment of Medicare would mean the death of freedom, a stance that might deepen the confusion of present-day Tea Partiers holding signs reading “Keep government out of my Medicare!”  If liberals waited for conservative support no important social legislation would ever be passed.

And why should Democrats have been forced to reach Horowitz’s 60 vote threshold?  He’s referring to the filibuster, a Senate rule which requires 60 or more Senators to allow a bill to come to a vote.  (Forgive the following short walk through the weeds of legislative process, but it’s necessary to clarify a point important enough that Tea Partiers claim it justifies their aggressive tactics.)  Historically the filibuster was invoked infrequently, but after 2000 it began to be used more and more until now it has almost come to be considered part of the normal functioning of the Senate.  This violates the spirit (if not the letter) of the Constitution, which demands super-majorities for specific votes (such as ratification of foreign treaties) and requires nothing more than simple majorities for most votes.  The Democrats had 60 votes after the defection of Arlen Specter in April of 2009 and passed their version of Obamacare in the Senate in December.  But they lost the 60^th vote on January 19, 2010 when Republican Scott Brown won the special election to fill the seat emptied by the death of Ted Kennedy, the liberal lion.  Brown had indeed campaigned with the promise of maintaining the filibuster against Obamacare and thereby preventing its passage.  The House of Representatives had passed its own version in November, but Brown’s election and promise of filibuster meant the House and Senate bills could not be negotiated through normal procedure.  Democrats, determined to pass universal health care after decades of effort, decided the House would simply pass the Senate bill as it was and make any desired changes through supplementary legislation passed in the Senate via the budget reconciliation process, which doesn’t require 60 votes.  It’s only the passing of this smaller accompanying act (which contained only budgetary changes to the main bill) that Horowitz is complaining about, not the passage of Obamacare itself.  If conservatives were justified in using an extra-Constitutional device like the filibuster to block Obamacare in a repudiation of huge Democratic electoral victories, why were Democrats so unjustified in using budget reconciliation to pass minor changes?

There’s a word for ruthlessly using technicalities to win on policy: hardball.  But hardball is not the same as Leninism.  On the other hand, parties tend to employ hardball when they lack broad popular support.  Was that true of Democrats and Obamacare?  The Democrats had won the presidency and large majorities in both houses of Congress by running on – among other things – universal healthcare.  But wait: “among other things.”  People vote for all sorts of reasons and not everyone that voted Democrat did so to enact Obamacare; though, by the same token, probably not everyone who voted Republican did so to block it.  If there was overwhelming popular support for Obamacare – as there had been for Social Security, Medicare, etc. – it would have been quite hard for Republican members of Congress to vote against it.  The final Senate version passed in the House by only 219 to 212; 34 Democrats voted no, hardly an overwhelming acclamation.  This is where Krauthammer’s charge of Democratic partisanship has some validity. 

The last decades have seen increasing polarization, and a relatively small majority supported universal healthcare while a sizeable minority vehemently opposed it.  Democrats did try to mollify that polarization by modeling their healthcare legislation upon moderate proposals by the two most important conservative think tanks, the Heritage Foundation and the American Enterprise Institute, and touted by Newt Gingrich and other Congressional conservatives, and passed into law by the Republican governor of Massachusetts.  Conservatives responded with legislative stonewalling, some even conceding that they had never seriously meant their own proposals but only pretended so to undercut liberal plans.  Indeed, over the course of the healthcare debate, liberals reached out to conservatives and were repeatedly rebuffed.  Most of that rebuff was political and cynical – more hardball – but some of it was based upon honest differences over the role of government in a free society.  That is, by 2009 polarization had grown to the point that, reasonably or not, conservatives honestly wanted no universal healthcare to pass.  When the Democrats passed genuinely contentious legislation in such a polarized atmosphere and through such unorthodox methods it was bound to exacerbate polarization and partisan bitterness.  It’s true that much of that polarization before the passage of Obamacare was part of a deliberate conservative strategy designed to increase polarization, but Democrats need not have responded in kind.  Hardball against your opponents may be appropriate revenge for the hardball you’ve endured, but, contra Krauthammer, Leninism as retribution for Leninism is not so glibly justified.  And when Democrats used hardball to overcome lack of popular support it was a genuine example of the Leninist attitude.  But the most objectionable example of Democratic Leninism was the dismissal of Scott Brown’s election.  When such a blue state replaced its longtime very liberal Senator with a Republican expressly for the purpose of blocking Democratic legislation, it constituted an unmistakable loss of popular confidence.  When Democrats determined to pass Obamacare anyway it expressed greater trust in its own ideological analysis than in public opinion.

But Republicans have been guilty of the Leninist attitude as well, and more systematically and to a greater degree.  George W. Bush acquired the presidency with less than 48% of the popular vote, but he governed as if he’d won a broad conservative mandate.  From the Bush era to the present, conservatives have consistently pushed for upper end tax cuts, claiming to represent widespread populist demand for them; there isn’t any. Even during the Great Recession, conservatives have anguished over the debt in the name of a public that is actually much more concerned about jobs.  But the real problem of conservative Leninism is that it’s baked right into the cake of conservative populism.  Consider again the conservative defenses of this month’s confrontationalism.  The populist defense claims conservatives represent a majority when they clearly don’t.  Seems like everyday political deceit; but is there something more?  The libertarian defense claims, in effect, that conservatives should be exempt from certain government actions, even those democratically passed and duly adjudicated.  And as we saw, hardball tactics typically indicate lack of popular support, and October’s hardball conservatism seems to lack all scruples about thwarting popular will.  Do conservatives feel themselves in possession of some alternative to a numerical majority that conveys comparable, or even superior, authority?

It’s a mainstay of conservative folklore that Republicans loose presidential elections when they nominate mushy moderates, like John McCain and Mitt Romney, and win with full-fledged, reliable conservatives, like Ronald Reagan (he may constitute that entire list).  They really seem to believe, against all evidence, that the American heart belongs to them and can be made to beat vibrantly again at the entreaties of a true-blue conservative savior-statesman.  That is, conservatives believe they understand the American essence in a way non-conservatives just cannot.  Only they appreciate the almost perfect constellation of cultural and political institutions – a free market, a religious and temperate populace, and divided and limited government – bequeathed by the Founders; and only they feel the appropriate urgency of freeing ourselves of liberal corruption and returning to that original bliss.  That’s what it means to be conservative!   This inside knowledge of the true American cultural essence is what endows conservatives with the moral-political authority to override mere numerical majorities.  This is conservative cultural Leninism: the belief that all true Americans are conservative beneath the skin, and if not, then they aren’t true Americans and they’re views need not be respected.  This attitude is widespread, habitual and fundamental on the American right.  And it’s this minority populist arrogance which is the true justification for the shockingly hardball conservative strategy of shutdown and debt threat, a strategy that constitutes the single most egregious act of Leninism in generations.

All political movements, even democratic ones, must have leaders and experts; in a word: elites.  There are subtle and complex issues that much of the public – actually living private lives detached from the inside baseball of modern government – simply doesn’t appreciate.  Consider that the citizenry wishes to not raise the debt ceiling.  They are correct in thinking that raising it allows the government to acquire more debt, but they don’t seem to understand that it allows the government to acquire more debt in order to pay for government spending that Congress and the president have already agreed upon and are legally committed to spend.  Failure to raise it would prevent the government from paying its already existing debts, which the world financial system rests upon; such failure would likely lead to global economic Armageddon.   This is a simple matter of fact upon which the public is simply wrong.  Congressmen, Federal Reserve governors, department heads, news professionals, academics, advisors and bureaucrats understand this issue in ways that much of the public does not and probably never will.  That’s not a slam against anyone.  The American people generally display reasonable and balanced judgment; they have good instincts.  Consider their reaction to recent Republican extremist tactics.  But it’s not the job of private citizens to be informed on every aspect of fiscal policy.  Responsible, informed, prudent elites are as necessary to a functioning democracy as is a free and responsible populace.

Of course, not all elites are responsible.  During the debate over Obamacare, Republicans filled the public discourse will all sorts of dishonest accusations: death panels, socialized medicine, government takeover, etc.; such lies continue now in the implementation phase. The public, with its own ideological inclinations and its less-than-perfect knowledge of the issues can be too susceptible to propaganda and obfuscation.  That susceptibility helps explain much of the change in opinion on healthcare between Obama’s election and Scott Brown’s.  This is one of the inescapable limitations of democracy.  (Sometimes the elite falls prey to its own propaganda: apparently several Republican Congressmen seem to think a default would actually be beneficial!  But what’s forgivable in the general public is unbearably shameful in a public servant.) 

Acknowledging the people’s imperfections opens one up to the very charge of Leninism, a charge that can be quite powerful in a country with such a deep populist tradition.  Such accusations arise, for example, whenever a party tries to explain its own electoral failure.  In a democracy you’re obligated to believe that your side loses (either from messaging failure, but that’s the lamest copout there is, or) out of ignorance; i.e. the people don’t realize how wrong they are.  Conservatives believe people vote liberal for the free government goodies; they are morally weak and don’t appreciate the moral satisfaction of economic independence and personal responsibility.  Liberals believe people vote conservative out of mistaken beliefs about the moral nature of capitalist outcomes.  They believe that big government humanizes capitalism and makes it work for everyone rather than just the rich; when working people vote against liberalism it must be that devious conservatives are manipulating their cultural and racial fears.  Obama famously said in 2008 (in a closed-door meeting) that when working people feel the economic squeeze, “it’s not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy toward people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.”  But Leninism does not consist in believing the people are mistaken or limited; it consists in believing one is justified, based upon one’s possession of special ideological truth, to act on important issues against the public’s clear wishes.  Democracy is necessary because without accountability elites run the system for their own benefit.  If democracy without elites becomes a mob ripe for demagoguery, elites without popular control become an aristocracy.  Leninism is an alibi for an aspiring aristocracy.

But even liberals at their Leninist worst, as when passing unpopular transformational legislation, or conservatives at their even worse Leninist worst, as when threatening to blow up the world economy unless their losing economic agenda is enacted in full, are radically different from historical Marxist-Leninists in one very important way: neither one is a small, purely intellectual movement.  Both liberalism and conservatism are broad-based popular movements.  Both the Democratic and Republican parties are small “d” democratic parties in that the grass roots of each party has enormous influence over its policy.  Indeed, the Republican establishment and business leaders lament how powerful the Tea Party insurgency has become within the GOP.  The actual Lenin led his vanguard party to violent revolution and totalitarian control and no reasonable person fears those things in America in the foreseeable future.  But the Leninist attitude is a serious threat to national comity and unity; it exacerbates polarization; it makes people angry; it robs them of their pragmatism and generosity; it makes them less receptive to reason and compromise and more susceptible to propaganda and demagoguery.  And there is one other very important and quite fortunate difference between Lenin’s red October of 1917 and the red state Tea Party insurrection we just endured:  Our red October failed.  Thank goodness.  And thank the good sense of the America people.