The temporary closure of the US government has opened the floodgates to all sorts of diatribes in our newspapers, regardless of their political preferences.
Just this once there’s no divergence of opinion: all commentators, Right, Left or Centre, agree that it’s the obstinacy of the Republicans that threatens the wellbeing of America and of the world she’s supposed to lead.
Obamacare, which most commentators generously admit is flawed, nonetheless reflects the will of the people. Democracy has spoken, and now those rightwing nutters are trying to sabotage it.
Such unity would be touching if the underlying judgment weren’t so flawed. And as is usually the case, a silly underlying judgment produces arguments unworthy of otherwise intelligent men.
In his article America Is Becoming Ungovernable Max Hastings describes Obamacare as “the major achievement” of the current administration. In the process he dismisses out of hand (that is, without bothering to argue the toss) the Republicans’ claim that the plan “will make medical care more costly for middle America, and extend the reach of the hated federal government.”
Rather, the bill will put “health insurance within reach of the poorest Americans… Long-term, it is intended to lower the horrific costs of public healthcare.”
Now this long-term benefit is a matter of pure conjecture, whereas the short-term hike in healthcare costs is a matter of fact: since the bill was passed they’ve already increased by roughly a third. Wait till it goes into effect.
I’d also be tempted to mention that Obama’s project puts medical care on a slippery slope to nationalisation. Republicans may or may not hate the federal government but, the example of our own dear NHS before them, they see no compelling reason to love state control over medicine.
Mr Hastings gets so emotional that he slips into ignorant tirades most unfortunate in a professional historian. For example he accuses the Republicans of defying “the intentions of the Founding Fathers of the constitution as flagrantly as the gun nuts who exploit the 1776 provision for militias to bear arms, to enable modern mass murderers to equip themselves with machine-guns.”
The US Constitution was adopted in 1789 and its Second Amendment in 1791, not 1776, the year America issued her Declaration of Independence. Historians shouldn’t confuse the two documents. Hastings may like or dislike this amendment but it’s part of the constitution, which is to say the law. By citing it, people therefore uphold their constitutional liberties, which ipso facto doesn’t make them ‘gun nuts’.
Mr Hastings then broadens his attack on American constitutional arrangements, which according to him made the Tea Party possible – and God forbid any political mix should feature a conservative component. “Most Republicans,” he writes, “hate 2013.”
“They want to reset the clock to around 1955, when the world lived in terror of nuclear annihilation, but when Dwight Eisenhower occupied the White House, women and blacks knew their place, there was no swearing on TV, and sex was kept in its proper place under the carpet.”
Run for the hills, chaps. If those gun nuts ever take over, there will be so little swearing and sex on the telly that nuclear annihilation will loom large. The only thing to save us will be wholesale nationalisation, starting from healthcare in the States or, ours already being nationalised, taking off from there in Britain.
Both Hastings and the chap in The Times, whose name escapes me, bemoan the subversion of democracy allegedly perpetrated by those dastardly Republicans. Do they realise that the Republican majority in Congress is doing nothing illegal? That the rule of law supersedes abstract principles, including commitment to democracy über alles?
Neither American nor our democracy is direct. People are supposed to govern through institutions, not by plebiscite. Specifically, all modern democracies feature a separation of powers among three branches of government of which two, the legislative and the executive, often find themselves at odds. This is especially true of presidential republics, such as the USA, where the top executive doesn’t automatically have a parliamentary majority.
Such conflicts are normally resolved by what Americans call horse trading. This is exactly what is going on at the moment. The Republicans are prepared to suppress their better instincts and vote for increasing the public-debt ceiling above its current suicidal level of $16.7 trillion. In exchange they demand that the White House either suspend or, ideally, scrap its ill-advised plan.
One also detects that not all Republicans lose much sleep over the possibility of the government defaulting on its debts. That, they predict with much justification, will come sooner or later anyway, so the sooner the better. The consequences will be abhorrent, but not as much as they will be when the debt is twice as big, which it’s confidently expected to be in the near future.
Unlike the Second Amendment, democracy, by which Messrs Hastings et al. swear, isn’t part of the US constitution. If the distinction between a republic and a democracy escapes Hastings, he should really read up on it before committing his thoughts to paper.
In fact, the Founding Fathers, to whom Mr Hastings refers but with whose work he seems to be unfamiliar, knew the distinction very well. Thus In 1806 Adams wrote, “I once thought our Constitution was a quasi or mixed government, but they had made it… a democracy.” Thomas Jefferson then echoed Plato by going even further than Adams: “A democracy is nothing more than mob rule, where fifty-one percent of the people may take away the rights of the other forty-nine.”
Suppose for the sake of argument that the people voted for reintroducing slavery. Wouldn’t it be a good idea if some parliamentary mechanisms could be activated to countermand the majority?
One wonders how Mr Hastings would answer this question. We already know how US Republicans answer a different but related one.