Michael Kazin on the National Paranoia

By John Ballard

Michael Kazin's latest book is A Godly Hero: The Life of William Jennings Bryan. He is co-editor of Dissent and teaches history at Georgetown University.

We've talked about paranoia before. Rational people recognize it and it is being deliberately encouraged by opponents of reform for nakedly selfish reasons.  This piece from The Nation Magazine elaborates.

There is nothing particularly novel about today's protesters, including one failed vice presidential candidate and the chairman of the Republican Party, who have been screaming that Barack Obama is a closet socialist--or fascist--whose plans for reforming the healthcare system will destroy their freedoms and perhaps kill off their loved ones. They are just the latest representatives of a long national tradition: fear of a strong central government that periodically leads some Americans to make extraordinary leaps of logic and challenge the power of the alleged leviathan.

...the habit has always been more common on the right, and with good reason. Most liberals and radicals want the federal government, the only national institution chosen by the people at large, to satisfy social needs that business will not meet and private charities lack the resources to fulfill. Although socialism has never been a very popular faith in the United States, the American left's call for a stronger, more caring government does echo its more class-conscious counterparts in other industrial and postindustrial nations.

And conservative movements that stoke panic about the designs of big government have often won the day. In the 1870s Democrats who attacked Radical Republicans for imposing "Negro rule" on the South did much to sap Northern white support for Reconstruction; the result was a brutal segregationist order that endured for almost a century. The same fear that white Americans are losing control to blacks and recent immigrants has animated other wild attacks on federal power over the years, one reason it took so long for Congress to pass strong civil rights and voting rights bills. Redbaiting has done effective service as well. In the late 1940s the American Medical Association helped defeat Harry Truman's plan for national health insurance by publishing an erroneous quote by Lenin declaring that "socialized medicine is the keystone to the arch of the Socialist State." If all this be paranoia, the right has certainly made the most of it.

I sometimes wonder why I continue to blog the same old stuff. It seems as though I have been repeating it all my life and still have not reached enough people to make a difference.

Kazin's short article is full of historical references. He makes a general point that getting the voices of reason and change to speak in unity is like herding cats. He concludes with this...

If Obama and his progressive allies hope to defeat the latest assault on federal power, they will need to go beyond the president's artful ambivalence about the subject. Like FDR, they will have to talk about government as the property of all the people and push through programs that make its benefits palpable to the great majority. The liberal left is larger than at any time in years; but it remains fragmented by age and race and stymied by a lack of coordination between bloggers and NGOs, who speak mainly to the middle-class young, and unions and community organizers, who struggle to serve workers and the poor. For all its flaws, the national state is the only common political ground we have. To make that case does not advocate socialism; it advances democracy.

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Nearly every conversation I have with opponents brings up the lawyers. They don't use the phrase but what they are talking about is tort reform. I think this piece of the argument makes an excellent bargaining chip to offer opponents. Rational people know that tort reform is a red herring. But if giving ground on that one point will win friends and influence people then I'm all for it. 

The president is as tight with trial lawyers as a bunch of Congressmen and Senators are with the insurance and drug companies. Any former faculty member of a law school is in their corner by definition. But this is a trivial matter compared with the importance of health care reform, particularly since a look at the numbers reveals very little being lost anyway.

I'm neither a lawyer nor a constitutional scholar but like Will Rogers I know what I hear and what I read in the papers. And it is clear that many people blame lawyers for the high cost of medical care because they read dramatic stories of multi-million dollar settlements driving up the cost of malpractice insurance and the amount of settlements that then pad their medical bills.

It's mostly bunk, but even physicians often have the same notion. And why shouldn't they? After all, their insurance premiums go nowhere but up. Any time a disaster is in the news, the industry jumps on the chance to kick them up a little more and my guess is that the current public arguments are all the excuse needed to punch them up a little more. 

I recall from undergraduate political science that governments all the way down to the county and municipal level are able to declare themselves immune from liability under the "sovereign immunity" doctrine.  But my instinct is that any tort reform capping damages in the private sector would be struck down later as unconstitutional. (Remember the line item veto?) Even if language can be crafted to sooth the wrath of this one argument which is nearly universal, it would give something to elected representatives in both the House and Senate to show constituents a point for their side. 

I hope someone reading this will pass it along in hopes of bringing it to the attention to the boss. He needs every chip on the table to bring health and insurance reform to the end game.