"Meanwhile, supporters have spent most of their time on seemingly endless debates with one another about specific legislative provisions — whether to include a public option in the reform legislation, whether to have a single national insurance exchange or separate state exchanges, how to enforce a mandate that everyone carry insurance and how much to spend on subsidies to make that mandate acceptable, how to enforce a mandate on all but small employers to sponsor and pay for basic coverage for their workers, and scores of other complex and bewildering technical provisions.
Health care reformers in the administration and Congress have a powerful case to make and, on an issue of such enormous importance, a duty to make it. In addition to reminding Americans that reform will protect, not jeopardize, coverage by preventing insurance companies from canceling coverage or jacking up premiums for the sick, reform advocates should remind them that the proposed legislation will bring coverage to tens of millions of currently uninsured Americans and protect it for scores of millions of others. Reform advocates should explain the legislation’s legitimate promise of cost control and quality improvement.
President Barack Obama has announced a bipartisan meeting on moving the reform process forward. It is an opportunity for all sides to present ideas for improving the bills that already have been passed by both houses of Congress. If modifications are identified that will command the support of simple majorities in both houses, they should be adopted through reconciliation. Then the House should pass the Senate bill."Read more here
The pursuit of health care reform is a manifestation -- indeed it is the ultimate mission of liberal elitists one on side of a culture war that James Q. Wilson characterized with regard to the national split over the Iraq war. That divide exists on healthcare. Wilson wrote of a "linkage between ideology, on the one hand, and congressional polarization, media influence, interest-group demands, and education on the other are easily read in the commentary surrounding the 2004 election. In their zeal to denigrate the president, liberals, pronounced one conservative pundit, had "gone quite around the twist." According to liberal spokesmen, conservatives with their "religious intolerance" and their determination to rewrite the Constitution had so befuddled their fellow Americans that a "great nation was felled by a poisonous nut."
If such wholesale slurs are not signs of polarization, then the word has no meaning. To a degree that we cannot precisely measure, and over issues that we cannot exactly list, polarization has seeped down into the public, where it has assumed the form of a culture war. The sociologist James Davison Hunter, who has written about this phenomenon in a mainly religious context, defines culture war as "political and social hostility rooted in different systems of moral understanding." Such conflicts, he writes, which can involve "fundamental ideas about who we are as Americans," are waged both across the religious/secular divide and within religions themselves, where those with an "orthodox" view of moral authority square off against those with a "progressive" view.
To some degree, this terminology is appropriate to today's political situation as well. We are indeed in a culture war in Mr. Hunter's sense, though I believe this war is itself but another component, or another symptom, of the larger ideological polarization that has us in its grip. Conservative thinking on political issues has religious roots, but it also has roots that are fully as secular as anything on the Left. By the same token, the liberal attack on conservatives derives in part from an explicitly "progressive" religious orientation--liberal Protestantism or Catholicism, or Reform Judaism--but in part from the same secular sources shared by many conservatives."
Wilson goes on to ask and answer:"But what, one might ask, is wrong with having well-defined parties arguing vigorously about the issues that matter? Is it possible that polarized politics is a good thing, encouraging sharp debate and clear positions? Perhaps that is true on those issues where reasonable compromises can be devised. But there are two limits to such an arrangement.
"....many Americans believe that unbridgeable political differences have prevented leaders from addressing the problems they were elected to address. As a result, distrust of government mounts, leading to an alienation from politics altogether. The steep decline in popular approval of our national officials has many causes, but surely one of them is that ordinary voters agree among themselves more than political elites agree with each other--and the elites are far more numerous than they once were."
Read more here
The misguided effort to push through the current health care bill will deepen the divide as well as the distrust. As Wilson notes, since they are so many elites (the so-called stakeholders and people like me who follow them with blogs, white papers and Hill briefings) the ability of government to serve as a connective tissue to public opinion is dampened. The push for health care is leading to an outright rejection of the very politicians themselves. But importantly it is not leading to the alienation from politics. It is fueling an awakening.
