Facebook is about the worst place to talk politics, I find. Post something on your wall, and you usually get banal responses from those you've friended. Want to talk politics? Then just become a fan or a groupie of the appropriate group, and knock yourself out.
But there's that issue of who you friended, back when you were all excited about finding old school buddies and childhood crushes. You might accidentally end up with a diverse group, reading those wall postings you make.
And so it happened. I posted this little thing on the wall:
This person thinks that no one should die because they cannot afford health care, and no one should go broke because they get sick. If you agree, please post this as your status for the rest of the day.
more below the fold...
I liked this little statement because it is something I think everyone should be able to agree with. It says nothing about any particular proposal, belief, or political position. People would, I assume, differ not on this goal, but on how to get there.
Well, some agreed with the statement. Some posted it themselves. And at least one person objected fairly strongly. Someone who I haven't seen in a very long time, but have always liked a lot. Still do. But we disagree.
I pointed out to him that he'd read way too much into the statement, and that this is a statement that even right-wing versions of Jesus should be able to agree with. He responded with many of the usual critiques (but, I should say, he did it in the spirit of dialogue). So, my response to that is below (these responses were sent as messages - the Facebook wall is way too limited), for your consideration. You'll have to read between the lines, since I'm not posting his comments that I'm responding to (didn't ask him if I could, so I don't want to do that without his permission).
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Thanks for the thoughtful response. Would that more responses in this country on this issue, or for that matter many others, were as thoughtful as this.
Facebook is, I think, one of the hardest ways to have a real conversation, since it’s mostly limited to little soundbite snippets amid the banal updates of one’s life. I think it ends up becoming as polarized as anything else in this culture (people become fans of pages that resemble their beliefs), and there’s a lot of fear when anyone has to talk to someone outside of that group. I get that in class all the time – I bring up an issue in politics and religion, and especially at the beginning of term I have to really find ways to let everyone know it’s a safe space to say what they think, and that they’re not playing to an audience, like so much else that passes for political discourse in the US. It’s not discussion at all, it’s just theatre.
So anyway, to the post, my response, and your response. I don’t usually post stuff like that on Facebook, for the reasons I just outlined. But this one, I thought, was interesting, in that it seemed to me to be utterly uncontroversial to all political persuasions, and at the same time its connotations were such that it would be read differently by different people, and so was a kind of Rorschach test. One sees in those ink blots what one wants.
So what are the connotations? Clearly, some that you spelled out, about the present administration, and by implication, past administrations as well; the current proposals and past ones; immigration; political and economic systems; and so on.
What’s interesting to me, as a non-American, is just how much the current administration is using a market solution to the problem, as opposed to what it is accused of, which is a bureaucratic solution. Those are the two favoured mechanisms for dealing with a very large anonymous population, which is not tied together by traditional means such as family, tribe, clan, or even ethnicity. We can’t know how to act toward people in the modern world the way we did when we knew that so-and-so was from the X tribe, or was from this part of the family tree, or was Joe and Mary’s kid.
Like I say, the irony here is that the proposals are, compared to almost every other system in other developed countries in the world, a market solution. Specifically, the problem has been defined as being that the insurance companies have created what is essentially an oligarchic system, a system where a few elite players get to define the terms. The current proposals have been anything but socialist, in any sense of the term I recognize, they have tried to insist that to do this right we have to have a real marketplace for health, not one that’s slanted toward the interests of a few players.
That seems to me to be a proposal that, had a Republican brought it forward, would have been understood for what it was - a recognition that the right’s favourite mechanism is the one we’re going to go with. There’s one problem, though – virtually every member of the senate and the house is being funded for re-election by corporations that have an interest in keeping things as they are, or, even better, making them more slanted toward a few interests, and away from the non-corporate participant (I mean by that, you and me).
And so, we’ve had a smoke screen. We get the dreaded "socialist" term stamped on things that don’t even remotely resemble socialism. We get the conflation of the traditional left-of-center solution to the problem I outlined earlier, the bureaucracy, with socialism, a completely nonsensical move, but one that plays well to those who have other interests at stake (more about that in a moment). We get the waters muddied, as we can’t tell the difference between legitimate questions (like the one you raised, the question of how changes will be paid for) and illegitimate ones (like the idea that under the current system, patients have some sort of control over their health care, and that would be lost under a new proposal). And, we get the paradoxical inability to recognize that we have had bureaucratic solutions to large scale public issues that have worked quite well. Like Medicare, like oversight on markets (dismantled since Reagan, with disastrous effect). Like, even, municipal service like fire stations.
The fact is, market solutions don’t work all the time, and neither do bureaucratic ones, and the most successful societies have found ways to combine those. That’s what this current administration has done and, I'm afraid, every neo-conservative administration since Reagan has resisted. That’s why I said earlier that maybe the problem for Bush was not competence but conservatism itself. It proposes solutions that are too simplistic. I should qualify what I said, though – conservatism is great, we just haven’t had any for a very long time. We’ve had neo-conservatism, which bears little resemblance to real conservatism. I personally am no conservative, but I can respect real conservative solutions to things (even though I don’t agree with them). Neo-conservative solutions – they are market fundamentalist solutions, and they fail for the same reason any fundamentalism fails – overly simplistic, emotionally satisfying, and self-justifying answers to complex problems.
In this context, I think I can address some of what you said in your response. Let’s start with the issue of cost. What’s not usually figured in is the tax that currently exists on individuals. Health care premiums are a tax, just not one issued by a government. They’re issued by a corporation. Amounts to the same thing. One principle of taxation is that it should be evenly distributed. This corporate tax is anything but even – some people pay vastly more than others, and some do not get their "services" that they were paying for, because there is insufficient regulation and insufficient competition in the system. The brute fact is that the US still pays by far more for health care than any other country, and gets far less for it. This has been shown over and over, and those who continue to say that we have the best health care in the world hardly ever come up with any reason for saying that, nor do they deal with the overwhelming evidence to the contrary.
Here’s the problem – we treat health care as if it were a commodity, like buying a car or a TV. But it’s not. We can choose to not buy the car, or buy a cheaper TV, or just watch shows on the computer. There are real options, and the providers know that. There are no real options when it comes to health care. Health is in part a personal responsibility, but health care has always had a social function – to distribute risk over a society. It’s the same as the reason we have municipal fire departments – if it were corporately run, one person might use their service, and his neighbor might not. Clearly there’s a problem here – the whole town could burn down if the wrong person decided not to have a policy. It’s about risk, as distributed across a wide range of people, so that everyone can proceed without having to worry inordinately about possible disaster.
In the case of health, of course, people do have to worry about disaster. And it happens all the time, whether you have health insurance or not. In other words, on purely capitalist grounds, this is a bizarre and failed market, where you could pay for something and not be sure that you’ll get what you paid for, and not be sure that problems elsewhere won’t affect you. To the extent that an insurance company refuses to pay for someone, either someone else has to pick that up (like a hospital), resulting in higher costs, or the person dies. This is the system we live in. To someone who has lived in another system, it is amazing that it continues, with the permission of people.
You mentioned that you would take Medicare when you were eligible, and that’s personally a good idea. But Medicare is precisely that kind of market-based system that distributes risk. You didn’t pay into it as if it were a savings account. No one’s going to ask how much you paid, and then limit you to that amount. You will be likely getting benefits over and above what you paid for. So, why is that kind of thing ok for people over 65, but not for people under? Is it because we’re worried about the people who don’t pay? What if we could change that?
You mention the problem of the distribution of health services, and that there will be limits on care. The fact is, no system will not have limits of that sort. But in fact, right now, far more people die because they can’t get health care in the US than in Canada or any country in Europe. Life expectancy is lower here, infant mortality is higher here, and bankruptcy due to medical issues is a booming business here. The fact is, right now, distribution is far worse here than in any other developed country.
I know the standard right-wing answer, which is that those who have been responsible and worked hard and got health insurance are ok, and people who have been lazy don’t have it, and they get what they deserve. Except that, the people in that first group are the ones going bankrupt. And, you can’t predict who’s going to get cancer – it hits anyone, irrespective of age, social class, etc. In other words, everyone risks health problems, but the means to deal with those risks is itself not evenly distributed. It quite simply assumes that people who have money are better, more deserving people than those who don’t. And that’s an assumption I refuse to accept.
So, let’s talk religion for a minute. Yes, people do volunteer in this country, and some people do give money, although I'm always interested to see how much of that is essentially giving back to a particular group to further its interests (church giving, I think, is like this). I do think that there’s a good reason for preferring government action over individual action in many cases – if one relies on individual action, giving essentially becomes a popularity contest. Whatever the crisis is that gets the most press, or tugs the heartstrings in the right way, that’s the one that gets the money. Whatever disease is seen as an honorable one (e.g., cancer) gets the money; the ones that aren’t seen that way (e.g., AIDS, diabetes) don’t. Why is cancer honorable? Because people tend not to think that lifestyle is involved. With AIDS, people still think that it’s only gays that get it, and with diabetes, people think it’s a disease linked to lack of self control. So, if we rely on individual generosity, we get a warped system.
But this was about religion, Christianity in particular. I'm afraid I just don’t see that the US is particularly Christian. It is, of course, very religious, one of the most religious countries in the world outside of some of the more extreme Muslim states. The Christianity we have here is far more rooted in the 18th and 19th century than it is in anything else. A layer of interpretation has been put over the reading of the Bible that addresses modern issues and intervenes in debates over the past 100 or so years, about the nature of faith in relation to knowledge in general and science in particular, about the nature of the relationship between religion and morality (and the nature of morality itself), and about the place of religion in politics, that makes it very difficult to have anything like a real faith anymore. I guess that’s what Jesus always said would happen. But while I think evangelicalism was a necessary corrective 100 years ago to some excesses in the church and in culture, I think it is an exhausted form of faith, and does more harm than good now by distracting people from thinking about what faith means.
As I said in a previous message, I don’t think the Bible prescribes any political or economic system. Evangelicals think it does – it takes some real hermeneutical handsprings to make the case, though, and it’s usually made by implication and by drawing "principles" to be applied in the current situation, thus implicitly justifying the current situation. We have the veneer of religion in this country, but not much of the reality, not people who are willing to question everything they think they know.
And, that is a skill I find more readily available on the left than the right. The right, in religion and otherwise, has become the perfect postmodern movement, working only with images, theatre, manipulation. It is about power, how to get it, maintain it, and keep others from having it. Things are being said about the current president that, if they were said about the previous one, would have produced a firestorm of protest. Any issue becomes an opportunity to recapture lost ground. Right wing talk show hosts actively attack the office of the president, not just the policies; church leaders call for his death (yes, it has happened, and more than once). The most vile racist images and statements are made, and no one in the church or political leadership on the right counters them.
This is why I don’t think there’s much left of Christianity in this country. I hear little in the public sphere that isn’t really just about power and self-righteousness. I know the internal discussion isn’t like that, and I tell my students that there’s as big a range of evangelicals as anything else, but as to the main public face of it, I don’t recognize that faith as Christianity – it’s foreign to me, and bears no resemblance to the Christ I recognize.
Well, that’s a ramble. Sorry for the way too long response. I hope you take the response in the spirit it is meant, as one of conversation, not condemnation. Like I say, I spend a great deal of time talking with students whose positions I don’t agree with, but the point is not whether I agree or not, it’s whether a class can be created where everyone’s best ideas are brought out. So, it's the anti-O’Reilly, you could say, where the worst is brought out of everyone, including him.