In today’s New York Times, Paul Krugman explains how the Republican Party has become an organization made up of uncaring, inhuman politicians who would gleefully attempt to strip health care away from 22 million Americans in order to provide a tax cut to multi-millionaires, who would eagerly throw Americans into Medical bankruptcy while turning a blind eye to towards their agony, all while attempting to hide the fact of their malevolence from the people who voted for them.
He tries to answer the most basic question: what kind of people would do this? What happened to their basic sense of decency that they ended up this way?
The basics of Republican health legislation, which haven’t changed much in different iterations of Trumpcare, are easy to describe: Take health insurance away from tens of millions, make it much worse and far more expensive for millions more, and use the money thus saved to cut taxes on the wealthy.
That’s the essence of the Republican plan that’s only a few votes short right now of passing the United States Senate and being signed into law by their enabler, Donald Trump. But few if any in the GOP appear willing or even able to acknowledge the all-but-certain consequences of their actions:
Think about it. Losing health coverage is a nightmare, especially if you’re older, have health problems and/or lack the financial resources to cope if illness strikes. And since Americans with those characteristics are precisely the people this legislation effectively targets, tens of millions would soon find themselves living this nightmare.
What is particularly ironic is that the tax cuts for a comparatively tiny slice of the American population wouldn’t really alter those peoples’ lives. True, they would create more “generational wealth,” which would be duly passed down to the children’s children of the wealthiest, further cementing a near-permanent overclass of the super-rich wielding their enormous coffers like hammers to satisfy whatever twisted whim entered their stuffed heads.
But these people already have that wealth and privilege. This Bill won’t do much if anything to “alter” their lifestyles at all. Conversely, the noxious legislation now winding its way through the back rooms of the Republican-led Senate is so vastly unpopular [a recent poll of Americans indicates only 12% approve of the Republican scheme] that it leaves many scratching their heads in wonder at the motivations of the Republican Senators and Congressmen who are standing behind this abomination.
What kind of distorted social conscience votes for this? Was it bad parenting that created these people? Bad friends in high school and college? A horrible toilet training mishap at a tender age? It could be all of these things. But Krugman suggests it boils down to two fundamental lies that Republicans internalized, particularly over the last eight years.
The first was a gross misconception, fostered by a rabid, hyper-funded right wing talk radio regime as well as Fox News, that the Affordable Care Act (“Obamacare”) was so unpopular its repeal would be joyfully embraced by Americans. This is the fatal consequence of Republican Congressmen and Senators drinking their own Kool-Aid and living in a fantasy media bubble where the only thing that matters is what appears on the front page of outmoded but still churning web sites like The Drudge Report. And this is almost understandable—after all, this right-wing media noise machine is what built and continues to fund their careers:
So one way to understand this ugly health plan is that Republicans, through their political opportunism and dishonesty, boxed themselves into a position that makes them seem cruel and immoral — because they are.
The second lie, though, is even more fundamental, and traces itself back to the years of Ronald Reagan and the demonization by the right of minorities and people of color, whom Republicans have told themselves as a matter of faith are mere parasites sucking voraciously on the hapless backs of “real”, i.e., white Americans. But that too was a misconception, thrown into sharp relief given the starkly unequal economic environment that the GOP, through its tax-cutting fervor has fostered as its governing principle:
In an era of rising inequality and declining traditional industries, some of the biggest beneficiaries of these safety net programs are members of the Trump-supporting white working class. But the modern G.O.P. basically consists of career apparatchiks who live in an intellectual bubble, and those Reagan-era stereotypes still dominate their picture of struggling Americans.
Or to put it another way, Republicans start from a sort of baseline of cruelty toward the less fortunate, of hostility toward anything that protects families against catastrophe.
So what this grotesque tax cut disguised as a “health care plan” really does is something that the Republican Party has sought to do since the 1980’s—punish those Americans it considers “undeserving.” The problem for them now is that this pool of the “undeserving” has grown to encompass the very voters they counted on as being duped into supporting their philosophy in the first place.
The Republicans are trapped as a consequence of their own lies. And like anyone whose lifestyles depend upon fealty to such lies, they are loathe to admit they were wrong. That is why they do not—and cannot—pretend to care about the consequences of what they are trying to do to the American public.
The one silver lining that can be gleaned from this miserable debacle is the fact that the Republicans’ motives and true colors are now exposed for all to see. They don’t care about people’s health. They don’t care about people at all. What they care about is something all thinking Americans should reject like a foreign substance caught in their throat.
Since the people pushing this Bill are hopelessly conditioned to be impervious to compassion and empathy, the only recourse left for the ordinary Americans targeted by their repulsive policies is to grab them by the seat of their pants and unceremoniously throw them out of office.
To that end, 2018 can’t come fast enough.
