Obamacare and the future of the Democrat Party

Interesting column at the Washington Post today from a columnist I can’t remember reading before, Matt Miller, a progressive think-tanker, about why Obamacare is driving Republicans to distraction. (I guess I’m going to use “Obamacare” as shorthand for a while, although Obama let Congress write “his” signature legislation.)

Shock 1: Losing big. For starters, Republicans simply have not lost on an issue this big in decades…

Shock 2: The quest for security. The next blow is the dawning awareness that the quest for economic security in a global era is reshaping politics. The instant premise of Republican analysis — that the public will never tolerate Obamacare’s repeal once it is implemented — concedes the point that health reform will bring a measure of security that families crave…

Shock 3: The death of the tax issue. The final shock is the cruelest of all: the demise of the tax issue that’s defined the Republican brand since Ronald Reagan…

Until Obamacare, I had said that the parties had become very similar in economic policy. Miller thinks the Republicans engineered that, and I think he’s onto something:

Media coverage features so many breathless political ups and downs that it’s easy to assume each party tastes victory and defeat in equal measure. But as a matter of ideology, these overheated fights take place between the 45-yard lines on a field that conservatives shrewdly tilted to their advantage several decades ago.

Meanwhile, in the less-august-than-Washington-Post blogosphere, a Democrat explains with many charts and graphs why his party is doomed because their “tent” is too big:

Time and again in American politics, Republicans have voted as a unit to frustrate our disorganized Democratic majority. No matter what’s on the table, a few Democrats will peel away from the party core; meanwhile, all Republicans will somehow manage to stay on-message.

I think that’s what Matt Miller is referring to as the GOP keeping the game between the 45 yard lines.

Society works, government is sclerotic

I have breathed much economic doom and gloom in the brief life of this blog. It is remarkable to me how many people I come in contact with who feel the same way even as the official media view seems to be this is just another down cycle like all the down cycles before.

But my view nonetheless is not unanimous. James Fallows, writing in the Atlantic, outlines How America Can Rise Again.

Fallows brings to his task considerable experience living abroad, most recently in China, where he saw its emerging economy first hand. He gives a number of reasons why each of our major economic problems is really minor or can be fixed.

The catch is, we lack the will.

The most charitable statement of the problem is that the American government is a victim of its own success. It has survived in more or less recognizable form over more than two centuries—long enough to become mismatched to the real circumstances of the nation … Thomas Jefferson’s famed wish for “a little rebellion now and then” as a “medicine necessary for the sound health of government” is a nice slogan for organizing rallies, but is not how his country has actually operated.
Every system strives toward durability, but as with human aging, longevity has a cost. The late economist Mancur Olson laid out the consequences of institutional aging in his 1982 book, The Rise and Decline of Nations. Year by year, he said, special-interest groups inevitably take bite after tiny bite out of the total national wealth. They do so through tax breaks, special appropriations, what we now call legislative “earmarks,” and other favors that are all easier to initiate than to cut off. No single nibble is that dramatic or burdensome, but over the decades they threaten to convert any stable democracy into a big, inefficient, favor-ridden state. In 1994, Jonathan Rauch updated Olson’s analysis and called this enfeebling pattern “demosclerosis,” in a book of that name. He defined the problem as “government’s progressive loss of the ability to adapt,” a process “like hardening of the arteries, which builds up stealthily over many years.”

On second thought, maybe Fallows and I are closer than first appeared. Able but unwilling eventuates about the same as unable.

Okay: You can stop holding your breath now.

I decided to blog when I saw how different my FaceBook posts were from anyone else’s. It seems the most interesting things in my life – things that aren’t too personal to share, anyway – are ideas I encounter. That’s a problem – people ought to be more important to me than they seem to be when it comes down to how I actually live my life day-to-day, week-to-week. That probably makes me a fairly typical intellectualoid 21st Century American. I’m working on changing that, so don’t expect me to blog as if my life depended on it.

G.K. Chesteron wrote:

Ideas are dangerous, but the man to whom they are least dangerous is the man of ideas. He is acquainted with ideas, and moves among them like a lion-tamer. Ideas are dangerous, but the man to whom they are most dangerous is the man of no ideas. The man of no ideas will find the first idea fly to his head like wine to the head of a teetotaler.

I’m perhaps the teetotaler, but I hope you’ll like at least some of the ideas that intoxicate me.

As I begin this conceit, I anticipate that I will have mostly links with a few comments. In politics, the links are apt to be from the New York Times or the Washington Post editorial pages – not because I’m under illusions that these liberal institutions are right about things, but because as NPR beats heck of of Rush or Beck, these serious papers put to shame most others simply as newspapers and as troves of interesting editorial thinkers – and my favorite, the Front Porch Republic blog. The comboxes at FPR can be pretty lame at times, but the contributors are top-notch guys (and a few gals) who are in the tank for neither major party.

In religion, Father Stephen Freeman’s Glory to God blog produces more gems-per-post than any other I’ve yet found. Subscribe yourself and eliminate the biased middle-man. Of course, he’s Eastern Orthodox, as am I; so if you’re not Orthodox, I venture you’ll find his thinking unusual – a different sort of Christianity than is normally seen in North America.

I’m not sure I’ve followed all the rules for a canonical blog. I picked a title, a subtitle, a theme, and posted an “about.” Then I posted this. So the look of the blog is itself a work in progress.