Obama Healthcare Reform Plan Will Be Center of Ideological Battle

James Pethokoukos in U.S. News & World Report:

Passing Obamacare would be like performing exactly the opposite function of turning people into investors. Whereas the Investor Class is more conservative than the rest of America, creating the Obamacare Class would pull America to the left. Michael Cannon of the Cato Institute ... puts it succinctly in a recent blog post: "Blocking Obama's health plan is key to the GOP's survival."

Paul Krugman expressed something slightly different in his recent book, Conscience of a Liberal. He thinks that a popular health care reform plan would destroy the GOP as it is currently constituted:

The central fact of modern American political life is the control of the Republican Party by movement conservatives, whose vision of what America should be is completely antithetical to that of the progressive movement. Because of that control, the notion, beloved by political pundits, that we can make progress through bipartisan consensus is simply foolish. On health care reform, which is the first domestic priority for progressives, there’s no way to achieve a bipartisan compromise between Republicans who want to strangle Medicare and Democrats who want guaranteed health insurance for all. When a health care reform plan is actually presented to Congress, the leaders of movement conservatism will do what they did in 1993 – urge Republicans to oppose the plan in any form, lest successful health reform undermine the movement conservative agenda. And most Republicans will probably go along. ...

In the 1950s you could support Social Security and unions and yet still vote for Eisenhower in good conscience, because the Republican Part had eventually (and temporarily) accepted the New Deal's achievements. In the long run we can hope for a return to that kind of politics: two reasonable parties that accept all that is best  in our country but compete over their ability to deliver a decent life to all Americans, and keep each other honest.

(Conscience of a Liberal, pp. 272-3.) I think he's absolutely right, but people shouldn't read this to mean that Democrats can't or shouldn't win over some moderate Republicans to pass a health care reform package. It will be bipartisan, just not broadly bipartisan.

On the movement conservatives' determination to prevent universal coverage, Hilary Bok notes acidly:

Pethokoukis and Cannon claim that if Obama succeeds in passing health care, then people who might have been conservatives will like it, and will be more likely to vote for the people who passed it. This is unexceptional. An honest conservative might accept this claim and say: well, I guess our ideas are unpopular, so we'll just have to make our case more persuasively.

But that's not the conclusion they draw. Pethokoukis and Cannon say: because people will like health care reform, if we do not block it, our party will lose support. So precisely because people would like it if they tried it, we need to make sure that it fails.

At least they're honest about it.

Of course a conservative would respond that just because people like something is no reason to give it to them. But remember, America is a center-right nation. If you can believe both of those contradictory ideas simultaneously, you're intellectually fit to be a movement conservative.

Comments

[theoldguy]

WTF? America is Centre-Right? America is the most right wing nation among the G8 countries. The only one among these not to have universal health care; has one of the highest child mortality rates of the G8, and a lower than average life expectancy.

[Mithras]

You've lost the plot. Google the blogs for "center right nation" and read what's been going on, then carefully re-read my last para.