Much like in the United Kingdom, where the Liberal Democrats now comprise a third party, American liberalism is no longer of consequence. The ideological heirs to John F. Kennedy and Harry Truman who once would have freely criticized governmental excess have lost control of the Democratic Party. In their place have emerged leaders who regard their critics as unpatriotic and their own supporters as pawns.
Nowhere is this more apparent than in the ongoing policy debate over health care. Instead of launching an inquiry into a White House official whose special interest ties have influenced the main reform proposal, Congress is bullying those who might rather now question aspects of pendng legislation. This is the opposite of helping the little guy as well as the opposite of transparent governance. Liberals once nobly stood for ethical governance, as well as for providing greater opportunity to those without and those who disagreed.
A movement built on the appreciation of distinctions, and the development of new ideas has been replaced by something rigid, and increasingly hostile to opposing points of view. Leading Democratic members of the U.S. House of Representatives have only one answer when it comes to enacting change: make government bigger. Republicans in both chambers, and a minority of Democrats in the U.S. Senate correctly understand that there are many ways to achieve reform. If the European or Canadian experiences are any indication, government-run health plans which shut out private competition produce monopolies that drive up costs and drive down quality of care. Granted, most healthy people may do okay under such systems, but there is little room for experimentation and expensive but potentially beneficial options to support those with deteriorated health when taxes fund the medical care of everyone in society.
Much as Liberals long stood for advancing greater opportunity in society, many Americans today want to extend to millions of uninsured Americans the ability to possess health insurance. But there are ways to insure those Americans without which do not undermine the competitive character of American health care that sets it apart in the world. Instead of spending a trillion dollars on an antiquated approach to reform that will by design undermine private industry and establish a whole new federal bureaucracy as supporters of the “public option” want, far less could be spent subsidizing the uninsured, thus enabling them to acquire insurance.
It is telling that advocates of the public option are opposed to non-profit coops. Said government-sponsored, but autonomous insurance cooperatives, while far from ideal, would be the PBS of health care; a viable alternative that supplements, rather than supplants, competition among service providers. The public option championed by the contemporary left would be one service provider directed by bureaucrats and funded by everyone. Requiring a full federal agency all to itself, the publc option would be dependent on taxes, guaranteeing to it a constant stream of funding unavailable to the competition. Nothing could be more monopolistic.
Since no one is proposing that the profits of media conglomerates and network affiliates be taxed to pay for televisions and computers to air only programs and points of view the federal government deems proper and which even private networks are required to air, no one should take proposals seriously which do such in the context of health care. Yet, there is nothing liberal about advocating such a policy.
At every opportunity, the present administration in Washington has grown government when other options existed. From his inauguration onwards, President Obama has created new government positions of dubious use, many of which are redundant in scope, and all of which are accountable to no one. There was a time when liberals would have fought such excesses.
In place of American liberalism have arisen two currents, one seemingly labourite in character, and the other harkening back to the opportunistic populism of William Jennings Bryan, George Wallace, and others like them. Indeed, the Obama administration has used a national calamity to promote an ambitious and costly policy agenda which would otherwise be unpalatable to the American people. Liberals criticized George W. Bush for having allegedly done the same to win passage of the USA PATRIOT Act. No liberal resistance has emerged to contest these present excesses. Thus, one is left to conclude that liberalism is, in fact, dead.
ADDENDUM: After further review if H.R. 3200, clarity on statements made has been necesitated. While it is true that a new federal bureaucracy is to be established and funded through taxes, it is the health insurance exchange positions related to it for which that applies, rather than the public insurance option. Instead, the public insurance option is meant to ultimately pay for itself through a dedicated revenue stream. In this way, it is like Social Security, which has a dedicated revenue source derived only from those it is intended to serve. Since Social Security costs more than that revenue source provides, it is not unreasonable to expect that the public option will similarly cost more than is collected specifically for it. Nonetheless, my point remains; instead of opting for reforms aimed at building on existing practice and managing costs, leading Democrats are proposing rigid new rules, increased bureaucracy, and new taxes to address a problem in need of far less.
Last 5 posts by James Kane
- A glaring omission on Iraq - August 31st, 2010
- Employing a losing strategy - August 7th, 2010
- In Defense of Michael Steele - July 9th, 2010
- McDonald and Kagan - July 2nd, 2010
- The Petraeus Dilemma. - June 23rd, 2010
I’m afraid this article suffers from a standard problem in American political discourse; the use of the terms ‘liberal’ and ‘liberalism’ has gone completely wild. In the UK ‘liberal’ broadly speaking means the same as it does in political theory, and both the Lib Dems and the Tories, with reasonable plausibility, claim to be ‘liberal’, though reach trend towards republicanism. In American ‘liberalism’ has something to do with being left wing. Leftist sentiment is not ‘dead’ in America, it is merely almost completely excluded from political discourse due to the role which money plays in your democracy. But American liberalism has little to do with liberalism in political theory, just as American Republicanism has virtually NOTHING to do with republicanism in political theory. An attempt to equate party ideologies across international boundaries based merely upon the labels they have appropriated is doomed to failure. For a perfect example of this, check out the Liberal Democrats in Russia, who are in fact a far-right ultra-nationalist outfit; anti-liberal and barely democrats.
I agree that the terms “liberal” and “liberalism” no longer hold substantive meaning in practice on this basis, however, one could argue that liberalism is dead. Nonetheless, the focus of this piece was to emphasize the deterioration of “liberal” parties over the past forty or more years into parties increasingly illiberal in ideology and practice.
I am aware of the situation with respect to Zhirinovsky’s misnamed party in Russia, and also well aware that the Liberal Democratic Party is the principle conservative party in contemporary Japan. However, In the United States, and arguably, the United Kingdom, liberalism is no more. The best tenets of the tradition of been absorbed into mainline rightist parties while parties of the old center-left increasingly seek to expand the state at the expense of the individual, in contradiction to the keystone tenet of liberalism as a domestic political theory.