I saw this headline, and became upset:
Michele Bachmann: Health Care Law “Crown Jewel of Socialism”
Rep. Michele Bachmann of Minnesota, a Republican and founder of the Tea Party Caucus in the House, today cast last year’s health care reform law – “Obamacare” to its critics – as “the crown jewel of socialism.”
I had been thinking, when I started this blog, that I’d have something to say about politics on more or less a daily basis. At one point I probably did, but I’ve been dealing with the ins and outs of navigating difficult waters in life for the past months, and Washington seems very far away to me, generally. That said, I found, at last, some inspiration in Michelle Bachmann.
There are many problems with the Right as is plays a role in American politics, or rather there is a problem with how American politics relates to the Right, particularly the far-Right, which I suspect is much larger than the far-Left, numerically. Above all, the problem on the Right is the use of the rhetoric of revolution to maintain the status quo, or in fact to change things by diminishing social mobility and increasing the polarization of wealth. This is not immediately about Tucson, though it’s not surprising that people get shot in a country where violent rhetoric is part of mainstream discourse. Sensible commentators have pointed out that the real issue in Tucson is gun control and mental health services, both issues that have been politicized, on which the Left, so-called, takes the better positions, but which, in a more rational discourse, would be, like health care, not measured on a Left-Right continuum, but would rather be practical matters.
The think that kills me at this point–notice how the violent rhetoric has infected my own prose–is how the idea of socialism has been used by the Right. I wish Obama were a socialist. He’s not, and as a socialist I never expected him to be one, because he never acted like one. He’s a reformist: he works with the system we actually have–not a bad idea to work with that which actually is–to try to make things objectively better for as many people as possible given political, political because we have a political system, conditions. Fair enough: I voted for him and have no regrets.
It’s no accident that the jackass Glenn Beck wrote a book called The Overton Window. I’ve linked to the Wikipedia article to the concept rather than the Amazon link to the book, incidentally: Beck makes plenty of money already. The people who actually run this country want there to be no alternative to things as they actually are, i.e., to a particular capitalism that is particularly unequal. If I had both Margaret Thatcher and an active volcano, I’d toss her in. More violent rhetoric…
The trick from the perspective of the Bachmanns, Becks, Palins, Dick Armeys (honestly, I was sort of impressed at how Dick Armey was able to get back on television in the last couple years) is sort of like running the wire scam in “The Sting.” The goal is to separate suckers from their money, with an elaborate deception. Palin may run for President if she can make it, and to be sure that wouldn’t be good. Her goal, though, is not to be President, as her gubernatorial career surely demonstrates, but to raise her speakers’ fees. Being a darling of the far-Right is very lucrative, much more so than being a darling of the Left, though Noam Chomsky certainly isn’t going to be panhandling in the near future. I wonder what his tax return will look like this year…
The method, though, is to use what is already in United States political discourse an irrational concept–discursively irrational, insofar as the mention of it produces a fear-based reaction in all kinds of people, particularly those who remember the Cold War–namely, socialism, to raise one’s profile to boost one’s speaking fees. There’s a reason, though, that the owners of capital, the people who own, individually or collectively, controlling interests in corporate media, give the Bachmanns a platform when the Chomskys, let alone other, more interesting, to me, Leftists, are guests on Pacifica or Democracy Now. Bachmann defines an essentially capitalist piece of legislation, the Affordable Care Act of 2010, as socialist. If one accepts this, then, truly, there is no alternative, and, given access to information in this country, we know a lot of people will accept it. They don’t teach Marx in our schools, they simply say that “he’s wrong” and move on.
At some points, this tactic becomes outright lying. Take this, what passes for commentary at the end of CBS’ Sunday Morning program:
Leave off the fawning rhetoric about capitalism, but do note that the “Public Option,” so-called, has become, not in any real reality, but in this editorial, National Health. So, too, is it “dreaded.”
The public option is a nationwide system of government-administered healthcare. Opponents argue that means not only long wait times and poor service, but your life – and every decision regarding it – is basically in the government’s hands.
This is an absolute falsehood, the type that journalists unworthy of the name put in “opinion pieces” so they can sleep soundly, certain that they uphold their professional ethics despite their dishonesty.
All I can do is suggest that people engage in reading, for starters, Marx. Then we can talk about socialism. And not just the Manifesto: start with the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts and then dig into Capital. Or you can follow me as I, unexpertly, wend my way through the Grundrisse.
I would say that I was very happy to see the Affordable Care Act passed, but that it is indeed essentially capitalist. Very simply, the use of the state to generate profit is one of the oldest, if not the oldest, capitalist trick in the book. I was happy to see it passed because it will have positive, practical results, and because it establishes the precedent in this country’s law that everyone ought to have access to health care, even if the mechanism it creates doesn’t achieve that goal. We are a long, long way from socialism in this country, among other things psychologically and spiritually, let alone economically. The task for socialists as far as I can tell is to concretely build elements of socialist infrastructure within capitalism. Start by patronizing worker-owned co-ops, for example.
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Crossposted at http://www.palaverer.com/
