This article nicely makes its own contributions to our inability to separate fact from PR, an outgrowth, I think, of the poor factual content of too much political discourse. For example, like much of the press, the author oversimplifies the position of those with whom he disagrees: "Tea Party protestors vehemently deny that patients will be given a choice of insurance provider under universal healthcare proposals that statutorily preserve said choice": Tea Party protestors are not denying what is in the current spate of densely worded bills making their way through the system (since it is unknown what the final law …
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Eric L.
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To Robert Meyers, point taken about my "elimination of choice" remark: I fell into the sloppiness of conflating health care with health insurance, although I am not sure "single-payer" means what you say it does. "Public option," I would agree, could mean multiple sources of insurance, but to use "single-payer" to designate a system in which there are multiple payers to health-care providers is to further confuse the discussion. I guess it is a legitimate use of the phrase to say that the single government payer funnels money to multiple insurance entities (profit or non-profit), who then provide coverage for patients …
Posted to Mad Men 2.0
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One more point: the capacity for choice under the public option should not be measured only against the current system. There are proposals afoot to increase individual options for securing health-care coverage, but single-payer, of any form, does not seem like one of them.
Posted to Mad Men 2.0
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Wow, Zizek is willing to make explicit the Communism (in the historic sense of a totalitarian system of social, political and cultural control) that is implicit in his argument. He seems to think that bandying about the sort of abstract buzzword-infested bloviation that passes for analysis in the groves of academe while ignoring the details of history is sufficient to develop some original thought. But, really, his analysis of the legacy of '68 reflects the same failed categories that informed the New Left of '68. And although he complains that the French suburban riots were devoid of vision, what vision is …
Posted to The Ambiguous Legacy of ‘68
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I can agree with Kenbrociner that the Democrats are not Socialist, but I think we can all agree the party's full spectrum is left of center, and that of the two major parties, the Democratic Party contains the higher percentage of genuine socialists among its voters, so if we substitute "leftish" ("leftist" being a little loaded) for scorps "Socialist," his argument still stands and strikes me as historically accurate: Americans, and especially American working class members, don't vote for those they consider "leftish." And Obama's rush to the right, toward the center (at an unprecedented speed, in my perception) rather reinforces …
Posted to McGovern, Obama, and 'transformative' change
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For Gregory Wonderwheel, "the party's full spectrum is left of center" in my perception means that the professionals in the party (1) find resort to central government solutions to problems their first impulse; (2) believe that redistributing wealth is a legitimate purpose of tax policy; (3) esteem equality over liberty, when push comes to shove; and (4) see government and the wielding of the power as a career. A little simple-minded, granted, and with some thought, certainly there are Democrats, generally Southern, who don't fit that pattern and could legitimately be deigned right of center. But "socialist influence" is not the …
Posted to McGovern, Obama, and 'transformative' change
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GW-Sorry I missed your longer essay; I might have learned something. Your definition of a socialist idea posits socialism as a philosophy or ideology,an orientation, rather than having any sort of economic foundation. That positions your definition on a much different plane than mine, and makes it a little hard to compare socialism to capitalism, unless you think it, too, is non-economic. I will have to say that the notion that "capitalism has no inherent dynamism" strikes me as antihistorical. But perhaps you distinguish between capitalism and free markets, which is legitimate philosophically, if hard to find in the real world. …
Posted to McGovern, Obama, and 'transformative' change
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The fundamental problem with the author's critique is his notion that the job of the Supreme Court is to enforce fairness, when its role is to interpret law and the Constitution. Fairness is too subjective and vague a standard to allow tenured judges to wield when making decisions and interpretations. That vagueness appeals to those left of center when the judges share their values, because the left's primary project is to overthrow tradition sometimes directly and sometimes by undermining language and the common understanding of words. The left's new-found worship of precedent, of course, is only emerging when the precedent's being …
Posted to God--And Progressives--Save This Honorable Court!
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Good for the House. Now if only the Democrats (and Jean) could remember that this is the way that the government is supposed to work: the legislature makes the rules and the court decides them, not on the basis of what current political fashion or the party in power considers to be "fair" or "just," but on the basis of what the laws and the Constitution say.
Posted to God--And Progressives--Save This Honorable Court!
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