Obama and Healthcare
The passage of the Healthcare Bill is a triumph for the President. It shows he can do deals to get things done in the ultra balanced U.S. legislative machine. It achieves, at last, what every other modern democracy has (and a good many not so democratic); a universal healthcare programme for its people. America has arrived, but once again America is last.
I have been struck, listening to the extraordinary oratory of some of the opponents, by the link these passionate speakers make between the absence of healthcare and the preservation of freedom. This is same the argument, almost word for word, which was used by the proponents of slavery in the Civil War era, that its abolition would challenge the cause of freedom upon which the nation had been founded. Every other civilsed country had by this point abolished slavery.
This argument is as incomprehensible in Europe, so much more advanced and civilised than Americans will admit, now, as it was in 1861. What it says is that true freedom cannot sustain unless it allows not only the rise of every citizen in freedom. It must also permit the fall. Furthermore it must permit the fortunate to pass by and ignore the suffering of the halt, the lame and the enslaved.
Beneath that muddled vision lies a fundamental belief. It is that Government has no power to direct what individual people do in their lives. It does not matter whether it is slavery, healthcare, religion or segregation. This was what the Civil War was about. The Confederate States believed they had the right to decide for themselves. Washington could not decide for them. There were many, perhaps a majority even, Confederates opposed to slavery, but the right to decide for themselves was the overriding principle for which they fought and died.
This belief in the limit of the power of Washington over the local power of each State on all domestic issues, not only still pervades American political thinking, but it is on the ascendancy. Ironically the Confederate political philosophy is now the dominant theme of the Republican Party, yet this political party was founded to challenge it and was the instrument which conquered it in the war. Conversely the liberal notion of the responsibility of Central Government to right injustice has become the battle cry of the Democratic Party. There is no difference in the political philosophy of these two great iconic figures, Lincoln and Obama. Yet Lincoln was the Republican for the Union and Obama is the Democrat, the party of the defeated Confederacy.
Obama’s challenge on the world stage is to promote a much more healing approach to America’s involvement in World Affairs, so as to make friends and bring settlement to strife torn regions. At home things are different. It is to keep alive the dream of his hero, Lincoln, that the Whole of the United States is greater than the Sum of its Parts. If Obama takes a beating mid-term and certainly if he is beaten in 2012, it will show that Lincoln’s dream has faded and it was, in the end, the Confederacy that would offer the Constitutional interpretation which was closest to the American political heart.
It is also worth recording that it was the Confederacy’s ineptitude at defining the effect of its domestic policies on international opinion, which was the principle reason that assured its failure. The are tricky parallels here, too.