Choke The Dog?

The arguments for what in America is called economic populism are morally, socially and culturally conservative ones, deeply rooted in Christianity and in the civilisation formed definitively by Christianity’s synthesis of the Biblical and Classical traditions. The “free” market corrodes to destruction everything that conservatives exist in order to conserve, and the State must act against it accordingly, but must itself be constrained by the family and by that institution’s private property.

Like the British Labour Party and its Old Commonwealth counterparts, the American Democratic Party as a whole used to understand this. Like those parties, its core voters still do. Or, again like those parties, the people who would be its core voters, which would guarantee its dominance on an almost permanent basis, if only they felt that they were still welcome.

President Obama owes his election to his successful reconciliation, from his base in the black church, of his prodigal party to those voters, the exact opposite of Tony Blair’s toxic effect over here. On the same day as they elected both him and a Democratic Congress, those same voters made it clear at those same polls that, in Florida and California, they wanted back the country where marriage only ever meant one man and one woman. That, in Colorado, they wanted back the country that did not permit legal discrimination against working-class white men. That, in Missouri and Ohio, they wanted to preserve the country where gambling was not deregulated. And that, from coast to coast, they wanted that country as stalwarts of, especially, the black and Catholic churches.

The name of that country is America. She long led the world in protecting high-wage, high-skilled, high-status jobs both against the exportation of that labour to un-unionised, child-exploiting sweatshops, and against the importation of those sweatshops themselves. She could until recently say that she led the world in that she “did not seek for monsters to destroy”.

For she is the country of big municipal government. Of strong unions whose every red cent in political donations buys something specific. Of very high levels of co-operative membership. Of housing co-operatives even for the upper middle classes. Of small farmers who own their own land. And of the pioneering of Keynesianism in practice. Universal public healthcare provision is not only a natural extension of this, but has long been the vital missing link in it.

America is not in the position of Britain in 1945, when the National Health Service was in all three manifestos and therefore bound to happen, so that, even though it was very new and on the brink of bankruptcy, the Tories made no attempt to abolish it when they returned to office in 1951. But much as happened here will happen there: within a few years of the introduction of universal public healthcare, everyone will wonder how they ever got along without it; and within a few years of that, they will have forgotten that they ever did. The defeat of the current proposal would not make the matter go away. It is going to keep coming back until it happens, so it might as well happen now.

Moral, social and cultural conservatives can be, and are, Democrats. When they are, then they are for economic reasons, and are accordingly on the most staunchly populist (in British terms, social democratic) wing of the party. All well and good.

For reasons of their own and which I do not pretend to understand, such economic views are also sometimes held by people whose are anything but conservative morally, socially or culturally. However, since they tend to feel that they would be Democrats (or Labour, or whatever) anyway because of their moral, social and cultural views, they tend not to be so fulsomely committed to economic populism. And their other views are routinely, if not invariably, predicated on principles that are basically and ultimately incompatible with it.

Still, all part of the family, and all that, not least because populist economic policies will and do have conservative moral, social and cultural effects, whether those advocating them, or indeed opposing them, like it or not.

Whereas Marxists are not part of the family. Nor are geopolitical neoconservatives. And nor are economic neoliberals. It is time to level with the Blue Dogs over healthcare, and thus over everything else, too. You can be a Democrat if you are an economic populist, be you never so conservative morally, socially and culturally. That is where most Democrats have been, where many and probably most registered Democrats still are, and where the swing voters undoubtedly are. But the economic agenda of the Reaganite Right are beyond the pale, perhaps furthest so when they are combined, entirely logically and consistently, with moral, social and cultural liberalism. Never mind funded by the party’s enemies in the health insurance racket.

So the Blue Dogs, like others such as the pro-war tendency, have a choice to make. But is it a choice between the Democratic Party and the Republican Party? After all, it was the Republicans who called for Europe to revert to pre-1914 borders and thus end the First World War, an outcome which would have precluded both Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. The rural and Western half of the Republican Party supported the New Deal while standing foursquare with the rest of their party in opposing needless foreign entanglements, insisting instead that America should only go to war if attacked (as eventually happened) or under clear and present threat of being attacked.

President Eisenhower ended the Korean War, was even-handed in his approach to Israel and the Palestinians, and denounced the military-industrial complex. Congressional Republicans passed Civil Rights in the face of Dixiecrat resistance. President Nixon ended the Vietnam War as President Obama will end the Iraq War, and began détente with China as President Obama is beginning détente with Iran (and beyond). Even Reagan initiated nuclear arms reduction, the only conservative thing that he ever did. And Republicans opposed Clinton’s unpatriotic job-exportation, unpatriotic sweatshop-importation, and unpatriotic global trigger-happiness, all continued and expanded by the unpatriotic Bush Administration.

If the Blue Dogs clear off to the Republican Party, then it will finally have ceased to be a conservative party in any way, shape or form. The Democratic Party, however, may well find itself leaner and fitter, defined unambiguously by economic populism and thus by that populism’s underlying conservative principles. Once more the party of the Hyde Amendment banning federal funding of abortion, passed by a Democratic Congress, signed into law by President Carter, and still in force. What have the Republicans ever done like that? Where, today, is their Pregnant Women Support Act, endorsed by President Obama at Notre Dame?

Without the people who were in it because they supported things like abortion, the Democratic Party could be strictly the party that people were in because they supported things like universal healthcare for the born and the preborn alike.