Obamacare: Why The Fuss?

This piece by me appears on Post-Right:

Why do the Republicans care quite so much about blocking Obamacare? I am not saying that healthcare doesn’t matter. Of course it does. But don’t jobs matter? Doesn’t a manufacturing base? Doesn’t controlling immigration? Doesn’t America as an English-speaking country? Doesn’t a strong defense capability used strictly for its proper defensive purpose? Doesn’t restricting or reducing abortion? Doesn’t marriage as only ever the union of one man and one woman? Come to that, doesn’t winning elections?

But the Republicans have sold out completely on trade, on immigration, on the status of English, and on foreign policy, even though there was plenty of room for working across the aisle on those issues. Just as there was on restricting or, especially, reducing abortion, on which they have done nothing. And just as there was on defending traditional marriage, on which they have done nothing much, leaving it to core Democratic black clergy to deliver the goods. So now they have to bet the farm on the only thing they have left, defeating a healthcare proposal that could have been drafted and agreed on a cross-party basis, and which is going to pass anyway, not least with the very strong support of those pro-life, pro-family black clergy. The Republicans are reduced to ranting about ridiculous “death panels”, about federal funding of abortion and repeal of the conscience clauses (like they themselves have ever done anything about abortion), and about coverage for illegal immigrants (whom they themselves actively encourage), none of which was ever going to happen.

The Republicans could have had trade controls, immigration restrictions, protections of English, foreign policy realism, abortion reduction measures, and defenses of traditional marriage, as the price of public healthcare. Democrats have to answer to their black and their blue-collar white voters, who would have demanded to know why healthcare was prevented at all, never mind for the sake of not doing what they see as these eminently sensible things. Facing their own electorates, Republicans could have asked why universal public healthcare, to which those voters would rapidly have grown more than used, was too high a price for these much more significant and fundamental victories. Victories for principles held broadly or strongly by numerous Democrats, including Obama. But not, these days, by the Republican Party. And that, alas, is the point.

The rural and Western half of the Republican Party supported the New Deal. Congressional Republicans cast the votes that passed Civil Rights. Their party historically and rightly viewed the wider world in strictly realistic terms, “not seeking for monsters to destroy”. Republicans had called on 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.

Theirs was the party of Eisenhower, with his ending of the Korean War, his even-handed approach to Israel and the Palestinians, and his denunciation of the military-industrial complex. Of Nixon, who began détente with China, and who with Ford ended the Vietnam War. Of Reagan’s initiation of nuclear arms reduction. Of opposition to Clinton’s unpatriotic job-exportation, unpatriotic sweatshop-importation, and unpatriotic global trigger-happiness, all continued and expanded by the unpatriotic Bush Administration. Yet still of Bush’s withdrawal of American troops from Saudi Arabia after 9/11, in consequence of which there has been no further attack on American soil.

But where is it now?

It is all very, very sad. And it is also a shameful abrogation of responsibility, since it makes the Republican Party so absurd that it effectively turns America into a one-party state.