The New York Times


January 18, 2011, 1:47 pm

The Roots of Overheated Rhetoric

Along with a host of pointless arguments about Sarah Palin, the aftermath of the Arizona shootings has inspired an interesting intra-liberal debate about how polarized America really is. Noam Scheiber, of instance, watched the president’s speech last week and came away thinking that Obama underplayed the reality of Americans’ ideological divisions. “After all,” he writes, “the reason the country is so polarized is that we disagree pretty strongly about what would strengthen our democracy (say, a richer social safety net versus greater reliance on the free market and individual responsibility).”

My colleague Paul Krugman made a similar argument last week, and Jon Chait echoed his points. But Matt Yglesias dissented:

I didn’t really hear congressional Republicans calling for increased reliance on the free market. Did they talk about repealing the 2003 Medicare expansion? Did they argue for eliminating SCHIP? Did they push repeal of continuity of coverage regulations? Did they take up my pet cause of letting dental hygenists clean teeth without giving dentists a piece of the action? They certainly didn’t push to repeal the rule that hospitals need to provide care to the indigent. Indeed, I often heard Republicans asserting that the most popular elements of the Affordable Care Act—most notably a ban on refusing coverage to individuals with pre-existing conditions—could and should somehow just be severed from more controversial aspects of the law.

… George W Bush substantially expanded the federal government’s commitment to health care and K-12 education, yet liberals were absolutely convinced he wanted to roll back 100 years of welfare state expansion. TARP gave Barack Obama a once-a-century opportunity to transform the American economy through state control over the commanding heights, an opportunity he deliberately declined … due to the sincere belief of his team that doing so wouldn’t be in the interests of the United States. What’s interesting to me is that we have a kind of furious partisan debate despite the fact that we don’t see large disagreements about the basic principles of welfare state capitalism.

This is why it’s sometimes useful to consider American politics through the cynical lens suggested by Will Wilkinson’s election day commentary, in which all the sound and fury of partisan warfare is just a way to deceive ourselves into thinking there’s something more important at stake in each election than special interests jockeying for control of the fiscal commons. Our debates are so furious, in this reading, because our disagreements aren’t that significant: We rely on apocalyptic rhetoric about socialism and fascism, tyranny and freedom, to persuade ourselves that we’re actors in a world-historical drama, rather than just interest groups feuding over the spoils of governing a prosperous but somewhat decadent republic.

A less cynical way to look at it is this: Pace Scheiber, most Americans don’t actually disagree strongly about whether we should have a stronger safety net or a more limited government. They think, in a vague and none-too-consistent fashion, that we should have both at once — low taxes and expensive entitlements, subsidies for me but not for thee, a go-go free market when G.D.P. is rising but a protective government ready to save us from our foolishness when the economy goes bad, and so on. And the shouting on both sides, the overheated rhetoric about how the Democrats are socialists and the Republicans are going to shred the safety net, may be best understood as an attempt by ideologically-committed minorities to get an essentially non-ideological, not-that-interested-in-policy majority to recognize that all good things don’t go together, and that there will come a time (and soon, judging by the budget deficit) when they’ll have to choose more liberty or more government, lower taxes or bigger entitlements, more regulation or more laissez-faire. The shouters are sincere, but they’re also strategic: Framing the choice in stark, apocalyptic terms can feel like the only way to persuade the vast American middle to sit up and pay attention. (Whether this strategy actually makes sense, or whether it’s ultimately counterproductive, was one of the issues that Paul Ryan and David Brooks wrangled over in their American Enterprise Institute tete-a-tete last month.)

Finally, my sense is that Americans remain much more polarized on cultural and religious questions than they are on economic policy, which suggests that some of the apparent polarization we see on an issue like health care has less to do with the “markets versus government” debate referenced by Scheiber and others, and more to do with the way our divisions on more existential issues create a general climate of mistrust. It isn’t a coincidence that the health care debate burned hottest around two issues — abortion and end-of-life care — that were relatively tangential to the main purpose of the bill. (Or, likewise, that hottest health care debates in the Bush era were over the modest funds spent promoting abstinence education and the modest funds that weren’t spent on stem-cell research, rather than the gargantuan Medicare Part D.) For at least some opponents of health care reform, what was at stake in the Obamacare debate had little to do with either the broad argument about socialism or the narrower argument over mandates and tax deductions and pre-existing conditions. Rather, the key question was whether they could trust a health care overhaul conceived and implemented by people — liberals and Democrats, that is — whose views about life-and-death issues like abortion and euthanasia were radically different from their own. And the answer, perhaps not surprisingly, was no.


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About Ross Douthat

Ross Douthat joined The New York Times as an Op-Ed columnist in April 2009. Previously, he was a senior editor at the Atlantic and a blogger for theatlantic.com. He is the author of “Privilege: Harvard and the Education of the Ruling Class” (Hyperion, 2005) and the co-author, with Reihan Salam, of “Grand New Party: How Republicans Can Win the Working Class and Save the American Dream” (Doubleday, 2008). He is the film critic for National Review.

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