This Ezra Klein article - It Is Democracy, Not Health-Care Reform, That Is Sick - dates from back in August, but since:
- (a) I have only just seen it;
- (b) He's a well-known voice on his side of the argument;
- (c) It's really got a huge historical hole in it;
I'm going to address it anyway.
Here's the key paragraph in the article, but I suggest you go and read the whole thing anyway:
What we're seeing here is not merely distrust in the House health-care reform bill. It's distrust in the political system. A healthy relationship does not require an explicit detailing of the "institutional checks" that will prevent one partner from beating or killing the other. In a healthy relationship, such madness is simply unthinkable. If it was not unthinkable, then no number of institutional checks could repair that relationship. Similarly, the relationship between the protesters and the government is not healthy. The protesters believe the government capable of madness. There is no evidence for that claim, which means that there is no answer for it, either. That claim is not about what is in this bill, or what government has done in Medicare and Medicaid and the VA. It is about what a certain slice of Americans think their government -- and by extension, their fellow citizens -- capable of.
Now, I think that most of us would agree that the relationship between many people and the government is not healthy. Or, for that matter, that it is very dysfunctional. But what Mr. Klein generally fails to address - except in the quoted "There is no evidence for that claim, which means that there is no answer for it, either." - and hopes we pick up on, is that in his view the blame for the dysfunctionality falls on the shoulders of the protesters, who are just being silly and irrational in their suspicions of the government.
Unfortunately, historically speaking, there are plenty of examples of a government being capable of madness, just in the 20th century, and almost as many examples of the fellow citizens of the victims being happy to go along with it. One might ask, on the one hand, if Mr. Klein would have been advising German Jews to trust in the sanity of their government and fellow citizens in the 1930s.
But let us, to be charitable, confine ourselves to our government, and remember only things like:
- The Tuskeegee syphilis experiments.
- State-run eugenics programs.
- "Three generations of imbeciles are enough."
- The internment of Japanese-Americans.
- Civil asset forfeiture.
- Indefinite detention of terror suspects.
To mention only the things that leap immediately to mind. The history of the 20th and 21st centuries alone is replete with examples of people who found themselves on the wrong end of what their government and fellow citizens turned out to be capable of, after all.
So, Mr. Klein, to return to your metaphor, indeed, the relationship is dysfunctional. But it is dysfunctional because the people still remember the bruises from the government's previous outbursts of madness, and in this case, placing the fault with the side that's expecting the next blow to come at any time rather than with the side who has a half-empty whiskey bottle in one hand and a mouth full of promises that he can change, really, and no, he won't act like that any more...
Wait. Which political set is it that keeps complaining about the other ones always being too quick to blame the victim? I'm confused.
