Jane Hamsher has been taking a lot of flak in recent days for coming out against the Senate health care reform bill as well as for suggesting that “both the [progressive opponents] and the tea party activists are saying almost the exact same thing about the Senate bill” and that the ”painfully obvious left/right transpartisan consensus that is coalescing against DC insiders of both parties appears to be taking everyone by surprise.”  Although not actively opposing the final Senate bill, Glenn Greenwald offered similar sentiments about the common ground between the Tea Partiers and the far left, noting:

Whether you call it “a government takeover of the private sector” or a “private sector takeover of government,” it’s the same thing:  a merger of government power and corporate interests which benefits both of the merged entities (the party in power and the corporations) at everyone else’s expense.  Growing anger over that is rooted far more in an insider/outsider dichotomy over who controls Washington than it is in the standard conservative/liberal ideological splits from the 1990s.  It’s true that the people who are angry enough to attend tea parties are being exploited and misled by GOP operatives and right-wing polemicists, but many of their grievances about how Washington is ignoring their interests are valid, and the Democratic Party has no answers for them because it’s dependent upon and supportive of that corporatist model.  That’s why they turn to Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh; what could a Democratic Party dependent upon corporate funding and subservient to its interests possibly have to say to populist anger?

Hamsher then followed through on her assertions by agreeing to take her case to Fox News, for which she was criticized as being “naive.” Finally, today we learn that she has teamed up with none other than Grover Norquist to call for Rahm Emanuel’s resignation due to his actions with respect to Fannie and Freddie.  The criticisms of Hamsher and to a lesser extent Greenwald, have been echoed by several of my fellow Gents here at the League. 

Underlying these criticisms of Hamsher seems to be an assumption that: 1. From a liberal perspective, it is inarguable that the Senate bill at least makes things better; 2.  Hamsher is insane for finding common ground with Tea Partiers in opposition to bailouts that were sold as necessary to prevent a Great Depression; and 3. Hamsher is insane for thinking the Tea Partiers have any actual common ground with her, and that they may actually have similar values to her. 

The first two of these criticisms, however, demonstrate precisely why Hamsher and Greenwald are ultimately correct about the common ground with the Tea Partiers.  Specifically, these criticisms assume that “the experts” are always right, and that the average voter is unqualified to assess the normative merits of a particular government action.  So, the message is sent that progressives like Hamsher should STFU since Paul Krugman thinks that the bill, while imperfect, is at least an improvement from the status quo.  Similarly, on the bailouts, Hamsher (as well as, I assume, all the Dem legislators that voted against them last year) should STFU and support them because the experts say things would have been really, really bad without them [NOTE: I am not offering an opinion here as to my thoughts on TARP].  In each case, Hamsher is expected to weigh the acknowledged normative costs less than the claimed normative costs because, well, she’s neither an expert nor an insider; she’s dismissed as being unrealistic and unserious merely for assigning different moral weight to the acknowledged normative costs from the experts.  Unfortunately, last I checked, being an expert economist or scientist doesn’t give one authority to tell people how to make moral calculations. 

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To steal from and reformat Katrina vanden Heuvel on November 20’s On Point Week in the News segment: if there were as much passionate and vehement debate within mainstream political discourse on decisions to go to war as there has been on health care reform, something would have gone terribly right with our politics and the world would be a very different place. Discuss…

Our pal Ken at Popehat (see also Dave Schuler) asks whether there can be an affirmative constitutional right to health care and whether there already exists an affirmative constitutional right that could be compared to an affirmative right to health care.  He says no, and I’d be interested to see a coherent argument that there is without defining the word “right” in a way that it has never been understood in the United States. 

This has been on my mind quite a bit of late, because I keep seeing this argument that health care is a fundamental, positive human right (sometimes quoting the Declaration of Independence “life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness” language) that the government has an absolute obligation to provide.  As many times as I’ve seen it, I’ve never been able to figure out how it makes any sense.  Rights, generally speaking, are absolutes for which infringement is justified only in particular, usually exceptional circumstances.  This is, to my mind, definitionally true – in order for a right to be infringed, the scope of that right has to be defined well enough to know it is being infringed, and by whom. 

Put another way, they are generally non-excludable and non-scarce – although there may be a right to bear arms, there can be no right to be provided a government-issued AR-15.  There is thus a definable and timeless ideal with regards to any “right” that can at least theoretically be achieved: the right to say whatever you want without interference from the government, the right to be imprisoned only for actual crimes you committed, the right to a trial by jury, etc.  In this sense, I can see a strong argument that there is a right to seek health care without government interference for the same reason why there can be a right for adults to enter into consenting relationships or contracts with other adults (whether these should or should not be considered fundamental human rights is a different topic – the point is just that they at least can be rights in theory).*

But the idea that there is a fundamental human right to receive health care without regard to your ability to pay makes no sense because there is no conceivable, static ideal – what counts as an ideal level of health care varies from person to person, country to country, and year to year.  I can’t, for instance, have a right to a life-saving treatment that doesn’t exist yet. 

Perhaps you can say that this is sophistry – you can always frame the right as being a right to the best care available at a given time within your country.  Well, fair enough – but define “best.” Is “best” the care that most prolongs your life (“life”), is it whatever course of treatment you decide is best without regard to cost (“liberty”), or is it the care that most improves your quality of life (“the pursuit of happiness”)?  Or is it somehow all three?  And regardless of how you define “best,” how do you handle the fact that health care is a scarce resource with greater demand than there can possibly be supply?  In other words, if everyone has an affirmative right to the “best” healthcare, but there is only enough supply to provide 50% of the population with the “best” healthcare, how do you decide whose rights will be respected and whose disregarded without violating the quite real fundamental human right to equal protection under the laws?

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Last week in the comments, E.D. noted that the more liberal and Canuck of the League’s contributors hasn’t offered much in the way of analysis around the current red hot health care debate. Earlier, I offered my own sense of bafflement over the inability for American health care debaters to have a realistic discussion about reform that actually looks at a single payer system in something approaching sensible terms and noted how many of the tropes involved in that subsection of the debate strike simply incongruous postures vis-a-vis my own life experience.And look, it’s just hard to sit down with the relatively sparse amount of free time that one has at one’s disposal and look through the particulars of the HR3200 v. Wyden-Bennet plans when neither plan’s options will be available to me.

But the broader context of the debate is something I’ve found pretty interesting to follow and in doing so I’ve noted how much the ontology of that context strikes me as largely contrived — and thereby leads to a fairly contrived debate.

Take for example the screaming dissidents of the proposed Obamacare reforms. [Read more →]

John Whittet offers up some good advice for debating online.  The post is specific to Newsvine, but has universal appeal…. [Read more →]

Patrick Appel responds to John Schwenkler: [Read more →]

Unfortunately, the scheduled discussion between Conor Friedersdorf and Dan Riehl has had to be rescheduled due to irreconcilable technical difficulties. Every time we started to get into the thick of it, one of us would get booted off the conference call. That’ll learn me to ditch a new plan for the tried, tested, and true method to which I’ve become accustomed. [Read more →]

So next week we are going to have a skypecast up of Conor Friedersdorf and Dan Riehl discussing/debating their different ideas about the necessary tonic for the future of American conservatism. I’m exploring the possibility of being able to broadcast the discussion live, though I’ve never done such a thing, so if anyone has any experience with broadcasting live on the Internets please drop a comment to this post or fire me an email via the League’s contact page.

The purpose of this post; however, is to solicit questions from you that can be put to Conor and Dan while we have them on the line. So fire away because both Dan and Conor, as well as everyone here at the League, are curious to see what you come up with. As always, keep it clean, civil, on topic, but still interesting and challenging.

Thanks much.

by kyle cupp

I picked a fight with a book the other day. It was a work on ethics. I’ve occasionally taken it off the shelf and scanned a little here and there, but I’ve never devoted much time to actually reading it. I can’t say that engaging the text was my motivation in this instance. Despite my better judgment, I continue to feel a lingering temptation to approach works expressing views different than mine out of a desire to feel good about my own philosophy. And sometimes I succumb. I knew – okay, suspected – that this particular book on ethics presented arguments that I would find laughably poor. I had no intention of being challenged by the authors or even learning something from them. I wanted to revel in my own superiority.

You’d think I’d have learned my lesson. Back in my university days, I started reading the postmodernists and deconstructionists because I knew they were the latest and greatest bad guys, and I wanted to get to know their particular intellectual villainy so that I could heroically refute them. I had the truth. They were relativists who denied the truth. Or so I thought. Reading them turned out to be very unsettling, but this feeling was not due solely to what they said or even how they said it. I felt unsettled because I had heard from trusted lovers of truth that that these writers were enemies hell-bent on destroying the truth, and what I read of them didn’t seem to support this characterization. Suddenly I found myself asking, like Pontius Pilate, “What is the truth?” Hey, a lot can happen when you learn that Jacques Derrida, the dark lord of deconstruction himself, actually affirms justice, forgiveness, and hospitality. A lot can happen when you actually engage a text. [Read more →]

I’m increasingly coming to the conclusion that both sides of the “Did We Torture?” debate are doing themselves a big disservice in how they approach their arguments.  This perhaps isn’t surprising since I tend to think this is the case on most controversial hot-button topics.

The pro-waterboarding side’s real argument isn’t that waterboarding, etc., aren’t torture, which I think is a clearly losing argument that frankly disturbs the hell out of me.  By making that argument, they implicitly concede that whether it is “effective” is meaningless.

Similarly, the focus of the anti-waterboarding, etc. arguments is also too much on the morality issue.  I say this not because the argument is wrong, but because it’s so clearly right.  By even arguing it, we give the belief that it may be something less than torture more credibility than it deserves, thereby marginally increasing the possibility that it will become acceptable in even situations where thousands of lives are not potentially at stake.

The trouble is that for the vast majority of people, the issue isn’t whether torture is moral or immoral, but whether the results it provides warrant the breach of morality.  For some of us (and I include myself in that group), the morality breach is never or almost never worth it.  But that’s just not going to be the case for the vast majority of people in just about any nation.   Similarly, for some small number of people, there just is no morality issue at all.

But most people in a free society are far more concerned about their personal morality and decisionmaking than they are about their government’s morality.  This is as it perhaps should be – what good is having a moral government if all of its citizens are robbing and looting, murdering and beating?  And of course, a huge part of being a moral person is taking care of one’s family.  This means that relatively few people have the time or the interest to concern themselves much with the morality of their government, at least as long as their government is dealing with them and the people they know in a relatively moral fashion. 

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To follow-up briefly on the recent discussion regarding intramural conservative debate, there’s an odd tendency among certain mainstream conservatives to unduly concern themselves with enforcing intellectual orthodoxy. Case in point is this hysterical blog post from National Review’s Cesar Conda, which implores the Hoover Institute to kick Professor Diane Ravitch off the payroll for suggesting a 90 percent income tax on people earning over 10 million dollars per year.

Now I think Ravitch’s idea is silly for many of the same reasons Conda provides, but is it really necessary to write someone out of the movement for throwing out a provocative idea in a forum designed for free-flowing debate? Ravitch’s academic credentials are impeccable. A brief survey of her work reveals a book decrying the rise of PC culture in schools, not to mention numerous articles criticizing No Child Left Behind, attacking Obama’s education policy, and defending requirements for presenting a photo ID before voting. These are not, as they say, the liberals you’re looking for. So why bother expending so much energy to kick them out of the movement?

Via the American Conservative, I see that Sean Scallon’s challenging article on Jimmy Carter is getting some well-deserved attention. And for that, I’m glad – it’s an interesting take on a fascinating historical figure.  But you know who I’d really like to see respond to Scallon’s piece? How about a National Review symposium, or perhaps a few reactions from Contentions and The Weekly Standard? I’d even take a good fisk from Hot Air or Powerline.

I’ve played around with this post for some time, and I never know quite how to phrase my central point. I can’t offer any empirical evidence, but after trolling the dank alleys of the blogosphere for a few years, I’m always surprised by the lack of interaction between dissident conservatives and their mainstream counterparts. Which is odd, because if anything, the last eight years have highlighted the importance of decidedly non-mainstream perspectives, from the libertarian critique of Bush’s excessive domestic ambitions to the traditionalist take on runaway consumer culture to the renewed relevance of conservative non-interventionism.

I admit I’m biased, having absorbed a lot of interesting, provocative stuff from all three intellectual traditions. But I don’t think you need to be particularly sympathetic to these arguments to grasp their significance. These are serious critiques aimed at a movement that is foundering, and deserve to at least be addressed in an equally serious manner. Agreement, of course, is not a precondition for dialogue, and I don’t expect mainstream conservatives to suddenly jettison their deeply-held convictions. But critically reexamining those beliefs in light of recent events is not the worst thing in the world, particularly for self-confessed magazines of ideas.

I’m also struck by how differently things are done on the Left, where The New Republic, The Washington Monthly and The American Prospect routinely exchange links, participate in symposiums, and generally interact with each other in a respectful, engaging manner. Some of this is undoubtedly the result of favorable circumstances – the trauma of the Bush years coupled with Obama’s ascendancy have done wonders for liberal cohesiveness – but I’m always left wondering why a similar atmosphere of respectful engagement can’t take root on the Right. If not now, when?

N.B. – I hope I don’t come off as a presumptuous scold, so to preempt the inevitable, let me acknowledge that as a young, marginally-employed 20-something, I know nothing about running a major magazine (or even a mid-sized blog – E.D. does all the legwork around here). So perhaps I’m just ignorant.