Damon Linker on appeals to common sense in American politics is worth reading, even if he overlooks the fact that like all rhetorical tropes, celebrating the intuition of the American people is a thoroughly bipartisan tendency (FDR: “The country needs and, unless I mistake its temper, the country demands bold, persistent experimentation. It is common sense to take a method and try it: If it fails: admit it frankly and try another. But above all, try something.”) But I wonder if something has changed since William Jennings Bryan or Roosevelt or even Reagan asked the electorate to ignore the received wisdom of eggheads in favor of their own instincts.

We live in an increasingly complex age. Instead of enhancing public discourse, the spread of information often overwhelms our ability to process new ideas. A few weeks ago, Freddie argued that the inherent complexity of the Afghanistan debate demonstrates the fallacy of empire-building in an egalitarian, democratic society, as the electorate simply isn’t equipped to parse the merits of occupation vs. withdrawal or counter-insurgency vs. counter-terrorism. His criticism is telling, but isn’t it equally true of just about every domestic policy dispute out there? If the electorate can’t handle the debate over Afghanistan, are voters really prepared to assess the likelihood of catastrophic global warming or the desirability of the health care public option?

I cringe whenever Mark Steyn or some other conservative bomb thrower takes the “Climategate” scandal as evidence of a world government conspiracy aimed at eradicating freedom. But I’m almost sympathetic to their credulous fans, who haven’t mastered the intricacies of climatology but do know there’s something awfully fishy about those leaked emails. The enduring popularity of the “death panels” myth is also symptomatic of reasonably informed voters who haven’t the time or inclination to read the latest think tank study grappling with an incredibly complex health care debate.

The divide between voters and policy-makers has been explored elsewhere and is probably an inevitable consequence of politics in any egalitarian democracy. But as society becomes more complex, so does policy-making, and the gulf between the electorate’s intuition and sophisticated expert analysis continues to grow. Perhaps the most significant example of this divide is the now-infamous bank bailout, which remains incredibly unpopular despite its near-unanimous support among political and financial elites.

Linker seems largely unconcerned by all this, and indeed is more worried by the prospect of “common sense” infecting a political platform than any disconnect between appeals to populism and actual policy. That voters should be reasonably well-equipped to make informed judgments, however, strikes me as pretty integral to the health of our democracy. In some cases, we may be able to avoid the problem of deliberation altogether (we could withdraw from Afghanistan, for example). Other circumstances make a clash between common sense and expert opinion almost inevitable. In the midst of a systemic economic crisis, we didn’t have the luxury of plugging our ears and ignoring the debate over the bank bailout. And with other, equally complex challenges looming on the horizon (health care, entitlement reform, climate change), the problem of democratic deliberation seems more pressing, not less.

If I had a solution to this dilemma, I probably wouldn’t be writing overlong blog posts. But I will offer one modest suggestion: In the wake of “Climategate” and a bank bailout dominated by financial insiders, the integrity and transparency of expert deliberation is more important than ever. On many issues, I am more than willing to defer to informed opinion. The pettiness revealed in the leaked climate emails and the borderline dishonesty of Bernanke and Paulsen in the midst of the economic crisis, however, makes it more difficult than ever to trust our governing institutions. I don’t want to rely solely on “common sense,” but given the choice, I’ll take my own intuitions over self-interested insiderism any day.

When the House recently passed a healthcare bill which included restrictions on the use of federal money to subsidize abortion, liberals were up in arms.  ”It restricts choice!” they cried.  Let’s oppose it!  Let’s vote down the entire bill even if that means more people in the country will remain uninsured.

Now the Catholic Church in Washington D.C. is being told that in order to receive government funds, they must abide by a new D.C. anti-discrimination law in all their charities and employment practices in those charities.  The Church in Washington – part of a much larger, global organization – feels that it cannot submit to those rules and therefore will be forced to refuse said funds and close the doors on a number of the charities they currently run.

Liberals are once again up in arms.  ”What about the homeless?” they cry.   “How dare they not change their fundamental religious beliefs when that means leaving more homeless and poor without charitable services!”

Something about this smacks of double standards.

And thus we come to a very fundamental aspect of government involvement in just about everything.  The government limits choice.  The trade-off can be worth it.  It may mean less affordable abortions but more people covered.  It may mean gay people are given the right to wed, but religious charities have fewer dollars to provide for the poor.

The point I’m making is that there is such thing as consensus, but it usually comes at a cost.  It can’t simply be that everyone gets what they want, nor is it merely a question of ethics.  Reasonable people disagree on issues like abortion.  And we have a system of government that separates church and state, for better or worse.  This leads to concessions and compromises and trade-offs and people are always unhappy at the end of the day.

If we want government health care, maybe we have to give up federally subsidized insurance plans that cover abortion.  If we want gay marriage in D.C. and we also want religious charities to keep doing their good work, maybe we have to make exceptions for those institutions on religious grounds.  Or we can refuse them funding and find ways to implement those charities via the state or some other private charity.

Either way, I see pro-choice advocates and the Catholic Church doing very similar things here.  They’re both up in arms about the government making rules about how they spend the government’s money.  But it’s the government’s money, or rather it’s our money.  And that’s the way it rolls in a representative democracy.  Deal with it.

Update: it is worthwhile context to note that I’m doing some thinking-out-loud questioning about the direction of this post if you follow the comments thread here.

Andrew posted what I consider to be an uncharacteristically stark comment yesterday about Obama’s intention to go to a Human Rights Campaign fundraiser and his corresponding support for gay equality,

If Obama wants to support gay equality, he knows what to do. If Pelosi and Reid want to support gay equality, they know what to do. If HRC believes in gay equality, they also know what to do.

So spare us the schmoozing and the sweet-talking and do it. Until then, Mr president, why don’t you have a nice steaming cup of shut-the-fuck-up?

Whether you agree with Andrew or not, I think it is fairly evident that the above comment is “uncharacteristically stark” when compared to Andrew’s previous sanguine approach to Obama’s tactics,

In an ideal world, I’d favor a Sarkozy style carbon tax, an end to employer subsidies for health insurance, a swift departure from Afghanistan. I’d also like marriage equality in Alabama, an end to agricultural subsidies and a flat tax.

…

In this, the tone of his discourse is critical. He would lose it all if he followed MoDo’s advice. He needs to stay bipartisan, reasoned, and centrist to succeed. Despite the fulminations of an unhinged GOP, he is doing all of that.

Many of us supported him not to revive a right-left war, but to try to move past that divide. He has kept that promise. We need to reward him with our support.

No doubt, Andrew’s vehemence is  born out of a combination of his well-documented disdain for HRC and the personal fashion in which this particular issue affects Andrew’s life. And, you know, I get Andrew’s frustration. From my own perspective, I continue to find the kind of discrimination that gay men and women experience in a variety of of foray as fundamentally mind boggling and incomprehensible.

But in this particular instance, I’m inclined to avoid frothing at the mouth and see this move by Obama for what it is: prioritizing. [Read more →]

Now, I know that there are going to be about a bazillion principled responses to this suggestion, so one should understand that I post at least half to three-quarters in jest. But I couldn’t help wondering this morning on my way into work as I listened to yet another healthcare debate via podcast why one doesn’t hear any Democrats throwing this line out, [Read more →]

Here it is. There’s a lot to digest – some good, some less so – but my first impression is that criticizing Obama for installing unelected, unaccountable and (at least according to her) unpopular bureaucrats for the purpose  of controlling medical costs one moment and attacking the Democrats’ “poll-driven” strategy the next is kind of silly.

I think I’d be downright enthusiastic about Bill Bradley’s plan to marry health care reform with tort reform. It seems to me that legal damages are basically an ad hoc way of compensating for a lack of regulatory oversight, and that government-subsidized coverage for things like preexisting conditions and expensive medical procedures would obviate the need for costly judicial remedies. Assuming we guarantee universal coverage through some mechanism or another, is there any reason to maintain the current legal regime with respect to medical damages?

Putting  my conservative hat back on, I think I’d also be in favor of tort reform in a vacuum or, per Bradley, as part of some grand bipartisan bargain. I don’t really find the standard industry lines about excessive medical damages persuasive – as far as I’m concerned, an injured party’s right to a day in court ought to take precedence over companies’ need to limit financial liability. That said, I’m not sure if the justice system is equipped to determine equitable compensation for medical malpractice. One reason courts generally defer to the legislature is their limited ability for fact-finding; at least in theory, legislators are supposed to be better prepared to dig deep into a particular policy question. If Congress adopted certain guidelines for compensation and left the rest to specialized medical courts, I think that would be fairer than having the fate of aggrieved parties hinge on the competence of their attorney (not everyone can hire John Edwards) or the generosity of a particular judge or jury.

Howard Dean may be right to argue that adding trial lawyers to a long and growing list of health care opponents is not a politically savvy move. But it occurs to me that this Administration has expended precious little political capital taking on any industry groups, so perhaps it’s time to for a real special interests fight.

N.B. – Unlike my esteemed co-bloggers, I have not been following the health care debate very closely, so it’s quite possible I’ve misread this issue entirely. Any thoughts from our commenters? Our resident healthcare wonk? Our resident progressives? What about our resident (*gasp*) trial lawyer?

Ezra Klein writes:

What’s been striking, however, is the implicit argument that this is somehow a simple failure of liberal will. Rachel Maddow called it “a collapse of political ambition.”…The unifying idea here is that someone can just go into a back room and torture Max Baucus and Kent Conrad. But how? Rahm Emanuel isn’t a shrinking violet. Neither was Clinton or Carter or Nixon or Truman or FDR. But none of them managed to get health-care reform past the Congress. There’s not really a record of presidents being able to bend committee chairmen and wavering centrists to their will. Even LBJ, the master of this stuff, decided to go for Medicare rather than full reform. He thought the latter too ambitious. The history of health-care reform is the history of health-care reform failing. If there was some workable presidential strategy, or foolproof negotiating lever, presumably someone would have used it by now, or at least mentioned it in public.

This is exactly right.

I think there’s at least three major mistakes being made relative to Obama and the push for healthcare.

1. There’s this little thing called the constitution.  Since we live in the postWWII era where the Executive, under both Republican and Democratic administrations, has massively increased its power through extra (or un depending on pov) constitutional means, mostly through the creation of agencies (e.g. EPA, NSA, etc.) people think the President is basically all-powerful.  In foreign affairs this has indeed become the case with repeated flagrant violations (again both parties) of the War Powers Act as well as the Congressional mandate to declare war.

In domestic affairs however this is not the case.  And since Congress has been on holiday for at least a decade and half, major domestic reform rarely comes up.  When it does it generally fails:  Bill Clinton with his healthcare initiative, George W. Bush with aborted immigration and Social Security Reform. The Constitution was written for the Legislative branch to be the dominant branch.  You may think that a design flaw, but that’s how it is.  A strong executive the US Constitution does not (on paper anyway) make.

[Sidenote: I think the primary way to fix this is not to give domestic power over to the Executive but to massively expand the membership of The US Congress.  But that's another day and another fight.]

For our purposes here all that matters is that the President doesn’t really do all that much until there is legislation on his desk that he either signs into law or vetoes.  Other than that he can do some backroom wheeling and dealing, go on TV and try to get people behind him.  But at the end of the day he is not constitutionally mandated nor democratically elected to be handling this thing.  That’s why we have Senators and Representatives.  If you’re someone whose pissed about how this is going call and yell at them.

2. People are also forgetting (or don’t know I guess) what they should remember which is that Obama has clearly laid out what his plan is.  Again, given what small role he does have, he has a plan for how to maximize it.  Another excellent Ezra post on the subject.  The Team Obama plan is to push hard in conference committee for the kind of plan it wants.  It said so specifically:

Conference is where these differences will get ironed out. And that’s where my bottom lines will remain: Does this bill cover all Americans? Does it drive down costs both in the public sector and the private sector over the long term? Does it improve quality? Does it emphasize prevention and wellness? Does it have a serious package of insurance reforms so people aren’t losing health care over a preexisting condition? Does it have a serious public option in place? Those are the kind of benchmarks I’ll be using. But I’m not assuming either the House and Senate bills will match up perfectly with where I want to end up.

So while I agree with Br. Jamelle that attempting to do this through reconciliation would be perilous indeed, I don’t think it will come to that measure.  Or at least that is not the plan from the administration.  But even there, as Ezra’s post helpfully points out, if the Senate passes a bill without a public option (while the House has), the only way for it to get back in via conference would be if Harry Reid stacked the conference committee membership with more liberal (pro-public option) members.  The Republicans would whine and cry foul and play the victim card all over TV and Harry will probably fold for all I know.

But stranger things have happened.  [Read more →]

I just stumbled across this old post from Reihan Salam’s new policy blog, wherein he offers a very Foucauldian take on whether we have a right to healthcare. Definitely worth a read.