A Very Sick Country 

by David Michael Green

Published on Monday, April 2, 2012 by Common Dreams

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2012/04/02-5

So.

It looks now like the regressive majority on the
Supreme Court is poised to overturn Barack Obama's
signature legislative achievement, his health care
bill. [(Getty image)

That is so fitting.

More than that, it is also a reminder of just how sick
this country truly is. Imagine that the lab returned
the results from your battery of blood work tests, and
all the indicators were screaming out "Danger!" and
"Broken!". That's us, baby. Get this patient to the ER!

What a total disaster.

The first indicator of how unhealthy we are as a
country - literally and figuratively - is the fact that
we still don't have universal health care here in the
wealthiest place on Earth. It's been more than century
since the welfare state - a system in which the
national government assumes responsibility, as an agent
of the national will, for guaranteeing certain benefits
and protections to its citizenry - was invented, and,
unlike every other developed country in the world, the
richest one still doesn't come close to having
universal care for our public, including millions of
children. It's a crime - there's no other word for it -
of astonishing proportions . But it gets worse. We pay
more than half-again per capita above the cost of the
next most expensive system in the world, and still
one-sixth of our population remains completely
uninsured, with many more poorly insured. Nice.

By the way, it's worth noting that the guy who
originally launched the welfare state was none other
than the regressive and aggressive old Prussian
chancellor himself, Otto von Bismarck. Golly, I don't
mean to be critical or anything, but you know you're
hurting when your country's politics are to the right
of the "blood and iron" father of the German Empire.
Just saying...

I'll hold my gauze-packed nose in a vise-grip and give
Obama a little bit of credit for addressing the issue.
But the way he went about it constitutes the original
sin that will have brought us to the place of almost
complete disaster after the rump Court finishes its
ideological hijack. To begin with, Obama looked at the
existing disaster of regressive health care policy -
the joys of commercializing and profitizing the
public's need for medicine - and then decided to
promulgate the next most conservative option he could
come up with, one which commercializes and profitizes
medicine even more. He could have gone for single payer
- that is, Medicare for all - which is only the system
employed by just about every other developed country in
the world, all of whom, naturally, are more highly
ranked by the World Health Organization on delivery of
health care. Yes, yes, I know. All the Obama apologists
out there say this was politically impossible. Maybe
that's true. But maybe it's not. The presidency is all
about persuasion. If the punk Bush could sell the
insane Iraq war, which in fact he did to an originally
skeptical public, perhaps Obama could have talked sense
to America about health care, and moved people enough
to force action out of Congress. Or, short of that, he
might at least have demanded that the public option be
part of the legislation, the next best choice.

What he did instead was to pretend to care about a
public option, in order to keep stupid liberals on
board, while he cut a secret deal with the parasitic
insurance industry guaranteeing their profits and
promising there would be no public option in the bill.
That isn't reckless surmise. Tom Daschle, Obama's
political mentor and health care point man, wrote that
the president did just that. Then he adopted a model
for his plan that was so conservative it had originally
been put forth by the Heritage Foundation, was a plank
in Bob Dole's 1996 presidential campaign, and had
already been implemented by Mitt Romney (who, in case
you hadn't heard, is a Republican - though he can be
whatever you need him to be, as long as you make him
president) in Massachusetts, in addition to being
blessed by that bastion of progressivism, the insurance
industry. Hey, what's that old line about reposing with
canines...?

Obama compounded his sell-out to the one percent by not
selling his legislation to the ninety-nine percent.
Polls show that most Americans don't understand the
legislation - today, three years after the extended
sausage-making process that produced it - and most
favor repeal. What's astonishing about that latter fact
is that, even though the bill is deeply flawed, it
provides pretty much nothing but good news for American
citizens. Opposing it - unless you're opposed to the 99
percent getting a fair shake (hmmm?, who could those
opponents be?) or you're just dead-set on seeing this
president fail (hmmm? again) - is like opposing free
chocolate sundaes or bonus checks from your employer.
When you can't sell Christmas to a six year-old, maybe
you should get out of the Santa business, eh?

Obama appears to have also been the last person in
America to understand the vicious nature of today's
so-called conservatives. Generally, I think his
incompetence as president is overstated. Too often,
it's the excuse suckered liberals give themselves for
the cognitive dissonance they experience when they look
at how corporate and conservative and militant and
statist their hero's actual policies are. But health
care may be a case where this is an accurate portrait.
I suspect he was actually dumb enough - as if he, like
Sarah Palin, had simply not been paying the remotest
attention to the government shutdowns, the impeachment
of Clinton, the 2000 election, the Swiftboating of John
Kerry and Max Cleland, and the rest of American history
these last thirty years - to believe that he could find
some moderate Republicans, compromise with them and get
their vote. And I also think he is the most inept owner
of the bully pulpit since George III. All during the
year (year!) of legislating health care, this
administration completely ceded the high ground, low
ground, and everything in-between ground to the
bellowing, foaming-at-the-mouth, blatantly lying
(remember death panels?), corporate-sponsored, Koch
Brothers-funded, Tea Party idiot right. And all during
this last year they've done exactly the same thing
while the four or six or ten Republican presidential
candidates running at any given time have trashed the
bill relentlessly, with nary a counter peep from Barack
and his communications wizards. Gee, is it shocking
under those conditions that the American public doesn't
understand the bill, or that they oppose it? Is it such
a leap to imagine that such public sentiments have
given license (as if they needed it) to the same five
hacks-in-black-robes who gave us Bush v. Gore and
Citizens United to legislate from the bench as the most
activist court in perhaps all of American history and
strike down the legislation wholesale?

Which brings us to even deeper maladies being suffered
by the body politic. This debacle demonstrates in full
the degree to which the American political system is
completely broken. But, alas, not in the way people
think, which leads to the possibility (and, given the
events of the last thirty years, the likelihood) that
in the coming years we will simply compound our
problems in response to these indicators, by simply
going further in the direction of our systemic carnage,
rather than running as fast as we can the other way.
There are four main issues here, and none of them are
peripheral or symptomatic - each of these go to the
core dysfunctionality of the American political system.
They are: the American presidential system, its
electoral system, the extensive use of judicial review,
and the kleptocratic ownership of the state.

Americans revere their Constitution, but they mostly
don't know why. Just like we grow up Catholics or Mets
fans or anti-communists, we just by-and-large think
what we're told to think and do what we're told to do,
never stopping to ask the big Why? questions. As a
political scientist, I do admire certain feats of
engineering embodied in the Constitution, and the
clever solutions these provided to otherwise
intractable problems at the time of the Founders. And
as a citizen, I admire parts of the document - such as
the Bill of Rights - very much, especially given the
era from which they emerged.

However, one of the handful of most salient ideas of
the Constitution is a bad one, as has becomes
increasingly evident in our time for anyone who cares
to look. This is the notion of separation of powers,
along with the twin concept of checks and balances. I
suspect most Americans don't even realize that you
don't have to structure your political regime this way
in order to have a democracy, and in fact, most
democracies don't. They use a parliamentary system
instead, rather than our model, which is referred to as
a presidential system. What's the difference? Well, in
a parliamentary system, you have one singular
government responsible for governing. The executive
function (prime minister and cabinet) emerges directly
out of the legislative function (parliament) to which
it is permanently fused, and, meanwhile, there
typically is no judiciary with the power to speak to
legislative matters. That means, quite simply, that the
undivided government governs, unimpeded by anything
other than the criticisms of the media and the
opposition, and how its work plays with public opinion.
It gets things done - none of the divided government
plaguing the American system so badly today - and if
the public approves, it gets another term. If not, it
doesn't.

It's a simple straightforward concept that fully
embodies the notion of responsible government, thus
permitting accountability and, ultimately, real
functioning democracy. Contrast that with the American
system. Is there anybody in the US who isn't unhappy
with the current government? Maybe that one guy in
Nebraska, but he's been off his meds for years now. Or
the woman in Florida with the sixty-seven cats.
Otherwise, though, the remaining three hundred million
of us are pretty much sickened by Washington. So what
do we do? Well, throw the bums out, of course, and
replace them with some new bums. But think about what
that would mean today. We would be replacing a
Republican House with a Democratic one, a Democratic
Senate (with an insufficiently large enough majority to
do anything) with a Republican Senate of the same
gridlocked structure, and a right-wing Democratic
president with a Republican president. Wow! That'd be a
relief, eh?! What a difference that would make! What a
prescription for boldly launching the future!

We are, of course, a million miles away from shredding
the worshiped Constitution (and a change of this
magnitude to such a core item would indeed represent
something of a shred, starting with Articles One, Two
and Three), and even further from possibly imagining
that foreign people - let alone those squishy European
bastards who inconveniently live healthier, happier and
longer lives - could teach us anything about anything.
But, that said - since we're just talking among friends
here - one of the greatest gifts we could give
ourselves at this point would be a parliamentary system
and the gift of responsible government. Then, when
we're not happy with any particular government we've
got, we can make a change at the ballot box which might
actually result in a genuine change of direction.

Assuming, that is, that there is an alternative to be
chosen. If, on the other hand, you have an electoral
system like ours, you can have parliamentary government
and yet may still be left with only two parties to pick
from. Worse still, on fundamental issues like foreign
policy and the distribution of wealth in the society,
the parties may be identical enough (or just owned
enough) so as to offer no real choice at all. Hello!
Can you say "America 2012"? There are a lot of systemic
reasons for this duopoly we've produced in American
politics, but the chief one is our use of the
winner-take-all district model electoral system - which
will tend to produce two dominant parties over the
long-haul wherever it is employed - instead of a
proportional representation system, which does not.
Again, god forbid Americans should learn anything from
anyone else, but if we did stoop that low, we might
want to think about revising our electoral system
(which would not require Constitutional amendment). It
would do us a world of good, not only by giving us
multiple and genuine choices at the ballot box, but
also by injecting alternative ideas into our
poverty-stricken political discourse.

Meanwhile, if we return to the separation of powers
problem again for a moment, we encounter another severe
problem which is a natural artifact of that system. If
you're going to have separate branches of government,
each with the capacity to check and balance against
each other, that means your judiciary pretty much needs
to have the power known as judicial review in order to
be a meaningful player in that contest. This term
refers to the capacity to strike down legislation
produced by the other two branches. Again, this is -
especially to the degree with which it is practiced
here - a fairly peculiarly American idea. In most other
democracies, parliament rules. Period, full stop. Not
here.

Does judicial review makes sense? I can see two domains
where it does, though often (like now) only in a
theoretical sense: civil rights and civil liberties.
Stupid and angry politicians, often reacting to the
stupid and angry sentiments of the public, almost never
fail to relieve minorities of their rights and deny
individuals the human rights (little things like due
process, and so on) they are otherwise entitled to
possess. All too often, in short, it's just plain
politically popular to be mean and bigoted and
'legally' violent, and democratically elected
governments will readily oblige a lathered up public
(when politicians aren't in fact whipping up voters
themselves - remember McCarthyism? the war on drugs?
gay marriage?). Who will stop them from doing this?
Theoretically (meaning, only if they happen to be so
disposed - just the opposite of our condition today
with the regressive majority on the Supreme Court),
courts populated by justice-seeking and
principle-protecting judges will do so, judges who also
happen to be insulated from the public wrath by
lifetime terms. They can afford to stand on lofty
principles when the political branches are assembled
into a lynch party. There is definite wisdom to this
concept, though no guarantees. Do you see Justice
Scalia, for example, slapping down Congress for
depriving African Americans or women of their
Constitutionally-guaranteed rights? I rest my case.

Apart from those two areas, however, I would argue that
the very notion of judicial review is a disaster,
because it is profoundly undemocratic. That was perhaps
never more evident than it is now, as the rump majority
of this extremely activist Court is preparing to fully
legislate from the bench - in full contradiction of
their own fervently argued 'principles' of federalism
and judicial restraint from previous cases no less - by
overturning not just the individual mandate part of
Obama's bill, but all of it. And apparently - judging
from Scalia's comments - they'll be doing so without
even reading the legislation, and certainly without
understanding it. I see little difference between such
a governing structure and the essence of monarchy. In
both cases you have political decision-makers who have
not been chosen by the public, serving life terms,
making legislative decisions in secret, unaccountable
and nonreplacable, making policy on high and dictating
it to the masses without fear of consequence. What
possible relationship does that bear to anything one
could plausibly label as democracy? The question
answers itself. It also therefore reminds us that the
third major political malady infecting our system is
the expanded and profoundly undemocratic notion of
judicial review.

Notwithstanding these structural handicaps, the
American political system has nevertheless been
moderately successful at negotiating the rocky shoals
of policy-making over the last two-plus centuries.
There have been, to be sure, some glaring inadequacies
and the occasional near-fatal meltdown. But people
ultimately vote with their feet, and something
chronically broken would ultimately be unlikely to have
seen that many candles on its birthday cake. In that
same two hundred year-plus time period, for example,
the French have had five republics (along with several
iterations of empires and monarchies). But after one
false start (the Articles of Confederation), the
American regime has remained more or less intact for
more than twenty decades, though it is manifestly
broken today. Calling the federal government
dysfunctional would be an act of charity.

But there is one last peril that threatens American
democracy today, to a degree not seen for at least a
century, and to the extent that the term democracy
itself becomes a rather dubious appellation for the
system we live under. Let's just be honest, shall we? -
if for no other reason than the refreshing novelty of
doing so: Fundamentally, the representatives in our
'representative government' don't represent you and me.
They represent the one percent. You can play all the
games you want about how campaigns are funded, and spin
all the tall tales you need to about how money 'only'
buys access, not Congressional votes, but the real
system of pay-to-play is transparently obvious to
anyone willing to risk even a sidelong glance at the
emperor's new clothes. It's just that simple and just
that broken. The only place American representative
democracy exists anymore today is in eighth-grade
civics textbooks.

General governance mechanics are important, as I've
noted at some length above, and there are campaign
finance systems that are way better than others at
promoting true democratic representation, to be sure.
But at the bottom of the pile of political engineering
problems lies human nature. If we allow greed to
control our public sphere, we will wind up with a
government representing the one percent and not the
ninety-nine percent. Indeed, it will be a government
very much intentionally governing at the expense of the
ninety-nine percent. We will wind up with a political
system that is completely dysfunctional, except for
purposes of the wholesale transfer of wealth upwards.
We will wind up with policies in every domain - from
national security to tobacco policy to guns, prisons
and taxes and far beyond - that reflects the needs of
the special monied interests over the public interest.
And we will end up with a health care system whose
purpose is not to provide health, but rather to enrich
insurance and pharmaceutical corporations.

Hey, what the hell am I doing, saying "We will..."?
Strike that.

We have.

Welcome to America, 2012.

Here's to your good health. David Michael Green

David Michael Green is a professor of political science
at Hofstra University in New York. He is delighted to
receive readers' reactions to his articles
(mailto:[log in to unmask]), but regrets that
time constraints do not always allow him to respond.
More of his work can be found at his website,
www.regressiveantidote.net.

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