This incident may not exhibit the level of bloodlust that could be heard in the full-throated Republican roar that erupted when, in an earlier debate, Brian Williams pointed out that Governor Rick Perry had overseen 234 executions in Texas, a number that makes the governor an all-time death sentence champion.
Why are Republicans so enthusiastic about death? I’m pretty sure that part of the answer is that the people cheering and shouting over someone dying are not imagining the dying to be in their circle of family and friends.
Let me bolster this point with a thought experiment: Imagine that Wolf Blitzer had addressed one of those cheering Tea Party individuals with this question: “Suppose you and your spouse lost your jobs, found yourselves too poor to buy insurance, and then suddenly discovered that your daughter had an illness that would require hundreds of thousands of dollars in medical attention to save her. Should she be allowed to die?”
Faced with a question like this, I don’t believe even a hard core Tea Partier would blurt out an enthusiastic “Yeah!”
But perhaps I’m naïve.
The fundamental sin of these conservatives, in my opinion, is not just their tendency to imagine that “other people” will be the ones who suffer under the policies they favor, but their outright abandonment of reason. They seem to have given up on rational thought to the point where they are starting to look like a cult.
I think of a cult as a social group with a set of beliefs that are designed to coerce allegiance from group members and to do so by promoting ideas that are irrational but that are made to seem reasonable through being constantly repeated by influential figures – the cult leaders.
One of these irrational beliefs is those executed by the government (the government!) are almost always guilty of the crimes for which they are convicted. This has been proven false by any number of scientific studies. For an interesting and disturbing example of Texas’s death penalty in action, see Errol Morris’s classic documentary The Thin Blue Line. But from the GOP right we get, “Damn the facts and keep the lethal injections coming!”
The Thin Blue Line by the Great Errol Morris
Another irrational belief is that taxes are bad because government is bad (except, I guess, when it is killing people), and that Congress should never, never, never raise taxes, period. This, of course, is the brilliant notion that pushed the government to the brink of default last month, and that threatens to strangle any possibility of an economic recovery in the near future.
One way to put a spike in the heart of this anti-tax fanaticism would be to survey a dozen economists, asking them whether or not they thought it made sense. From my own informal survey of my colleagues in economics, I’d guess that somewhere between 95 and 100% of economists would reject this belief as ridiculous.
But then, why listen to economists? What do they know about economics? Or so a cult believer is likely to say. If a claim is made by someone who is not in the cult, it can be dismissed as propaganda, and not part of the true believer’s belief system.
The Tea Partiers apparently only believe those who don’t criticize or otherwise threaten the true belief system - the system that says, for example, the death penalty only condemns the guilty, taxes should never be raised, undocumented aliens should be treated with contempt and government should never involve itself in the economy.
Let’s stop for a moment to consider that last point – government involvement in the economy is always bad.
China offers an interesting test case. In China, where the economy has been growing at close to 10% per year for decades now, the government has recently been orchestrating the development of green technologies that will dominate the 21st century and by doing so has gained significant advantages over American industries. Of course, China is a country whose government is entirely too intrusive in the lives of ordinary citizens. But it is also a country whose economic growth proves (as though this were necessary) that carefully planned government action can be very good for the economy and for the long-term economic well-being of its citizens. What is keeping the Tea Partiers from seeing that?
Bob I think you missed a "not" in this this paragraph.
ReplyDelete"Why are Republicans so enthusiastic about death? I’m pretty sure that part of the answer is that the people cheering and shouting over someone dying are imagining the dying to be in their circle of family and friends."
OK, onto your bigger question, What is keeping the Tea Partiers from seeing that [carefully planned government action can be very good for the economy?]
First I think you unfairly equate an inchoate audience response at a highly partisan event (shouts of "yeah" at the latest republican primary debate) with thoughtful libertarian or conservative ideas about the appropriate role for government in a free society.
While I agree with you that carefully planned government action can be very good for the economy. You don't need to go to China to find examples of this. The history of the development of the US economy is largely composed of such government action; from national roads, to land distribution as the US moved west, to the railroads, universal education, land grant universities, the interstate highway program, and the National Information Infrastructure of the 1990's.
However, that does not mean that there are not quite reasonable, certainly thoughtful, political philosophers, economists, public policy thinkers, and politicians who think that a much more limited role for government (including a criminal justice system that may, or may not, include the death penalty) and a greater expectation of individual responsibility (for things like personal health care costs) is the appropriate way forward for American society.
This is not cult like.
Mr. Miller: The following sentence fragment is included in your short biography on your eblog home page: "Where I earned my Ph.D. in 2009."
ReplyDeleteI would say that any political philosopher, public policy thinker, economist or politician who thinks that working Americans should assume"individual responsibility for personal health care costs" is doing nothing more than advocating for people to go without healthcare. You, sir, as an employee of institutions that tend to provide decent benefits, seem not to have been afflicted by the double digit rises in health care costs that have taken place every year for the last 10 years. People who do not work in the public sector or for a large private institution are going without adequate health care in record numbers. The number one cause of personal bankruptcies is an inability to pay debt occurred as a result of medical costs. Anyone who does not understand the burden of health care costs for working Americans and how they restrain economic growth may not necessarily be a cult member, but they are thinking like one.
Deborah,
ReplyDeleteNot sure what my PhD has to do with anything. It was awarded by the School of Information Sciences at Pitt. Also I can assure you that my current employer, a small private college, has been deeply affected by rising healthcare costs. Our benefit costs have risen so quickly that this impacts both student tuition and employee salaries.
Bob's use of the word cult, and your repetition of it here, are examples of a worrying trend in American political rhetoric. Instead of trying to address the policy positions of our political opponents, we simply try and marginalize them with simplistic labels. The result is that we end up talking past, and not to, each other.
I was simply trying to make the point that instead of calling each other names we should try and address our legitimate policy differences.
Personally, I was born and raised in the British National Health Services and am a fervent advocate of a single payer healthcare system, but that does not mean I cannot listen and try to understand people with a different point of view.
I'm not going to back away from my "cult" or at least "cult-like" characterization. I agree that in general it is better to engage issues directly. But I also think that there are ways of approaching issues that amount to accepting some positions as though they were rooted in unchallengeable religious-like dogma and simply disregarding any arguments to the contrary. This way of "thinking" is ripe for criticism. Anyone can do this, left middle or right on the political spectrum, but what I've been seeing of the political right lately gives me the definite impression that this malady is much more serious there than elsewhere on the spectrum. If a Tea Partier or other right-winger says things like "The government is the enemy of our freedom" or "In all cases, and without question, government's functions need to be reduced to nothing or near nothing," or "Muslims are terrorists and their mosques shouldn't be allowed in X place," or "We should never, never, never raise taxes," or "Gun ownership is the key to freedom," etc., I feel like I'm hearing from a religious cult member. Yes, there are political-economic theorists who have built models indicating, they believe, that government influence on the economy should be minimized. My take on Milton Friedman and his allies convinces me that he is wrong, but I do not therefore go about spouting sound bites like "Government is always good," "The bigger the government, the better," "The higher the taxes, the better," and so on. But this kind of repetitious and simple-minded noise is what I all too often hear from the right, even, sometimes, the candidates and other leaders on the right. It reminds me of the kinds of mindless devotion to sound bites that flourished among Maoist youth in the 1960s, and that, in my opinion, characterizes cults.
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