Howard Dean

I don’t want to delve too far into health care reform at the moment. Frankly nothing is more distasteful to me than the current tangled and smoke filled room mess in the Senate. Apparently any single senator can derail anything, which merely highlights how undemocratic American politics can be at times. The Senate is an institution that acts as an anti-democratic impediment to change. This was rightly predicted by Thomas Jefferson who objected to its establishment for exactly that reason. He realized that the Senate, as it is constituted, is a bastion of vested and establishment interests. It is a bulwark against reform. Deliberately so. This role was created as a mitigant against the democratic zeal that the founders of American politics foresaw and feared might erupt in the House of Representatives – which remains to this day the only truly democratic institution in the Federal Governmental set up.

None of this matters too much. Nor does it concern the average citizen brought up as they are to believe in the mythology of America as the ‘great democracy’. Along the sliding scale of total democracy to total authoritarianism America obviously sits firmly on the democratic side, but its system is no paragon of democratic government. Instead it is stuck in a two centuries old republicanism that is no longer modern or even accepted anywhere else. The acid test is this: in the years since the establishment of America there have been hundreds of governments set up. Countries all over the world have had the opportunity to choose a governmental style. Newly freed nations have been able to copy the American system. Not one has. Not one.

That early mistrust of the people – the mob so feared by the gentlemen farmers who wrote the rules – resonates today in things like the bias within the Senate against the large states, and in the Electoral College for presidential elections. There is no tyranny of the masses here because the masses are deliberately under represented.

Which is why people like Joe Lieberman belong more in a Roman than a modern setting. The romanticized image of an orator holding back the tide of change on a senate floor by defying base populism, belongs in Seneca not in the 21st century. And certainly not when it is the masses that would benefit from the change.

It is all too apparent that the opposition within the Senate to health care reform is based upon upholding the status quo and the protection of existing vested interests. This has led to a debased proposal that accomplishes few if any of the original intended changes.

That America, of all the world’s nations the most capable of extending health care to all its citizenry, refuses actually to do so, is testimony to its legislative commitment to the past and to the defense of vested interests. Here’s one in the eye for the notion that America is a dynamic place!

I take little comfort that the Senate has been so wrong in the past so frequently on such vital and tumultuous topics: it has a long record of denying the march of history. We should expect very little from it now.

I leave it to Howard Dean to articulate the progressive view on the state of play. He says kill the bill. It’s not worth the effort. It could easily have been written – and probably was – by the insurance companies.

And for the contra view I give you a much disgusted Paul Krugman. He says hold your nose and try not to punch Lieberman on your way out.

I agree with Krugman, but my heart is with Dean. Pragmatism tells me to support the watered down and ineffective pablum that now masquerades as reform. Perhaps we can modify and improve it with time. I just hate the supercilious and triumphant look that Lieberman has as he single handedly hands billions over to his precious insurance lobby sponsors. If he keeps it up I will have to agree with Dean after all.

What a mess.