gracchusdixit

Just weeks after Republicans humiliated themselves by failing to “repeal and replace” the Affordable Care Act, which they had been promising to do for seven years and which Donald J. Trump promised to do “on day one” of his new administration, they went at it again and succeeded, at least in the House of Representatives.  This, despite the fact that Trump and Republican leaders in both houses of Congress, acknowledging their initial failure, had conceded that “Obamacare” would continue to be the law of the land for the foreseeable future.

What changed the equation was Trump’s mounting anxiety that he had come away from this debacle looking like a “loser.”  As his desire to accomplish something, anything, in the first few months of his presidency grew more desperate, the bill was resurrected.  It is doubtful that Trump himself had, or has, the slightest clue about the details of the legislation.  Certainly, none of the promises he made to his “base” are in the bill that just won narrow approval in the House.  If anything, this version is even more dreadful than the last, as difficult as that is to imagine.

Among its many cruel conditions, the new version of the “American Health Care Act” allows states to opt out of key provisions of the ACA, to drop Medicaid for the poorest of their citizens, and to jettison mandatory coverage of those with pre-existing conditions, pushing them into “high risk pools,” which will be prohibitively expensive for any but the richest of the rich.  Republicans claim that these changes will provide “flexibility,” “choice,” and “access.”  Their actual effect, however, will be to make health insurance unaffordable for millions.  It is no exaggeration to say that many thousands will die as a result.

The last attempt to “repeal and replace” the ACA failed, because it was enormously unpopular.  All across the land, Republican legislators found themselves confronted by thousands of angry constituents, whose ire reflected the fact that a large majority of Americans now want to keep and improve the ACA rather than repeal and replace it. Why, one must therefore ask, were Republicans so determined to press ahead with an alternative that delivers none of the “improvements” their newly elected president promised?

We cannot turn to Donald Trump for the answer, because it is abundantly clear that he doesn’t even understand the question.  His promises were empty from the start, and their sole purpose was self-promotion.

Nor can we look to normal political calculation for the answer.  Some pundits say that Republicans, after seven years of failing to overturn the ACA, were desperate to avoid another failure, which might lead to primary challenges from candidates on the far right.  This may make sense for Republicans in completely safe “red” districts.  But for those who barely won election or reelection last November—who number in the dozens—it makes no sense at all.  They will be going home this weekend to face even more outrage from constituents now fully aware of how much they are about to lose.

The real answer to the question can be found elsewhere, in a statement by Mo Brooks, a tea party congressman from Alabama and a leading member of the “freedom caucus.”  As odious as his opinions are, Brooks is at least honest enough to state them openly:

My understanding is that it (the American Health Care Act) will allow insurance companies to require people who have higher health care costs to contribute more to the insurance pool that helps offset all these costs, thereby reducing the cost to those people who lead good lives, they’re healthy, you know, they are doing the things to keep their bodies healthy.  And right now, those are the people who have done things the right way that are seeing their costs skyrocketing.

You couldn’t ask for a clearer or more chilling articulation of Republican ideology with respect to health care.  It comes down to this:  if you’re sick, it’s your fault; others, who’ve “done things the right way,” shouldn’t have to help you.

This isn’t a political ideology in the normal sense.  It is a moral and theological one.

I say “theological,” because Republican ideas about health care—not to mention taxes, education, welfare, law enforcement, and social justice in the broadest sense—rest on assumptions that are fundamentally religious.

The United States of America is, far and away, the most religious nation in the advanced world.  Three quarters of Americans classify themselves as Christians, half as Protestants, and more than a quarter as evangelical, fundamentalist, or “born again.”  Their views about the world, about human behavior, about right and wrong, are saturated with religious presuppositions and prejudices.

Whether they know it or not, politicians like Mo Brooks are following in the footsteps of a specific religious tradition and, in particular, a tradition laid down by the Reformation theologian John Calvin.

Born in France, Calvin fled to Switzerland in 1533 to escape persecution after breaking with the Catholic Church.  Like Martin Luther before him, Calvin became one of the leading figures of the Protestant Reformation.  But Calvin went further.   Luther’s aim was to cleanse and purify Catholic doctrine.  Calvin set out to repudiate and replace it.

His most provocative tenet was “predestination”—the notion that god randomly chooses or “elects” some to receive his gifts and, no less randomly, rejects others, all to please himself, all without regard for right or wrong.  In Calvin’s words:

All are not created on equal terms, but some are preordained to eternal life, others to eternal damnation; and, accordingly, as each has been created for one or other of these ends, we say that he has been predestinated to life or to death.

For centuries, the Catholic Church insisted on a moral link between behavior and consequences, between virtue and reward, between sin, penitence, and redemption.  Calvin upended all that.  He proclaimed, in effect, that material success is an incontrovertible sign of god’s grace.  If you are wealthy and healthy, god made you so; for anyone to question such good fortune is to question god himself.

This, in effect, is what people like Mo Brooks would now like us to believe—not that virtue is its own reward but, rather, that rewards are a sign of virtue.  He and other Republicans in Congress, who just condemned millions of Americans to fear, sickness, and poverty, are Calvinists one and all.  Their callous cruelty is beyond redemption.