gracchusdixit

After weeks of secret scheming, hidden away from the public, the press, and their Democratic colleagues, Senate Republicans just released an outline of their proposal to replace the Affordable Care Act.  They are calling their bill the “Better Care Reconciliation Act”.  It is impossible to imagine a more ironic and deeply cynical title.

Like the bill passed several weeks ago in the House of Representatives,  this legislation won’t provide “better care” for anyone.  On the contrary, it will deny health coverage to millions, claw back coverage for millions more, and raise premiums and deductibles for nearly everyone—all to provide a tax cut of nearly $1 trillion to the wealthiest Americans.  The public backlash to the original House bill was furious.  The backlash to the Senate bill is likely to be even worse.

Which leads to the question:  What can they be thinking?  In moral terms, why would Republican politicians wish to enact a law that is so cruel and will do so much damage to so many of their constituents?  And even if they don’t give a hoot about morality, why, in purely political terms, would they so deliberately thumb their noses at millions of voters, thereby courting the possibility of electoral disaster?

There are three reasons.

The first is that it is not at all clear that even a bill this dreadful would pose a serious threat to Republican electoral chances.  For all the incompetent and scandal-riven five first months of the Trump presidency, Republican voters seem to be standing by their man.  As a result, Democrats were unable to win even one of the recent special elections held to replace congressional seats vacated by Trump cabinet appointees.  In the Senate, the 2018 electoral map heavily favors Republicans, and in the House, hundreds of congressional districts across the country have been gerrymandered to all but guarantee Republican control.   Ominously, the Supreme Court has decided to take up what could become a landmark case concerning partisan gerrymandering in Wisconsin.  With Neil Gorsuch (a partisan conservative, if ever there was one) now on the bench, the odds are better than even that the court will uphold what Wisconsin’s Republican legislature has done, encouraging other states to do more of the same.   In sum, Republicans are betting that they can weather the storm of public protest, wait for the anger to exhaust itself, and ultimately hang onto their seats.  They may well turn out to be right.

The second reason is money—especially big money—and no one is more beholden to big money than Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell.   In 1895, the notoriously corrupt Senator from Ohio, Mark Hanna, quipped:  “There are two things that are important in politics.  The first is money, and I can’t remember what the second one is.”  Mitch McConnell learned this lesson early on.   And so far, events have proved him right.   Despite abysmal approval ratings in his home state, McConnell keeps getting reelected.  Why?  Money.  During the 2014 electoral cycle, the average Senatorial candidate raised about $4 million; McConnell raised $21 million, two-thirds of which came from large individual donors.  McConnell used all that money to crush his otherwise promising Democratic opponent.  McConnell is now moving forward with the “Better Care Reconciliation Act,” not because it will help his constituents, lower costs, or improve upon “Obamacare, but rather, because his big donors want their taxes cut, and he wants their money.  Neither he nor they care that millions of ordinary Americans will get hurt along the way.

The third, final, and by far most consequential reason is ideology.  Over the course of the last 30 years, the Republican Party has been transformed—one might even say, hijacked—by a particularly cruel libertarian creed.

The intellectual roots of this transformation go back more than half a century: to the Austrian political philosopher, Friedrich Hayek; to the American economist, Milton Friedman; to the Russian-born novelist, screen writer, and would-be philosopher, Ayn Rand.  In their various ways, these figures cast aside many of the central tenets of old-fashioned conservatism: respect for established institutions, for long-standing social traditions, and for the obligations of individuals to community and country.  They replaced that old-fashioned conservatism with a new political creed that idolized the unfettered individual, the so-called “free market,” and the absolute right of private property and self-interest against any claim of overriding public interest.

The political face of this transformation appeared in the 1980s, with the elections of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher.   It was Reagan who proclaimed:  “In the present crisis, government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.”  It was Thatcher who declared:  “There is no such thing as society.  There are individual men and women, and there are families.  And no government can do anything except through people, and people must look to themselves first.”  In other words, if you’re poor, out of work, or sick, you’re on your own.  You can sink or you can swim, but don’t expect government or your luckier fellow citizens to offer you a helping hand.

The culmination of this toxic thinking came to a head in 2009, with the formation of the so-called “tea party”.  Billed as a “grassroots movement,” the tea party was actually orchestrated and funded by Charles and David Koch, who inherited their libertarian ideology from their father, an early and enthusiastic member of the unapologetically racist John Birch Society.  Since then, a handful of like-minded billionaires—the Walton heirs, hedge-fund tycoon Robert Mercer, gambling magnate Sheldon Adelson, the DeVos family with their Amway fortune—have tightened their grip on the Republican Party to such an extent that it has become entirely their instrument.

The ultimate avatar of this new Republican ideology is Paul Ryan, the Speaker of the House of Representatives.  Ryan is a true believer in the dog-eat-dog political and social worldview of Ayn Rand, in which there is a stark divide between purportedly talented and industrious “makers” and lazy, parasitic “takers”.  This worldview takes no account—indeed, it contemptuously dismisses—the corrosive consequences of social and economic inequality, racial prejudice, and simple bad luck.  People like Ryan deny that government should have any role in leveling the playing field.  For decades, such people have been longing for an opportunity to tear down the social safety net fashioned by Franklin Roosevelt in the wake of the Great Depression and subsequently expanded by presidents both Democratic and Republican.

Now, with Trump in the White House and Republicans in control of both houses of congress, their opportunity has finally arrived.  As Paul Ryan put it:  “This is our chance.  This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.”  Nothing—no amount of public protest; no amount of cruelty, pain, and suffering; not even the prospect of electoral catastrophe—will prevent them from seizing it.