The painful Capitol Hill spectacle of the last two weeks must surely have made clear, to anyone on either side of the partisan divide, what has been in plain sight for a long time: the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision, the fate of which lay behind the brutal machinations of both parties, is the poison pill at the heart of all that has gone wrong in American politics in the last forty years.
It has also, I believe, been a disaster for the liberal left, permanently alienating a segment of the population from legitimate liberal-left causes: livable wages, a fair tax structure, a strong public education system, and universal healthcare.
I think the procedure should be legal, and if the court had kept its nose out of this subject many states, if not most, might have ratified abortion by now. But I have never been able to understand how the Court construed this to be a constitutional right, or how “due process,” as protected by the 14th amendment, can be extended to include a medical procedure. I wonder how many of the ruling’s defenders can explain it.
It’s a deal that many liberals, wanting to defend the liberation and empowerment of women, have made, I believe, with a bad conscience (I say so because for years I did so). The obstinacy with which Democrats have clung to this tortured reading over the years, has convinced the approximately one-third of Americans who regard abortion as a profoundly moral issue that the left simply does not negotiate in good faith. Roe v. Wade was the primer for a politics that was all about saying what you need to say to satisfy your “base,” regardless of facts, Constitutional principles, or anything else more enduring than winning the day.
Let us stipulate that the other side has learned to play the game. God knows. The Republican party is thoroughly captive to a President who is a fluent liar and who has gone the final logical step and entirely discarded facts or truth as a governing principle. The devolution hardly began with Trump, however; there has been a steady corrosive drip of insincerity. Does anyone even remember the shameless Republican posturing around a private domestic tragedy in the case of Terri Schiavo?
In the long slide to our current depths, Sarah Palin’s “death panels” lie must be regarded as the really, really deep dive. You might remember that “death panels” referred to a provision of the Affordable Care Act that would have established a funding stream and a reimbursement code within the Medicare program to pay doctors to have a conversation with patients about completing an advance directive, living will and other aspects of end-of-life planning. Congress killed the provision in the wake of Palin’s lie. (Six years later, in 2015, Medicare did indeed begin paying physicians to have these discussions with their patients).
Palin’s lie has had legs. Almost a decade later, I know of an individual on Facebook who has posted that Ezekiel Emanuel, the Harvard medical ethicist who was an author and proponent of the provision, did so for the purposes of being able to “euthanize political opponents.” Give that some thought: there is an American out there, and he is not alone, so distrustful of “coastal elites” that he believes (or pretends to believe, in the safe space of social media where fantasies flourish) that they want to kill him.
This is an individual who should be on our side. A decade ago the housing collapse and financial services industry scandal demonstrated that Wall Street can screw over the average American before Washington politicians can get their shoes on; both of those industries are now being de-regulated. Our elected politicians rely on ungodly amounts of money to get elected, much of it coming by hook or by crook, from Wall Street. The Supreme Court has ruled that a corporation is a “person” and the lavishing of extravagant amounts of money on a candidate is a form of free speech. A multi-billion-dollar, investor-driven pharmaceutical industry bears a very large share of responsibility for an opioid epidemic that has exacted extraordinary suffering on every segment of American society. We have the only healthcare system in the developed world where the first question you get asked when you go to the hospital is, “How is this getting paid for?” Private equity firms are buying up cash starved medical practices; by what logic does anyone think they will not dictate the limits of medical care according to their profit demands? For profit colleges. For profit prisons. For profit detention centers for detained immigrants.
But go on any right-wing website, or tune into Hannity or Limbaugh, or look up your Trump-loving Facebook friend (if you have one) and you would think the United States was menaced by……socialism. Meanwhile, the Trump Administration practices the real thing, handing out $12 billion in subsidies to farmers damaged by protectionist policies that run counter to traditional conservative free trade policy, perfectly closing a perfect loop of perfect hypocrisy.
Such is the measure of how badly we have lost the audience we should have. When the issue of abortion is returned to the states, where it should have been all along, at least some of the passion on the pro-life side will have been leaked out, and the political dynamics will favor a measure of choice: voters (including men) will have to live with the prohibitions they impose upon themselves. Then perhaps the liberal left can return to principles and policies aimed at securing the economic ground beneath Americans’ feet so they can thrive and prosper—policies like a publicly funded, single-payer national health insurance system that would be, I believe, restorative of American health in more ways than one.
It should have happened years ago. The passage of Medicaid in 1965, a kind of afterthought to the Medicare program, was believed to presage what would be the next logical step—universal healthcare coverage for every American citizen.
In the interval, the Democratic Party and the liberal-left fatefully lashed itself to the electrified cage of a legal reading that some 30 percent of Americans believe to be morally reprehensible. The shockwaves from that ruling, and the cascade of escalating lies, dissembling, and demagoguery on both sides over the years, have seared our cultural and political fabric and warped our regard for each other. It has also, I believe, done serious damage to much that is good and true and unassailable in the American liberal tradition.
