Rand Paul, Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz (Credit: AP/Timothy D. Easley/Reuters/Adrees Latif/AP/Tony Gutierrez)
Prior
to Barack Obama’s presidency, healthcare access was the gaping hole in
the country’s tattered, patchwork safety net. If, for instance, you made
too much money to qualify for Medicaid, weren’t old enough to qualify
for Medicare, never served in the military, and didn’t work for a large
employer, you probably had to pay for your own insurance. If you were
low- or middle-income, or you had a preexisting condition, there was a
decent chance you were uninsured, unable to obtain routine care and at
constant risk of financial ruin.
Add ‘em all up and we’re talking about upward of 50 million people.
Part
of the reason conservatives fought the Affordable Care Act so
relentlessly, and continue to fantasize about its demise, is that it
will ultimately fill that hole. Though flawed and inadequate in key
ways, the safety net will now lack major structural gaps it just
had. When conservatives warn that Obamacare will turn the United States
into a European welfare state, they’re being histrionic, but they’re not
being entirely disingenuous.
The extraordinary but ultimately
failed efforts Republicans undertook in 2011 and 2012 to win back
Congress and the White House — the direct assault on public sector
unions, systematic disenfranchisement of minority voters, legislative
sabotage on Capitol Hill — are perhaps best thought of as rearguard
actions to prevent Obamacare from ever taking effect. To keep America
from becoming Europe.
Obama’s reelection was Game Over. GOP
leaders understood this, even if rank-and-file Republicans and millions
of Republican voters remain in denial about it.
But just because
the American welfare state no longer lacks the linchpin of a healthcare
guarantee doesn’t mean the programs that compose it will lumber along in
their current forms unchanged. In other words, the grueling ideological
struggle over the shape and generosity of U.S. social programs will
continue for years to come.
Enter a snarky, unconventional but ultimately innocuous Rolling Stone article
by Jesse Myerson. In it, he proposes five reforms that are pretty
far-reaching relative to the country’s existing social and economic
regime, and would in fact dramatically alter the balance of economic and
political power in America.
When
you strip away the comedic framing, though, they’re a fairly
straightforward mix of progressive and radical-centrist reforms. (See
Matt Yglesias for a complete breakdown.)
But
conservatives went absolutely apeshit. So severe was the apoplexy that
they failed to recognize that included in these ideas were a bunch of
things conservatives like — replacing income taxes and replacing
paternalistic welfare programs with cash transfers — and that already
exist successfully in the non-communist world. It was amazing.
In their rendering, Myerson hadn’t sketched out a road to serfdom. He’d planned a massive frog-march to Siberia for our society.
Part of this was emotional affect. Myerson’s Twitter bio
is satirically hashtagged #FULLCOMMUNISM. Combine that with the
article’s hyperbolic framing and many conservatives reacted tribally.
Some
of Myerson’s antagonists were smart enough to see past the cultural
identity stuff but too weak-minded not to respond with shallow,
reactionary nonsense. Sean Davis thinks
Myerson’s ideas are discredited because they all appear in the USSR’s
constitution (they don’t really). Even if you assume, for the sake of
argument, that this rebuttal isn’t historically illiterate, you can’t
get past the juvenile reasoning. Even if you assume Soviet leaders
rigorously adhered to a constitution, Davis is making an inductive
fallacy.
If he’d clicked on the link in his own piece, he’d have seen, right up top, that “women and men have equal rights in the USSR.”
Exercise
of these rights is ensured by according women equal access with men to
education and vocational and professional training, equal opportunities
in employment, remuneration, and promotion, and in social and political,
and cultural activity, and by special labour and health protection
measures for women; by providing conditions enabling mothers to work; by
legal protection, and material and moral support for mothers and
children, including paid leaves and other benefits for expectant mothers
and mothers, and gradual reduction of working time for mothers with
small children.
Here the U.S. was a bit behind the
times, but by Davis’ standard we have now largely embraced this
particular form of murderous evil. The Soviet Union also guaranteed free
provision of higher education. Here in the United States, we limit that
to secondary education, which I suppose means we’ve escaped one of the
chains of Soviet bondage.
Smarter conservatives both understood
that Myerson’s list isn’t communism, but nevertheless had a visceral
oppositional reaction to it. Which brings us back to the right’s losing
bid to unseat Obamacare and the evolving debate over social policy in
the U.S., post-Obamacare.
I don’t think the ongoing freakout over
the Rolling Stone article is simply a reflection of cultural anxieties.
It also reflects an effort to limit the scope of that debate, so that
progressive ideas fall outside of the sphere of acceptability. A basic
cash income wouldn’t destroy America, and actually enjoys the support of
conservative heavyweights, now and in the past. But it isn’t exactly
compatible with significant tax cuts for wealthy people. And it
preserves the federal government’s role as the purveyor of public
welfare. One way to marginalize ideas like that is to call them
communism.
A lot of conservatives just don’t know any better. But
for the rest, this is as much about keeping the endless debate over
social welfare anchored around shrinking government and privatizing
services as it is an ignorant cultural reaction to a writer from New
York who made a #joke about #communism on the Internet.
Brian Beutler is Salon's political writer. Email him at bbeutler@salon.com and follow him on Twitter at @brianbeutler.
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Walker: The only reason Obama wants to extend unemployment benefits is to distract from Obamacare
Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker offers his view on extending unemployment benefits:
I don't know about you, Candy, but if I was out of work, I'd
be looking more than twice a week for a job. I'd be looking for every
day except maybe today. I take Sunday off to go to church and pray that I
could find a job on Monday, but I think there need to be reforms in
that system.
It's not that Walker wants you to think he's a heartless S.O.B., it's
that he wants you to think that the reason there are nearly 4 million more unemployed people today than before the Great Recession is that they just aren't employable:
One of the biggest challenges people have who are either
unemployed or under employed is many of them don't have the skills in
advanced manufacturing [...] Instead of just talking about extending
benefits, we should talk about getting people the training they need to
fill those jobs. That's much better off than just putting a check out.
If you're going to believe what Walker has to say, then the reason that
unemployment skyrocketed in the wake of the financial collapse in 2008
was simply that people weren't looking hard enough for work and that
even if they were, they weren't employable. That defies credulity.
There is a specific, identifiable reason for today's unemployment
level, and it's not because people have suddenly become less employable
than they were five years ago. It's because of the recession. This isn't
rocket science.
That's not to say that there is something wrong with wanting to help
people improve their skills. But if you only talk about doing that in
order to avoid paying their unemployment insurance benefits—the benefits
they need to put food on their table, a roof over their head, and the
stability to find another job—then no matter what you say, you aren't
trying to help them. You're just being a heartless S.O.B. Sign and send the petition to Senate Republicans: Restore emergency unemployment benefits.
For years the left-wing has been saying that Fox News viewers are
“uneducated” or “misinformed”, but now a study has come out that might
confirm those suspicions.
According to a new survey of Fox News viewers by Reuters, this is what Fox News viewers believe:
67% Believe Barack Obama’s name sounds suspicious.
45% Believe that homosexuals are polygamists
2% Believe that science is more important than faith
90% Believe that all of the Founding Fathers were born in the United
States of America, even though it had not yet been created when the
Founding Fathers were born.
56% Believe Sarah Palin went to an Ivy League Law school.
99% of Fox News viewers who were Medicare recipients said they opposed “socialized medicine.”
94% Believe Reagan lowered the National Debt.
15% Believe that George Washington defeated the King of England in a duel for America.
88% Believe that Bill Clinton failed as a President, because of his affair with Monica Lewinsky.
75% Believe that people on welfare are lazy.
24% Believe Santa Claus is real.
36% Believe the “Bill of Rights” is legislation introduced by the Republican Party to stop “Barack Obama’s socialist agenda.”
99% Believe that communism, socialism, fascism and tyranny are all the same.
70% Believe Barack Obama was born in Kenya
38% Believe Barack Obama was born in Indonesia
85% Don’t think Hawaii was even a state when Barack Obama was born
76% Believe Sarah Palin has an “Alaskan accent.”
92% Believe that Bill Clinton left Barack Obama with a surplus, which he spent.
96% Believe the economy was doing great when Barack Obama took office.
84% Believe the Tea Party is a grassroots movement without any corporate sponsorship.
94% Believe the Constitution mentions Jesus Christ as America’s savior.
23% Believe FEMA is building concentration camps.
63% Believe Glenn Beck is a healthy weight
37% Believe Nancy Pelosi is a witch, and that she can cast spells.
25% Believe Hillary Clinton’s resignation was good for the economy.
74% Believe that unemployment is higher now than it was during the Great Depression.
92% Couldn’t find Iraq on a map.
9% Believe that homosexuals are trying to take over America with glitter.
93% Couldn’t name the 7 continents.
12% Believe John Quincy Adams was a Founding Father.
99% Believe that the Government doesn’t create jobs, but 95% of those
surveyed credit Governor Rick Perry (R-TX) with creating 1 million jobs
as Governor of Texas.
While some of these might seem comical, the most shocking result from the study was this:
100% of Fox News viewers said they wouldn’t care if the entire
country fell apart as long as Barack Obama doesn’t get anything he
wants. Satire disclaimer
On CNN’s State of the Union on Sunday, host Candy Crowley asked Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker (R) why unemployed Americans, or workers making minimum wage, would become Republicans. “If I am an unemployed American and or if I am a minimum wage…
When I was 8 or 9, I was very briefly kidnapped by well-meaning lunatics. My younger sister and I were exploring the FIBArk
(First in Boating the Arkansas) Festival in Salida, Colo., when we were
lured by the promise of candy into a small trailer with a number of
other children. It turned out that in order to get the candy we had to
suffer through a short film on Jesus, which, as I recall, depicted with
graphic horror the torments that await the unsaved in the next world.
After the film, a clean-cut young pastor and four or five of his flock
delivered some bromides. Finally the pastor said, “Before you leave, let
me ask you a question. Is there anyone here who has not accepted Jesus
Christ as your personal savior? Raise your hand if you haven’t been
saved.”
I don’t know what perversity impelled me to raise my hand—I like to
think I was registering a protest against the coercive flim-flam I had
just been peddled. It wasn’t, at any rate, that the film had scared me—I
knew I was already saved. I had invited Jesus into my heart, I attended
church, the whole nine yards. I also knew I didn’t like these people—if
I’d known the word, I’d have said they were unctuous.
Whatever the reason, I raised my hand, and when the pastor dismissed
us, two of the adults physically prevented me from leaving with the
other kids. They prayed over me and, despite my increasingly freaked-out
demands to be allowed to leave, refused to release me until I said, “I
accept Jesus Christ as my lord and savior,” which I finally did, racing
from the trailer to join my sister without even accepting the proffered
candy and Jack Chick tracts.
This was my first encounter with conservative Protestant
evangelicalism, but it was far from my last. I grew up in Colorado
Springs—home of Focus on the Family, and a city in which a high-school
friend of mine once beheld a group of people sitting in a circle in the
street in front of someone’s house. He asked them what they were doing,
and one of them replied, “A witch lives here; we’re praying for her
soul.”
But the Lutheran pastor of the church in which I was confirmed was
remarkably open to my youthful attempts to reconcile the rationalism I
had inherited from my father, a liberal atheist, with the attraction I
felt to the teachings of Christ. I was, for instance, firmly opposed to
the doctrine of hell, on the grounds that it was hardly fair for the
creator to subject people who never asked to be created in the first
place to eternal torture just because they failed to figure out the
mysteries of being in their paltry time on earth (or, you know, for any
other reason). Could a Hindu be blamed for practicing Hinduism, having
been born into a Hindu culture? The pastor talked to me of allegory and
metaphor, and was ready to agree that a God of love was unlikely to
resemble the caricature presented by foaming preachers high on sulfuric
fumes. He was more interested in grace, and in this strange fellow who
pissed off the authorities in ancient Galilee and urged the rich to sell
their possessions and give the money to the poor. He wasn’t afraid to
say “I don’t know” and “I struggle with that, too.”
I can’t remember this man’s name, but I owe him a lot. He didn’t keep
me from straying into faddish atheism in my teens and 20s, but because
of his example it was easier for me to return to a very liberal version
of Christianity later. He was exactly the kind of steward of God’s word
who, generations earlier, had kept men like Carl Henry and Harold
Ockenga up at night, men who, guided by an abomination of modernity and a
belief in biblical inerrancy, spearheaded a neo-evangelical movement
that would culminate in the fundamentalism of Ralph Reed’s Christian
Coalition and today’s creationist cretinism.
In Apostles of Reason,
UNC history professor Molly Worthen tracks the intellectual history of
modern American evangelicalism, which for her is defined by a “crisis of
authority.” “Three questions unite evangelicals,” she writes:
how to reconcile faith and reason; how to know Jesus; and how to act publicly on faith after the rupture of Christendom.
Worthen begins her story in 1942, with the founding of the National
Association of Evangelicals in St. Louis, “a self-aware intellectual
movement of pastors, scholars, and evangelists within the conservative
Protestant community.” These neo-evangelicals sought to establish that,
in Carl Henry’s words, “the Christian world-life view is not only
intellectually tenable, but … also explains reality and life more
logically and comprehensively than do modern alternatives.” Following
his teacher Gordon Clark, who worried that evangelicals were neglecting
“the philosophical, scientific, social, and political problems that
agitate” the 20th century, Henry called for Christians to engage secularism at a specifically ideological level.
Worthen traces the ripples of the resulting evangelical offensive in
ever-widening circles that eventually encompass the highest reaches of
American power. Along the way, intra- and interdenominational battle
lines are meticulously redrawn—Mennonites and Wesleyans vs. the Reformed
tradition, Presbyterians vs. Pentecostals, Southern Baptists vs.
Southern Baptists. Worthen’s a beguiling portraitist, especially as she
recounts the intergenerational frictions that arose among evangelicals
in the ’60s. Here’s a young Wes Craven being removed as editor-in-chief
from Wheaton College’s student magazine for publishing “disturbing and
morally complex stories.” Here’s the president of Biola University
assuring angry alumni that “we do not endorse … left-wing folksingers,
nor do we endorse the visiting of breweries at any time, especially on a
Sunday afternoon.” One comes away from Worthen’s book with an
impression of slapstick chaos on a sinking vessel, all hands knocking
into one another in clashing attempts to bail water and plug holes (at
least until the Christian Right decided to abandon ship and hijack the
Republican Party’s passing yacht).
The key to understanding the anxieties that led conservative
evangelicalism to such frantic action lies in Henry’s phrase “world-life
view,” an awkward translation of Weltanschauung, a word that,
in Worthen’s telling, obsessed the neo-evangelicals: “They intoned it
whenever they wrote of the decline of Christendom, the decoupling of
faith and reason, and the needful pinprick of the gospel in every corner
of thought and action.” They picked up the term not from Kant but from
Reformed theologians, and it came to represent a set of shared premises
and guidelines that, once discovered and articulated, would reknit the
dispersed body of faithful into a new Church Militant.
Apostles of Reason, then, is a chapter in the broader
history of secularization, and as such it makes an interesting companion
to Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age, which I happened to be reading alongside it. “It’s a commonplace that something that deserves” the title of secularization “has
taken place in our civilization,” Taylor writes. “The problem is
defining exactly what it is that has happened.” (The vulgar popular
version has it that science in some sense proved religion to be false;
this is simply another way of saying that scientism is the faith proper
to late capitalism.) Regardless of the precise content of
secularization, Worthen’s neo-evangelicals saw that a coherent picture
of the world, a shared presumption of the truth of the Christian
religion, had disappeared. And they set about trying to figure out how
to restore it.
What’s interesting is that the proposed solutions often rested upon
the methodologies of secularism itself. Worthen recounts evangelical
attempts to reinforce premodern dogma using the tools of modern
empiricism, sociology, and anthropology—the very regimes of knowledge
they often condemned for displacing Christ. This is perversely
appropriate, if we consider Taylor’s argument that the Reformation
itself laid the groundwork for secularization. What Weber diagnosed
(borrowing from Schiller) as “the disenchantment of the world” began as
the systemic disenchantment of Christianity from within. In its
expulsion of “the sacred from worship and social life” and its
“instrumental stance” toward the social order, radical Protestantism
prepares the way for humanism. It doesn’t do so alone, and it can itself
be seen as the product of shifting economic forces, but there is an
important sense in which evangelicals found themselves hoisted on their
forebears’ petard. So it is not too surprising to find Carl Henry
arguing that biblical truth is propositional, to which Wheaton professor
Clyde Kilby smartly retorted, “How can the Psalms be propositional?”
Author Molly Worthen.
Photo courtesy Michael Cotey Morgan
No doubt it was naive of the neo-evangelicals to think they could
simply formulate a worldview, as if it were a matter of individual
decision. But they had recognized a real fact about the world and their
times, namely that the default options for the understanding of lived
experience had changed rather dramatically, and fairly recently. As
Taylor argues, it is not the same thing to be a Christian in the 21st century as it was to be a Christian in 1500, and we might add that it’s not the same thing to be an atheist, either.
Taylor uses the example of a person possessed by evil spirits in
first-century Palestine: It simply wasn’t open to those around such a
person “to entertain the idea that this was an interesting explanation
for a psychological condition, identifiable purely in intra-psychic
terms, but that there were other, possibly more reliable aetiologies for
this condition.” We, on the other hand, “cannot help but be aware that
there are a number of different construals, views which intelligent,
reasonably undeluded people, of good will, can and do disagree on.” We
can’t help “living our faith also in a condition of doubt and
uncertainty.”
It was this doubt and uncertainty that the evangelicals of Worthen’s
history tried to exorcise, and of course they might as well have tried
to recreate the social conditions of New Testament Galilee. What
philosophers call the “background,” Taylor writes, has shifted from one
in which a naive theistic construal was almost ubiquitous to one “in
which everyone’s construal shows up as such; and in which moreover,
unbelief has become for many the major default option.” This
transformation cannot be undone but by another, equally earthshaking
transformation, and such events cannot be brought about deliberately.
One unfortunate consequence of this background shift is that as
unbelief seems to more and more people the only plausible construal,
they find it difficult to understand why anyone would adopt a different
one. Thus “they reach for rather gross error theories to explain
religious belief,” and we are subjected to ignorant books by the likes
of Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, and Daniel Dennett. Take Dawkins on Thomas Aquinas,
for example, a discussion so inept that it’s as if Noam Chomsky had
decided to publish a primer on black metal. (See David Bentley Hart’s
elegant demolition of Dawkins’ analysis in The Experience of God.)
The “undergraduate atheists,” as the philosopher Mark Johnston dubbed them in Saving God,
have been definitively refuted by Hart, Terry Eagleton, Marilynne
Robinson, Johnston himself, and others. As intellectual bloodbaths go,
it’s been entertaining—like watching Jon Stewart skewer Glenn Beck. But
of course Richard Dawkins is merely a symptom. I have encountered
atheists who seem not only to have never met an intelligent, educated
believer, but to doubt that such a creature could exist.
Such unbelievers seem to me to have missed something quite
fundamental about the nature of being, as it appears to the human
animal, something that the major theistic traditions attempt to address
with rather more nuance and generosity than contemporary updates to
logical positivism can muster. You don’t, obviously, have to believe in
God to feel humbled and bewildered before what Heidegger called “the
question of the meaning of Being.” (Indeed, I often think the notion of
“belief” is more trouble than it’s worth.) But you do have to
acknowledge that there is a question, “the major question that revolves
around you,” as John Ashbery puts it: “your being here.” And you have to
recognize that it concerns something outside the scope of the natural
sciences.
One of the worst aspects of conservative evangelicalism is that too
often, especially on its fundamentalist fringes, its literalism
encourages know-nothing atheism of the Dawkins variety. If Christianity
actually entailed the beliefs that the earth was created 6,000 years ago
and homosexuality is evil and there really was a Noah who built a
gigantic boat, I wouldn’t want anything to do with it, either. I imagine
Richard Dawkins never held a third-grader in a trailer and forced him
to confess that the theory of punctuated equilibria is false.
But Christianity does not entail such beliefs, I make bold enough to say. As usual, Marilynne Robinson has made the point with eloquent forcefulness:
People who insist that the sacredness of Scripture depends
on belief in creation in a literal six days seem never to insist on a
literal reading of “to him who asks, give,” or “sell what you have and
give the money to the poor.” In fact, their politics and economics align
themselves quite precisely with those of their adversaries, who yearn
to disburden themselves of the weak, and to unshackle the great creative
forces of competition. The defenders of “religion” have made religion
seem foolish while rendering it mute in the face of a prolonged and
highly effective assault on the poor.
In 1931, C. S. Lewis was converted during a moonlit walk with J. R.
R. Tolkien. In the space of that walk, Lewis later wrote, Tolkien
convinced him that “the story of Christ is simply a true myth.” Taylor,
Robinson, Hart, and Johnston—all of whom are open to the truths of other
religions as well as to those of Christianity—help us understand what
that means. Apostles of Reason, a thrilling, if partial, history of the fallout of the fundamentalist–modernist wars, helps us understand what it doesn’t.
A team of researchers from across the globe believe they have discovered a means of re-opening “critical periods” in brain development, allowing adults to acquire abilities — such as perfect pitch or fluency in language — that could previously…
Rand Paul, Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz (Credit: AP/Timothy D. Easley/Reuters/Adrees Latif/AP/Tony Gutierrez)
Brian Beutler is Salon's political writer. Email him at bbeutler@salon.com and follow him on Twitter at @brianbeutler.
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