Civics Lesson

I know that raising the specter of Big Government shuts down American brains more or less automagically at this point (as presumably the specter of Soulless Sociopathic Corporations does not?) and that conjuring up the image of government bureaucracy makes all American mouths curl up instantly and inevitably into a cynical dismissive smirk (as presumably images of corporate suits, meddling managers, and telemarketers in veal-fattening pens do not?).

But those who are fighting for real health care reform are always at the same time fighting against the feudal corporate-militarist mindset of tinpot tyrants barking can-do platitudes, celebrating as inevitable the merciless brutality of unaccountable monied masters, isolating and exploiting the vulnerable, hyping useless crap and distraction to the ruin of the world all the while denigrating and punishing expressions of fellow-feeling, critical awareness, nonconformity of any kind, or demands that authority always be prepared to make an accounting of itself.

To fight for healthcare is always already to fight for democracy and accountable, consensual governance, in our diversity, peer-to-peer, it is always already to fight against the anti-democracy of incumbency and the authoritarian order of corporate-militarism (the global neoliberal/neoconservative circuit).

It may seem like biting off more than we can chew to take all this on when taking up the fight for real commonsense healthcare reform, but the fact is that this is already the actual fight in which we are engaged, and we might as well grasp it in the terms that actually prevail. To win this fight is to facilitate the next step in the struggle toward more, better democratic governance -- likely to be collective bargaining rights, with campaign finance reform next, then global access to knowledge, then planetary governance over environmental criminality, but who is to say exactly how these struggles will play out? To lose the healthcare fight will be to make the next struggle that much harder, to confront us with the same arrayed forces of incumbency, the same hegemonic barrier of corporate-militarist platitudes we face now, again and again and again.

Why not fight them here and now, clear-eyed, with the strength of numbers and the wind at our backs? I'm not advocating muddying the issue of urgent healthcare reform with theory-head meditations on good-governance, but I am insisting that we grasp the way in which ignorance of or an entrenched habitual hostility to the very notion of good-governance forms an insuperable barrier through which commonsense discussions of issues rarely penetrate remotely intact. Be aware of the ways in which our metaphors and formulations and assumptions mobilize merciless, uncivil, cynical assumptions about our shared problems and the peers with whom we share them, how these anti-democratizing circumscriptions of possibility serve best that vanishingly small minority of authoritarian incumbents who stand between us all, whatever our differences otherwise, and the solution of our shared problems, peer to peer.

It doesn't matter how you put the points, what language you use, how you draw on your own experiences and metaphors to remind us all of the political assumptions without which none of our struggles make sense -- it doesn't even matter if you prefer the more philosophical sorts of language my own analytic temperament and academic training suits me to... However you put them, there are several basic ideas that we need to reiterate over and over to combat the inertial ignorance, short-term thinking, and deranging whomping up of greed and mistrust by those who thrive best wherever arbitrary men and not legitimate laws rule:

One: Democratically accountable governance indispensably provides ill-commodifiable goods and services that solve shared problems for the general welfare (the things so urgent that we don't comparison shop for them and hence are not subject to competitive forces that check abuses, or services the efficient provision of which creates institutions too big or complex to fail in ways that would subject them to such competition either) and it is the promotion of this general welfare as much as anything that secures the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity.

Two: Taxes are the price we pay for such civilizational goods, taxes ensure that governance is representational quite as much as regular and regulated elections do by yoking authority to the consent of the governed who also fund it, and it is, of course, only sensible that the people who benefit most from their inhabitation of a civilizational order to which others who benefit less are nonetheless indispensable contributors pay their fair share for its proper maintenance as well.

Three: The separation of powers, federalist subsidiarity (the principle that problems should always be addressed at the most local layer of governance actually adequate to their resolution), the defense and strengthening of the scene of actually informed actually non-duressed consent, the celebration of consensual multiculture, peer-to-peer, and the institution of elections to public offices at regular intervals provide the necessary checks on abuses in the provision of these unique public goods that is provided by competition for commodities available for exchange in well-regulated markets.