The Fierce Urgency of Whatever

In a culture that often values boldness above all else, American politics is surprisingly allergic to big ideas.  Despite the clamor over President Obama’s health-care reform plan, it is important to remember that it proposes fairly incremental changes.  Today insurance in America is employer-based, and provided by private, for-profit insurers.  This will not change.  The sound and fury over the public option, on both the left and the right, has obscured the reality that it is, for now, nothing more than a small policy experiment.  The health care debate represents the truly cramped range of American political discourse today.
This has not always been the case.  In 1945 President Harry Truman proposed a system of universal health insurance similar to the Canadian model, a radical change from the status quo ante.  Of course, some things stay the same; Truman’s initial proposal claimed bluntly, and unconvincingly, that, “This is not socialized medicine.”  Truman’s healthcare innovation was part of a proud bipartisan tradition of bold leadership and radical change.  President Roosevelt was unabashed about trying to completely reshape the relationship between the government and private industry, and Nixon in trying to reshape the Cold War by forging a relationship with China.  In contrast to the bold policy initiatives even in the postwar era, it is not hard to see American politics since 1992 as static and small-bore.
Despite a marked difference in rhetoric, the similarities between the policies of Democrats and Republicans can be striking.   Both parties are committed to maintaining the American presence in Iraq and Afghanistan, preventing a nuclear Iran, ensuring a “pro-business” regulatory environment, protecting the employer-based health insurance system, continuing the War on Drugs, cutting taxes, subsidizing agriculture and feeding the military-industrial complex.  In the most recent Presidential campaign, only two candidates seriously addressed any of these key issues, Dennis Kucinich and Ron Paul, and were laughed at for their trouble. For making the commonsensical statement that perhaps Muslims resent a half-century of American meddling in the Middle East, Ron Paul was resoundingly booed.  For suggesting that the U.S. scale back its massive network of military bases around the world, Kucinich was ridiculed.
This political complacency suited a world where America was the unchallenged hegemon.  During the Cold War, politicians could not avoid trying to tackle tough issues, not with the Soviet Union waiting to pounce on American weakness.  The fall of the USSR left the United States free to languish in the status quo, and our apparent triumph left the American model politically unassailable.  Perhaps this is the best light in which to understand the conservative response to Obama’s agenda as “socialism”; that any challenge to the status quo is a rejection of everything that differentiated America from its Cold War foe.  Unfortunately, America did not win the Cold War because of its complete perfection.
America needs policy innovation today more than ever. The long-term deficit is a very real concern.  There is no way it can be addressed when entitlement and defense expenditures are politically untouchable; non-defense discretionary spending is a mere 17% of the federal budget.  The War on Drugs is stuck in the trenches.  The War on Terror is even worse, and certainly more costly.  Populists left and right rage against the seeming capture of the government by Goldman Sachs and other big banks.  America’s wars overseas seem to be going nowhere fast, soaking up endless amounts of money and continuing to kill American soldiers.  And Iran is inching ever closer to a nuclear weapon.  It should be clear that the conventional wisdom is bankrupt and, as they like to say in Alcoholics Anonymous, “Our best thinking got us here.”
Of course politicians don’t want to address hard questions, for hard questions demand difficult answers. Ultimately, though, if the status quo is unsustainable, it will not be sustained.   The time of complacency has passed, and even the somewhat incoherent Tea Party movement shows that voters have begun to demand serious change of some kind.  Counterintuitively, the slow deterioration in the American way of life may create the conditions for its renewal.