Politics and Democracy
Liberal commentators and Democratic Party-affiliated figures have hailed the March 21 passage in the House of Representatives of an ambitious and far-reaching program of legislative changes to the American health care system as a decisive victory for politics and democracy in showcasing the ability of the political system to achieve tangible and deeply reaching changes in the lives of ordinary Americans. The opposite tack has been taken among the bill’s many opponents, almost entirely based out of the now firmly right-leaning Republican Party, which has portrayed the passage of the legislation as a destructive blow dealt toward democracy and politics in the United States, turning the country’s formerly free political system into a socialist autocracy. The theme of “tyranny” has been a persistent one in the opposition mounted to the health care legislation, often outstripping tangible commentary on the specifics of the actual bill proposed to Congress. Some liberal observers of the functioning of politics and democracy in the United States have pointed to a coarsening in the nation’s stock of available political rhetoric brought about by the political right’s willingness, abetted by their conservative media allies, to make baseless attacks and conspiratorial insinuations regarding their opponents’ political criticism.
In one notable instance that has been pointed to of the debate over health care legislation taking an alarmingly negative turn, Representatives John Lewis, a Democrat from Georgia, and Representative Andre Carson, a Democrat from Indiana, both men African-Americans, were verbally attacked by protesters using racial slurs. Both spoke of these incidents of connected to the wider issue in the maintenance of a system of democracy and politics of maintaining a civil level of discourse while debating, at times, fiercely contested political points. Representative Lewis has encountered such issues of politics and democracy before, as an activist in the civil rights movement of the 1960s. He said of the attacks and similar episodes, “I’ve faced this before. So, it reminded me of the 60’s. There’s a lot of downright hate and anger and people are just being downright mean.”
The recurrent issue of political debates in the United States becoming flash points for paranoid interpretations of democracy and politics was pointed in a volume of political analysis published in 1964, “The Paranoid Style in American Politics,” by Richard Hofstadter. This book looked at the issue in the American system of politics and democracy of right-wing groups feeling marginalized and concluding that large-scale government reform was posing an urgent threat to traditional areas of American life. He found this phenomenon to be a recurrent issue in American democracy and politics and commentary on the course of the debate over President Obama’s now successfully passed health care legislation often invoked Hofstadter’s name to identify a pattern that seems to be deeply fixed into how certain segments of the United States population look at politics and democracy. As the debate over health care strongly reminded Congressional Democrats of, the consideration of this mode of thinking is a vital aspect of any ambitious legislative program.
