Why is it so important? There are all the obvious reasons: millions don’t have insurance; premiums keep rising; people are locked into jobs or driven into bankruptcy; we pay more than anyone else in the developed world for care and get some of the worst outcomes; and, most important, people die because they don’t get care. We all know this.
But there has to be more going on here. A simple policy dispute would not induce a bunch of older white people — and that’s who they are, older white people who probably voted for McCain-Palin last fall — to scream themselves red in the face. Something is bringing up extreme emotion.
Is it racism? Well, yes, but it’s not as simple as crude skin-color prejudice — though there’s some of that, too. People on the right are terrified that the country is slipping away from them, that new groups are assuming power and taking the country in new directions.
The truth is, they haven’t really accepted what happened in the 2008 election. Encouraged by their closed-loop media, they have been telling themselves that the election of Barack Obama was a fluke. The American people simply turned against George Bush — probably because he wasn’t conservative enough — and elected a placeholder. In 2012, they will find the next Ronald Reagan and get back to the business of slashing government and restoring traditional values — two things the first Reagan never managed. (I guess everybody has to have a myth to live by.)
They can’t let themselves see 2008 as the passing of a tipping point, when the traditionalist white Christians who have been dominating American society since the beginning — and trying for forty years to turn back the rise of a new diverse America — finally lost their majority. They can’t accept that they will never rule the country again. No matter how small a minority they become, they will continue to arrogantly see themselves as the “real Americans,” entitled to a special status.
But they also understand that if universal health care goes through — and especially if it is followed by newer entitlements, such as higher education — it will never be uprooted. Not only that, but basic understandings about the nature of American society will shift — ideas about the proper role of government, the relation between the individual and the community, the role of religion and “traditional values” in social policy. The change that Obama promised his supporters will be here.
No wonder they’re spitting mad. There will be violence — hopefully not much — when some of them decide that they can’t take the loss of their country lying down.
If that makes some of us uncomfortable, well, those are generous sentiments and do us credit. But we cannot turn aside. This country, this world, this future belong to us now. We have the right to refashion them in our own image. And what comes out will be a better world.
