As this round of the fight for universal health care in the U.S.A. — and it’s only this round — winds down, we should consider what we’ve learned.
We’ve learned that the Right wing loves to claim to speak for “ordinary Americans,” but they are in fact driven by a deep fear of democracy. If they weren’t, they would be equally outraged that the legislative process is based on minority vetoes and that single Senators have been holding legislation hostage. (No, don’t get started about “judicial tyranny” — that’s about protecting individual rights against the wishes of their neighbors, something the Right values every bit as much as the Left.)
Truth is, the Right lives in fear that the majority really will start to rule. When you believe that the world is divided into the “deserving,” “morally robust” few and the “undeserving,” “morally flabby” many — people who believe that almost invariably count themselves among the few — the last thing you want is an effective system of one person-one vote. The many will simply outvote the few, and the moral level of the community cannot help but decline. The many will vote themselves things like, say, universal health care, at the expense of the few. People have been casting that exact reproach against democracy since the days of the ancient Greeks.
Of course, people who think like this can’t imagine the undeserving many actually being able to direct their own political projects. There has to be someone manipulating them — some sinister and villainous “elite,” driven by selfish power trips and malicious hatred of the virtuous “real Americans.”
We have to understand where these folks are coming from if we are to break the “deserving” versus “undeserving” framework altogether. We want the ordinary, average, unheroic “masses” running things. Then, maybe the system would work for their benefit. That’s what democracy is for.
