Language of the Times II

The Co-Opting of the term Faith

In a nation where religious affiliation is on the wane, now is a good time to look closely at the term faith. In politics, in particular, an increasingly desperate Republican party that has for years girded its loins with the mantle of superior “faith” is now completely losing whatever sense of prudence, decency, or ethics it might have had—if any. And as we watch these Republicans rightfully relinquish their grip on power, we realize that, at some point along the decades-long arc of their rise and fall, the term faith was co-opted. A perfectly useful term that had always been dependent on a definitive modifier (Christian faith, Muslim faith, Jewish faith, etc.) was seized by white male Republicans who branded themselves men of faith, without giving us the faintest idea what that actually meant. “We’re just better than those godless Democrats,” the phrase said. “Just shut up and follow us.” And of course, millions bought into the ruse and did just that, to disastrous effect.

This despite the fact that these supposed “men of faith” were not using the term faith to express their embrace of Christian teachings: of sheltering the homeless, feeding the hungry, and clothing the naked, of “thou shall not kill,” “thou shall not steal,” and “honor thy father and mother.” They were not using the term to be inclusive, they were using it to be exclusive—to declare themselves saviors, to apply the salve of justice onto the wounds of shame and fear their followers were suffering: the shame of incurable racism and xenophobia, and the fear of impending poverty slowly descending on their families and communities. And this has always been both the true crime and the genius of the Republican rise: these “men of faith” were never saviors, but were in fact, with their policies of austerity for the deserving poor and prosperity for the undeserving rich, the bringers of shame, and the bringers of poverty.

Which is why this co-opting of the term faith has been so insidious and so evil. It has not only manipulated the religious among us by making them feel special and exclusive, it has diminished the faith we are all at liberty to feel, each and every day, as participants in the American experiment. Because ours is a prosperous nation, founded on and governed by the rule of law, and given to fits of great compassion and ceaseless innovation. There are imperfections, certainly, as there are and will always be in any large human undertaking, but the vast majority of us, as citizens, can have faith, when we rise and go out into the world, in the people around us, in the safety of our streets, in the integrity of our customs and enterprises. Binding the term faith up in a religious context, and particularly, in a right-wing Republican conservative Christian context, in fact, binds all of us by denying us one of the best terms available for our national identify: our relationship to our communities, our system of government, and the public servants we all trust and rely on each and every day. Because, in America, the faith we have in our teachers, first responders, school boards, town and city councils, trash collectors, road workers, postal carriers, and cops on the beat, and, most importantly, the faith we have in each other, is much more important to our social fabric than faith in any unseen deity in the sky.

“I Thought They Said Obamacare Was Evil”

Affirmation for the Affordable Care Act from an Unexpected Source

Republicans, predictably, have failed abysmally in their efforts to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act, or Obamacare, and the usual media hand-wringing can be expected to go on for at least a few more days. The New York Times covers both the public and private sides of the inevitable blame game, Reuters focuses on the Great Dealmaker’s inability to close his first big deal as president, and the Guardian actually finds a possible bright side for the president at the other end of all this. But the media report I found most interesting was this Anderson Cooper interview with Ohio Governor and former presidential candidate John Kasich, which appeared a few days before the failure of the repeal effort.


Fast-forward to 3:50 in the video to hear Kasich say this:

“If Republicans jam this through…we will be right back where we were…before we started with Obamacare.”

Now, Kasich certainly engages, throughout this interview, in the wild intellectual gymnastics all Republicans engage in when criticizing the ACA. But in the end, here is a prominent Republican leader, a governor of a swing state, saying out loud that in the days before Obamacare, the country was worse off. That is, Obamacare has actually made things better for Americans.

This is just one Republican, perhaps unwittingly, making this statement out loud on national television, but the reality is, the entire American Health Care Act debacle perpetrated by the president, Speaker of the House Paul Ryan, and all of their fellow Republicans, whether it be the governors, the Freedom Caucus, or the Tuesday Group, has, more than anything else, served to solidly affirm the importance of the Obamacare law and the sweat, toil, and political mastery that were required to get it enacted in the first place. Here are three reasons why:

1. Obamacare is a compromise. Despite the false narrative long pushed by Republicans that Obamacare was a shady deal negotiated in secret in back rooms, it was in fact a huge compromise. As moderate conservative thinker David Frum explains in a recent piece in the Atlantic, Obamacare constituted the “adoption of  ideas developed at the Heritage Foundation in the early 1990s and then enacted into state law in Massachusetts by Governor Mitt Romney.” Recall that President Obama and Democrats didn’t have to do this. They had the votes to pass a single-payer system of the kind Bernie Sanders still advocates, which would have been truer to liberal principles and in the end, I believe, much less expensive. But they knew there would be a huge political backlash, and that Republicans would be able to repeal and replace a single-payer law, probably with something that looked a lot like Obamacare, so they compromised.
   
   
2. Obamacare is a success. An analysis by Margot Sanger-Katz in a February piece in the New York Times clearly details the fact that, despite mixed results overall for the ACA, it has had some remarkable successes that would have been unthinkable before Barack Obama became president. Millions of Americans now have health care coverage and are now more financially secure, health insurance overall is now more comprehensive, and both income inequality and the federal budget deficit have been reduced. And one must always remember that these successes occurred despite a constant drumbeat of invective, hyperbole, and irrational resistance to the law by Republicans nationwide. Tweaks are certainly needed to address weaknesses, but total repeal is no longer even important to most Americans, and that’s because the law has delivered on its most important promises.
    
3. Obamacare has reframed the debate. As Sanger-Katz points out, “The Affordable Care Act has shifted the nation’s baseline expectations for how health care should work. Its successes have pushed Republican politicians, like Mr. Trump, into making expansive promises to provide insurance to all Americans.” And it’s not just government accountability that is discussed differently now; it’s health insurance and health provider services as well. As Sanger-Katz writes, “[Obamacare’s] failures have become focal points, too, leading to calls for lower insurance deductibles and for more choices in doctors and hospitals.” 

All of this indirectly led the president and Congressional Republicans to do something very strange over the past few weeks: after seven years of pledging to cheering crowds that they would totally repeal Obamacare immediately after taking power, they instead entered into a debate about how to modify the law: which provisions to keep and which to cast away, and what timing would be most advantageous politically. This tacit admission seems to have gone unnoticed, but that’s just what it was: a tacit admission that Obamacare had improved the lives of so many Americans, many of them Republicans, that it simply could not be repealed without massive political ramifications.

It’s hard to imagine in this weird aftermath of a bizarre, three-week Republican fire drill that the Obamacare law was debated in Congress for the better part of a year, that Republicans proposed dozens of amendments, many of which were accepted, and that many Democrats voted for the law despite serious misgivings. Even Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas, one of the more conservative Republicans in the Senate, has now admitted that the Democrats followed a more deliberative process in 2009 than the Republicans have with the AHCA. That’s called compromise, and it’s the necessary evil at the core of democratic governance.

As history judges this turbulent period in American politics, it could well be that Obamacare, whatever Republicans do in the coming months to try and push it over the cliff, just might go down as the last great legislative achievement of this democracy for a very long time.

Marco Rubio Finds a New Low

Marco Rubio, in a single comment on a debate stage, personifies every base debility known to American politics.

It’s no surprise that Senator Marco Rubio is a tool of his Big Money donors, but it is surprising to see the lengths he has gone to lately to keep the donations flowing.

When asked in the first Republican Presidential debate on August 6th about ways to help struggling small business, Rubio decided to use the occasion to attack a favorite bogeyman of Finance Industry–financed Republican candidates, the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act of 2010. These were Rubio’s words:

We need to repeal Dodd-Frank. It is eviscerating small businesses and small banks. 20 — over 40 percent of small and mid-size banks that loan money to small businesses have been wiped out over the — since Dodd-Frank has passed.

He fumbled a bit there, but this time it had nothing to do with cottonmouth. His mind was undoubtedly ruminating for a microsecond a couple of times on whether he should actually go ahead with the bald-faced lie he was about to utter.

His first fumble was whether to say 20 percent or 40 percent, and he tucked away the 20 and chose to go with “…over 40 percent.” This was the Big Lie.

(His second was whether to say “…over the Dodd-Frank law…” or “…since Dodd-Frank has passed…,” and he tucked away the “over” and chose to go with “since,” but this was inconsequential, since it was clear he was blaming the loss of community banks on Dodd-Frank.)

So, cleaned up, we end up with:

We need to repeal Dodd-Frank. It is eviscerating small businesses and small banks. Over 40 percent of small and mid-size banks that loan money to small businesses have been wiped out since Dodd-Frank has passed.

If you’re one of Rubio’s Big Money Wall Street donors, the senator chose wisely in issuing this statement. It blames the loss of the helpless little guy on the Big Bad Government. But if you’re someone interested in truth and in actually doing something to help America’s struggling middle class, the senator did not choose wisely at all, and he certainly isn’t choosing wisely in calling for the repeal of the single most important economic legislation of at least the last 30 years.

Because there is no data anywhere that shows 40%, much less “over 40%” of small banks in America being “eviscerated” at all, not by any force in the universe and certainly not by the Dodd-Frank law. It is true that somewhere between 16% and 22% of small banks in America have disappeared since 2010, but this is just a continuation of a trend that started in the early days of the Reagan administration, when deregulation made it irresistible for Big Banks to gobble up the small ones.

Both Congressional Republicans and their Wall Street financiers have been gunning for Dodd-Frank since Day 1, and even scored a stinging victory just last December, but rarely does one hear a call for out-and-out repeal. In order to issue one, Rubio not only had to fabricate his “over 40%” doomsday (a.k.a. right wing wet dream) fantasy, he had to deftly shift blame for the doom from the perpetrators to his victim. Because Dodd-Frank—even as toothless as Congressional Republicans have rendered it—remains the only weapon We the People have to prevent Wall Street from driving us headlong into another Great Recession, and the law does that by regulating the activities of Big Banks—those same Big Banks that have been gobbling up their smaller competition since the days of Reagan.

Small banks and businesses are not the victims of Dodd-Frank, they’re the victims of unfettered Big Banks—the same Big Banks whose nefarious activities Dodd-Frank is designed to curtail.

Marco Rubio is a relatively young man who has learned well from the masters of subterfuge who dominate American politics. What he is not is a qualified candidate for the highest office in the land.