Is Conservatism On Life Support?

ETHAN MALVEAUX
Jul 21, 2017 · 5 min read

The failure of the GOP Senators to recruit enough members within their ranks to pass a repeal of the Affordable Health Care Act (aka Obamacare) brings into focus the cross roads national Conservatism is in as an viable ideology. In spite of the election of a Republican President as well as the control of both houses of Congress, there are now a handful of Republican senators who are not willing to fulfill what was the rallying point of the party and especially the movement known as the TEA Party–get rid of Obamacare no matter the cost! The advent of this opposition to the repeal and replace measures of the legislative Right can only be the result of knowledge that the majority of the American people no longer subscribe to the principles of free market Healthcare; nor do they have an inherent attachment to the rugged individualism which is appalled at the expansion of government during the last decades of the twentieth century. Indeed when President Bill Clinton said, “the era of big government is over!” it was assumed that the Conservatives, as part and parcel of the President Reagan’s legacy, had won the argument of the Twentieth Century: the individual knows better how to take care of his or hers needs (especially healthcare) than the bureaucrats of Washington. However after the developments of this past week, it seems as though the country is on a trajectory to single payer universal healthcare and the upending of the argument for a small government with limited social impact. Should this happen the GOP will be neutered and without any fundamental distinction from the Democrats–thus rendering the Republic a one party system.

To understand this crisis in the Republican Party (and quite frankly the national two party system) in totality, two things must be examined: The lack of a previously developed plan to deal with the problems of Healthcare in a conservative way and the loss of an overall ideological confrontation of the New Deal realignment of the social contract. The lack of a serious GOP Healthcare bill ready to go after the November election, with needed alterations, CBO scored, and generally defensible, is an unmitigated blunder by the Congressional Republicans. Just because no one on capital hill thought Donald Trump was not going to win the 2016 Presidential Election is not a viable excuse for that kind of dereliction of duty. The seven years that had elapsed between the passage of Obamacare was more than enough time for Conservative leaders like Paul Ryan, Tom Price, and Mick Mulvaney (in the House) and Rob Portman, John Borrasso, Ted Cruz, Mike Lee (in the Senate) to have developed a Republican Healthcare plan that would have been sufficient to pass a Republican led government.

As we know, the lack of a unitary Republican Healthcare Bill at the beginning of the Trump Administration was the reason for a scramble to create one in the first months of 2017. Thus forcing a recalcitrant Freedom Caucus to balk at being coerced into to signing onto something that was hastily thrown together without years of hashing out. Although enough of them eventually supported the bill to pass out of the House, the collapse of a Senate bill to move the repeal and replace process through was a disaster waiting to happen given the present state of politics in Washington. Unable to pass on a strict party line vote under the parameters of a budgetary guideline with no room for more than two defections, the Senate Republicans have their backs up against the wall trying not to nullify what was their raison d’etre for one party control of government. This is why the great Twentieth Century Conservative politico and thinker Margaret Thatcher pronounced that you must get “policy right before you focus on the rhetoric.” The Conservatives having campaigned on the repeal of Obamacare made it explicit this was an existential threat to private enterprise and capitalism in general; and nationalizing one sixth of the American economy had no place in public policy. Such a violation of the social contract ripped up the prized place individualism and choice: requiring the young to buy insurance to pay for the old and infirmed while using the IRS to penalize any American financially for not participating in the further enlargement of government.

But the lack of a GOP plan for government oversight of the Healthcare industry was the product of a ideological disposition that doesn’t anticipate that the free market will either fail to rectify the problems of the industry or that the average citizen no longer has trust nor is willing to wait indefinitely for the free market to fix them. Here in lies the ideological conundrum on the Right of the political divide.

Ever since FDR introduced the bipartisan supported New Deal programs into the law and public conscious the argument for government intervention has prevailed in the battle between laissez faire and Federal control. The success of the New Deal laws created an apparatus of social policy (like Social Security) that rivaled and simultaneously dwarfed the free market in moral benevolence. As the Spencerian capitalistic dynamic lost its grip on the American psyche the Conservatives became more Butskellite in their politics–at least in metropolitan areas–in order to win office.

Furthermore, the success of the New Deal caused the American people to turn to the federal government in times of crisis to the detriment of free enterprise and individual responsibility. The addition of the Medicare and Medicaid programs under LBJ only increased the general mindset of trusting the government with a crisis instead of the market. The Conservative movement has never leveled with itself and admitted that it lost the battle with the New Deal in the public imagination. Within the modern conception of Conservatism it is taken for granted that all future policy from the Right is meant to preserve the social programs formulated on the Left while trying to uphold a lesser or contained federal footprint in everyday life. Hence George W. Bush’s invention of “Compassionate Conservatism.” Nonetheless any attempt to curtail or leave to the private sector in partial or total control and administration of the healthcare business will be viewed by most Americans as an unacceptable solution; and will highlight the fact Americans trust big government with their problems more than the free market. Moreover, a concession by the GOP to keep the government constricted in a post New Deal twentieth century harness will be portrayed as heartless and merciless which is the genesis of the characterization by President Trump of the House version of the repeal and replace bill as “mean.” The fact of the matter is that Obamacare is the ideological point of no return for the Republican Party. Should the Senate GOP fail to repeal and replace Obamacare they will never gain control over the ideological argument for limited and smaller government as well as robust capitalism in the private sector again. Those few Senators like Rand Paul, Jerry Moran and Mike Lee have in their hands the fate of the party. Should they remain recalcitrant against any Healthcare Bill proposal they will be responsible for delving a mortal blow to their own political persuasion-ironically. All that will be left for Conservative politicos will be slogans while, to quote Thatcher again, “the fine print of policy” and governing will merely pitch camp “in the long march to the left.” The binary choice is clear!

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ETHAN MALVEAUX

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Author, Historian, Political Conversationalist

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