Dishonesty has its virtues. Lies are essential political tools. Little lies are often forgiven or overlooked by the public. But when a political party wants to enact major pieces of its agenda, to be successful that party must be essentially honest about what it wants to do and why it wants to do it. Oh there can be little lies that grease the skids of legislative machinery. But politicians need to level with their voters (and themselves) about the broad outline of their plans and the reasons behind them.
This year Republicans have been consistently dishonest about their motivations for health care reform. They attack Obamacare for insuring too few people, and hiking premiums, and having high deductibles–even though the GOP plan would insure fewer people, and hike premiums, and have high deductibles.
In fairness to Republicans, the party suffers from not being on the same page about how they actually want to reform the health care system. Here is Peter Suderman writing for Reason.com: “The GOP’s real problem, in terms of passing legislation, isn’t that the party can’t agree on specifics, or that legislators need to bargain their way toward a compromise that gives everyone something they want. It’s that they don’t agree on, or in some cases even have, basic goals when it comes to health policy. This bill, and the aura of secrecy surrounding it, seems more like a wish and a hope that this essential problem goes away rather than an attempt to truly solve it.”
This was written back in early March, a week after Paul Ryan was hiding the bill in the Capital basement. But the sentiment is still true at the end of June when Mitch McConnell is busy hiding parts of the Senate version from the public and his own members.
The GOP is also in a bind because it has been promising to do something “terrific” on health care for over seven years. GOP leaders have long decried a litany of Obamacare problems: rising premiums, populations who are still uninsured; job-killing regulations. Their strategy was based on politics, not policy. In opposition, they said whatever would be perceived of as popular. We heard much less of their actual market-based policy ideas, which they knew would be less popular: the idea that markets will be healthier if people have to work harder to get their health care thus causing them to spend smarter.
As Mathew Yglesias points out in Vox: “They were taking a completely genuine conservative policy critique of [Obamacare] — that it was making things a little too cushy for people, so they might decide to quit working — and turned it into roughly the opposite argument… The habit of doing this repeatedly — not just saying things that aren’t true, but refusing to state Republicans’ actual objections to the law — is what has painted the Republican Party into a corner.”
Here is Ross Douthat summing up what the conservative policy shop agrees on about health care: “In theory there is a coherent vision underlying Republican health care policy debates. Health insurance should be, like other forms of insurance, something that protects you against serious illnesses and pays unexpected bills but doesn’t cover more everyday expenses. People need catastrophic coverage, but otherwise they should spend their own money whenever possible, because that’s the best way to bring normal market pressures to bear on health care services, driving down costs without strangling medical innovation. Republican politicians may offer pandering promises of lower deductibles and co-pays, but the coherent conservative position is that cheaper plans with higher deductibles are a very good thing, because they’re much closer to what insurance ought to be — and the more they proliferate, the cheaper health care will ultimately be for everyone” (my emphasis).
If this is what Republicans truly believe, why not come out and say so? Why not rally the public with this argument? Whatever the reason, it is clear they made the choice not to do so. They have chosen to be dishonest.
According to reporting by Vox’s health care expert Sarah Kliff, Trump’s Health Secretary Tom Price “repeatedly made false promises about what the American Health Care Act would do. He told CNN that the bill would “absolutely not” result in millions of Americans losing Medicaid. He told NBC that the goal of the Republican plan is to ‘make certain that every single person has health coverage.’ Non-partisan analysis of the Republican health care bill shows that neither of these claims are true. The Republican plan would result in millions of Americans losing Medicaid coverage. Passing the bill would reduce rather than increase how many people have coverage.”
And here is exasperated conservative columnist David Brooks: “Because Republicans have no governing vision, they can’t argue for their plans. Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price came to the Aspen Ideas Festival to make the case for the G.O.P. approach. It’s not that he had bad arguments; he had no arguments, no vision for the sort of health care system these bills would usher in. He filled his time by rising to a level of vapid generality that was utterly detached from the choices in the actual legislation.”
In contrast, the Democrats were clear and transparent about their intentions in 2009-10. They may have told a few little white political lies in the process, but their main goal was clear: to overhaul the health care system to provide widespread access to insurance for those who do not have it, and to pay for it by redistributing money from the wealthy.
After the first attempt to pass the American Health Care Act failed, Senator Tom Cotton, Republican from Arkansans and Trump surrogate, described what an honest approach to selling health care reform looks like: “When the Democrats came to power in 2009, for 60 years, at least, they had been pursuing a national health care system, yet they didn’t introduce legislation for eight months. They didn’t pass it for over a year of Barack Obama’s first term. So it went through very public hearings and took testimony, developed a fact-based foundation of knowledge. President Obama traveled around the country, held town halls. He spoke to a joint session of Congress. I am not saying that we needed 14 months to do this, but I think a more careful and deliberate approach… would have gotten us further down the path towards a solution…. I think the House moved a bit too fast; 18 days is simply not enough time for such major landmark legislation.”
Here was a Republican politician suggesting–pleading?–for an honest approach to selling conservative health care reform. Cotton was urging his party to take time to convince the country of the merits of their reform ideas. That was in March, and none of the recommendations Cotton mentioned have happened. The party still has not explained its principles and working theories to the country. As a result, this week the latest polls show the GOP plan has an average 15% support with the public, which the Washington Post rightly calls a “stunning indictment of the GOP’s failure to sell the bill.”
The GOP Has Been Here Before… with Gay Marriage
Republicans were consistent and strident in their case against gay marriage, but as with health care reform, they never bothered to explain the reason they were against it. As a gay college student during the Bush years, one who longed to be married someday, I was paying close attention. I listened to political arguments and to preachers. I heard over and over how opposition to gay marriage was not about hate and that those who harbor hate need to pipe down and let the professionals handle this. George W. Bush said that civilization depended on the sanctity of marriage, but when the moment in the speech came for him to explain exactly why that was so, he simply said “don’t try to take a spec out of my eye if you’ve got a log in your own”–a biblical cue to the faithful not to be judgmental.
In the final hour, when the Supreme Court was deciding California’s Proposition 8, when conservatives had a chance to make their final plea for traditional marriage–this balm of civilization–they balked. Instead they wanted to talk about cell phones. Samuel Alito asked this from the bench: “Traditional marriage has been around for thousands of years. Same-sex marriage is very new. There isn’t a lot of data about its effect. And it may turn out to be a good thing; it may turn out not to be a good thing, as the supporters of Proposition 8 apparently believe. But you want us to step in and render a decision based on an assessment of the effects of this institution which is newer than cell phones or the Internet?”
We were told over and over: marriage is between one man and one woman because it has always been this way. Politicians were content to repeat the talking points they perceived to be broadly popular, even anodyne to the ears of heterosexuals. But they never even tried to describe the underlying moral logic behind the talking point. They were not honest about what they believed.
There must have been conservative writers who tried to make the case, although I only ever ran across one: Ross Douthat, who has a good track record for honesty when it comes to conservative principles. In 2010, Douthat wrote with moral and intellectual clarity about the potential threat of gay marriage. He described the harm that may come to society, especially the poor, when “the incentives and prohibitions that reinforced the sex-marriage-reproduction-childrearing nexus have weakened to the point of nonexistence, and where there aren’t the potential rewards of the meritocratic ladder to make people intensely cautious and responsible about sex and relationships and childrearing.” He warned us to take seriously the possibility that without “institutional, cultural and legal support, heterosexual life seems to revert to a kind of serial monogamy, shading into de facto polygamy, in which there’s plenty of coupling and plenty of kids… that the formal shift away from any legal association between marriage and fertility will eventually lead to further declines in the marriage rate and a further rise in the out-of-wedlock birth rate.”
This had the virtue of being an actual argument, the starting point of a conversation. The problem was that by 2010 it was too late to begin that conversation. The gay community was on the march, and most other Americans had stopped caring about the issue.
Also this: in America, the public negotiates the terms of social policy with our elected representatives, not members of the intelligentsia. Republican politicians had two presidential terms–six years of which they also controlled Congress–in which to make Douthat’s case to the American people. They did not do so for a simple reason: this principle of a purer marriage ideal shifts almost all of the obligation and sacrifice from gay people onto heterosexuals.
If George W. Bush had started a true national debate about what protecting traditional marriage actually involves, the conversation would have come to include not just prohibitions against gay marriage but also policies and ultimately laws that sought to compel heterosexuals to become “intensely cautious and responsible” with their sexual affairs. They could have ushered in an America that forbade gay marriage but also Britany Spear’s 55-hour-long marriage and no-fault divorce, etc. I think Carl Rove might have counseled against the electoral benefits of that debate.
Had that debate started in the early 2000s, I have no idea how it would have turned out. I do know that if Bush had asked me to sacrifice my “gay marriage” for the good of the country at the same time he asked all Americans to sacrifice (assuming he threw in the promise of legal protections and some token overtures to gay people’s dignity) I would have at least heard him out. Who knows? It’s at least possible that things might have turned out differently in that particular culture war, and that exclusive heterosexual marriage would still be legally protected today.
But the conservatives did not even show up, and so gay marriage is the law of the land. Will it be the same with Obamacare? I’d like to think that the public will only accept big changes to the social compact if the advocates for change are transparent about what they want to do and why. Regarding health care, this means asking voters to use more of their own money and less government assistance to shape their health care choices. Even if the GOP health care bills pass into law, the only way Republicans will convince Americans to work harder and pay more for their health care is to look them square in the eye and ask them to do so.
That’s a hard road. The truth is often a hard road, just as sure as it is the only road to the promised land.