In which established myths are challenged:

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

I am going to describe a decade in US history, falsely identified as when men were men and women were women, when US society was last innocent and just and a society that its fathers would have been proud of. In this decade there were two major wars in Asia, one of which saw a corrupt regime of non-communists which had strong ties with anyone but the actual people they claimed to govern toppled unexpectedly easily by an army of communists it truly and well outgunned. This produced mass hysteria and a Dolchstosslegende aimed at the Administration that did those things.

At the same time the Administration itself is buffeted by a wave of hysteria targeting a group of people who actually did nothing wrong, by a group of representatives going after un-American Activity, a bunch of Beltway crooks and liars forcing their views on the people at large. A senator who's done absolutely nothing honest in his entire life starts this massive wave of hysteria, launching show trials and is all along a hypocrite in so doing. At the same time there really is some smoke with the fire, as a regime that had once been an ally was now a true challenge to the United States.

There is also the growth of a new movement of urban activists, taking a challenge to an established injustice from the courtroom to the street, using non-violent means of resistance, provoking another massive wave of hysteria and outcry against so-called communists. Also provoking firebombings and attacks by people who are the leaders of a society dedicated to small government, a government not able to regulate what customers a business will or will not have. This hysteria and violence escalates to the point that the government must send in Federal soldiers to execute the laws, despite the dislike of this by the President himself.

Now, this decade is the 1950s, and it's the supposed "age of innocence." I do not remotely see how that decade got nostalgically turned into some era of golden streets and alabaster buildings, but it did. Is there a point to all this? There is indeed.

Nostalgia is both a powerful and a deceptive guide as far as politics. There's a general trend to want to return to a simpler past, ignoring that the supposedly simpler, kinder past was neither simple nor particularly kind. There's a general trend to demonize the new generations, ignoring that this dates all the way back to the Ancient World, not just the Classical World. This preference for a "real America" that never was ignores the vital point that it well.....never was. A society that lacks all ties to its past is endangered in one sense. To quote a famous Russian poet, revolution is the fatal attempt to leap from Monday into Wednesday, but the attempt to leap back into Sunday is just as destructive.

The political issues of the 21st Century are not those of the 1960s. There are no Bull Connors or Richard Nixons, Al-Zawahiri is not Nikita Khruschev or Chairman Mao. The issues of the 21st Century are also not those of the 1940s, fascism is well and truly dead and not even Frankenstein could bring *that* back from the dead. The USA would do well to not try to govern the 21st Century with the political philosophy of the 1830s, and to acknowledge that the necessity of a larger army and a larger population means that the USA must of necessity adopt better means of maintaining healthcare in these United States.

Private industry cannot do this, unless people here *want* a society ruled by large corporations, ensuring that no matter what happens there's always a bureaucracy with too much power. People must also accept that in the 21st Century US interests require a large army with necessarily well-equipped and strong military forces. This is not a question of should, it is a question of is. A 21st Century USA has the examples of UHC in other societies to draw from, perhaps there might even be a superior form improving on the best aspects of other systems.

The USA has sent people to the moon, and it has managed to capture views of Earth from Mars. It has managed to split the atom. Instead of the myopic obsession with 17% of the US population as "real America" holding to values never actually held, why not focus on the present and the future? Respecting the past is one thing. Seeing forward to the future is quite a different thing.

In my view I think the USA should adopt a UHC on the lines of the German system, and that the USA could also improve things here by the simple expedience of a revival of public transportation, bringing back railroads, things of this nature. The USA should also institute a requirement for mandated public service of some sort. The military is not the only option, working to improve cities, simply repairing broken windows, could do things. The USA should also improve the political system by setting up established, clear rules for political parties. I may not like or agree with the ones adopted, but their clear existence in its own right would be another step forward. The USA should also decide if it wants equality of opportunity to still be given lip service, or whether or not it's long past time to ensure that white and black people receive the same sentence for the same crime, and to ensure the system is biased against no-one on account of gender, sexual orientation, or race. These are the basic cores of what the 21st Century USA needs. What people of the 18th Century, who could not fathom the railroad, much less the trans-oceanic airliner would make of it is for all practical purposes as irrelevant as the writings of Plutarch.

What say you?

Comments

[root-fu.livejournal.com]

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

Nice graph. Is there a point to showing it without commentary?

edited

[root-fu.livejournal.com]

Something like.. Skyrocketing educational costs outpacing healthcare premium hikes could imply a dire need for educational reform.

Unless, the only legislation worthy of being passed happens to be bills with a huge potential for profiteering by corporate and political sectors. In which case, it could make perfect sense to ignore educational reform(low profiteering potential) and focus entirely on healthcare reform, instead.

Considering the similarity between rising healthcare and college costs -- its possible both are related. If the cost hikes associated with college are entirely raising of for profit colleges raising profit margins. Its possible, the increases in health care costs are related to the same type of exploitive profiteering.

/weak post is weak

[prog-expat.livejournal.com]

Inflation proves that small government = better government. Or something.

[caerfrli.livejournal.com]

The 1950s are seen as halcyon because for a large cohort of the population, those were the days of their youth and childhood or times they've seen idealized on TV. Don't forget, there are people who remember the 1930s and 1940s fondly. As for your proposed reforms, nice but not gonna happen.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

I know, which is itself odd. The rise of the totalitarians and WWII and then the onset of the Cold War hardly seem decades anyone would remember fondly, nor the heyday of Huey Long and the first McCarthyists.

[soliloquy76.livejournal.com]

popcorn.gif

$0.02

[harry-beast.livejournal.com]

A larger population does not create a greater need for government health care. If anything, increasing population results in reduced average returns on health care investments.

I support mandatory public service. I think it could help out with maintaining and improving crumbling infrastructure, it would occupy and employ young people, reducing exposure to negative influences and unhealthy lifestyles, and as a national institution, it would help to strengthen social cohesion. Another benefit is the development of useful skills, especially for the trades.

With regards to gender, sexual orientation or race, I think it's time to do away with political correctness, and adopt a standard of pure fairness. Creating bureaucracies to micromanage combinations of demographic factors to enforce arbitrary measures of fairness is expensive, pointless and divisive.

Re: $0.02

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

Actually larger populations *do* create a greater need for government health care and a larger role for government in general. For one thing cities of millions of people require infrastructure suited to millions of people. You can't run New York City on the budget of Cut Off, Louisiana. Doing this on a national scale is the GOP approach to "sound finance" and it's about as logical as adopting the Somali policy on Gun Control.

I agree that it's best to do away with PC provided we take into account factors such as the inbuilt bias of the system to favor the wealthy at the expense of the poor. If we don't, we keep the status quo and maybe it's just me but the status quo ain't cutting it.

Re: $0.02

[harry-beast.livejournal.com]

Actually larger populations *do* create a greater need for government health care and a larger role for government in general.
I agree that this is your personal opinion, but can you reveal the basis for your assertion? There is a social tendency for a higher degree of freeloading in larger populations, resulting in pressure for greater government redistribution; I don't consider this a need. To the contrary, a larger population allows the government to reduce average health care expenditures because the impact on productivity of the reduction is spread over a larger number of people.

cities of millions of people require infrastructure suited to millions of people
Tautological and irrelevant to the discussion. Cities of millions of people have different needs and different challenges compared to small towns. This means different levels of spending per capita. For example, large cities have economies of scale, higher wages and better access to specialists, for example.

Regarding your third point, I agree that the status quo is not serving society very well, and I have no reservations about measures to ensure fairness between the wealthy and the poor. Unfortunately, the current PC doctrine is a blunt instrument that does little to address this issue directly, but only increases confusion, conflict and further inequalities. Why is this? Probably because the wealthy don't want their privileges to be affected.

[sandwichwarrior.livejournal.com]

While aside from your initial judgment of private industry there is nothing in your post that I would specifically disagree with I would like to point out that any future system we build must rise from the one that we have and as a result there are numerous constraints that would not otherwise exist if we want a peaceful transition.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

This is also true, and what I was getting at by mentioning said "to leap from Monday into Wednesday is destructive" proverb.

[jerseycajun.livejournal.com]

"People must also accept that in the 21st Century US interests require a large army with necessarily well-equipped and strong military forces. This is not a question of should, it is a question of is. A 21st Century USA has the examples of UHC in other societies to draw from, perhaps there might even be a superior form improving on the best aspects of other systems."

There's always a should. Can't be gotten around. Protecting "interests" is what most of our conflicts over the last century have been over, conflicts which no less than you yourself have rightly railed against, making the statement all the more ironic given that it appears you're defending that which makes them possible and encourages them.

As for health care, we're dealing with two bureaucracies, so while changing it to one would carve out a chunk of the cost initially, it is only the more obvious of two cost-drivers. The other one is driven by the lack of an economic relationship between doctor and patient, and as long as people do not have to talk to their doctors about the costs of services and the only economic relationship is between a third party and the doctors, the long term problem remains.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

I think there's a difference between that and recognizing that the USA's geopolitical situation does require a large army. It's not the 1880s anymore. We can't have an army smaller than Romania's.

[jerseycajun.livejournal.com]

There's a difference between requiring an army smaller than Romania's and requesting an army that's just large enough to concern itself with actual defense.

I suppose it depends on what one considers "large" however.

[allhatnocattle.livejournal.com]

"Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country." -JFK

[deborahkla.livejournal.com]

I say hear, hear, and I'd vote for you in a heartbeat.

Few people seem to grasp just how horrible the 1950s actually were. They're also completely unaware of how McCarthyism reshaped the Federal Government in general and the State Department in particular, and the impact the latter had on our foreign policy over the last 55 years.

My father was one of many, many men who were "RIF"ed out of the Federal Government through Harold Stassen's fraudulent tests because he was accused of being a "leftist with leftist tendencies" per Stassen (actually, my father scored higher on the test than Stassen did.) He and many others were bright young men from poor backgrounds, fresh from the war and/or the War Labor Board, experienced with labor and educated through the GI Bill. They differed substantially from the patrician WASPs who until then had filled the ranks of the State Department. Many of them were liberal and many of them, like my father, were Jews, which at that time was still the equivalent of "communist" to many people.

My father was the country representative to Afghanistan. In the 1950s, Afghanistan was one of the most progressive, modern countries in Central Asia if not THE most progressive. Kabul was called the Paris of Central Asia. The city at that time had cinemas, cafes, formal French gardens, schools, libraries and universities where both women and men had access to education and a better future. Women were granted the right to vote in 1963, and shortly thereafter they began to serve in Parliament.

The Afghani Ambassador praised my father as the best representative that the US had ever sent to his country. That didn't help him. He still lost his job, and his future, and all his friends lost their jobs, too. My parents' phone was tapped--but at the time this was so common that a New Yorker cartoon featured a man calling his wife at home and saying "hello, darling, and all you men listening in!" After months of working in a small department store selling shoes to support his three small children, my father finally got a job with the Asia Foundation that took the entire family across the country.

My point is that there was a very real possibility, until McCarthy and Stassen came along, that the state department might have been transformed from an entity solely concerned with business interests to one that might have had more humanitarian interests. My father and his many friends strongly believed that all countries had the right to self-determination. It was a concept that fueled my father's work in Afghanistan.

Who knows what these young men and women--and those like them in other areas of the federal government that also lost their jobs umder McCarthy/Stassen--might have accomplished if they'd had the opportunity. Who knows how different our country might have been in both its domestic and foreign policy? We hear a lot about the Hollywood blacklist, but never about these people who might have shaped the future--and thus our present--in a very, very different way

[anfalicious.livejournal.com]

You're loving the "In which" device a lot these days. It's like Ye Olde El Jay.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

Eh, sometimes you have to go a Milne to get people to see an inch. ;P

[root-fu.livejournal.com]

Have you been watching A Game of Thrones? Seems like the type of thing you might enjoy. [:

[anfalicious.livejournal.com]

Go for it, I'm all for literary style in History. I got seriously discouraged from writing in a populist style for my honours thesis when I said "History is boring because it's made up largely of people with absolutely no talent for writing so they've made it standard for academic History to be boring to cover up their own inadequacies". To which my supervisor replied "get over yourself, you're not Nietzsche". I told him that he should reserve that decision until he had read my work. By the time I'd given him the first chapter he'd shut up about my style :P

[kylinrouge.livejournal.com]

Never change, underbuddy.

What people fail to realize is that America is becoming an urban nation. 90% of the population lives 10% inland. 60% live in cities. I think it's time to recognize these facts and re-structure our infrastructure networks to appeal to mass transit, essential services, and communication.

The facade of equality that we call The United States Senate is just a tool of the minority to impose their will upon the majority. The House, which actually represents the will of the people, has passed numerous legislation that dies at The Senate or becomes mangled to the point where the original spirit of the piece of legislation is lost.

[jerseycajun.livejournal.com]

No legislation can pass without support from both houses. This rubbish that the senate controls and imposes is just that. It's just as true to say the House thwarts the ability of the minority to defend itself from the tyranny of the majority.

[kylinrouge.livejournal.com]

In theory, yes. In practice, no. I would prefer if the Senate had a more regional grouping instead of just giving 2 per state, or just abolished altogether.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

Perhaps it's so to you. To me, I notice the only time a political party wants to change the fillibuster is when it doesn't control the Senate. There is a necessity for the Senate, though I think that the whole parliamentary filibuster needs to go.