Tyrannies of the Majority.

photo credit: Neil Parekh; via Creative Commons

After months of predicting that HCR was going to fail, Megan McArdle now says its passage augurs horrible things for the future of the American political process. (A more humble person would just stop predicting things, but this is McArdle we’re talking about.)

Regardless of what you think about health care, tomorrow we wake up in a different political world.

Parties have passed legislation before that wasn’t broadly publicly supported.  But the only substantial instances I can think of in America are budget bills and TARP–bills that the congressmen were basically forced to by emergencies in the markets.

One cannot help but admire Nancy Pelosi’s skill as a legislator.  But it’s also pretty worrying.  Are we now in a world where there is absolutely no recourse to the tyranny of the majority?  Republicans and other opponents of the bill did their job on this; they persuaded the country that they didn’t want this bill.  And that mattered basically not at all.

This is such a wild reading. She’s saying this process was too majoritarian, even though it’s been a policy goal of every Democratic president since FDR and even though it was pretty much a non-starter during the many, many years when Democrats controlled Congress. And this particular iteration of the push for health care overhaul has taken damn near a year, with the bill finding itself on life support every few months, Scott Brown-style setbacks, Stupak/Snowe-style grandstanding, and the right-wing political establishment demonizing the hell out of it (death panels, “socialism”, the G.O.P.’s sudden transformation into deficit hawks, McArdle’s own concern-trolling on the questionable dangers posed to drug research, etc.) and lagging public support for it. After all this, the White House eked out the passage of a pretty moderate bill by a tiny legislative margin.

This is what “the tyranny of the majority” looks like? This is the bill’s unpopularity (and it isn’t all that unpopular) not mattering at all? If so, capriciously enacting the callous majority party’s will is really fucking hard.

But since this debate has been a boom season for sports metaphors and clichés, lemme one more: The White House and Nancy Pelosi just wanted it more. There were so many chances for them to bow out, and it’s probably safe to say that most politicians, reading the ominous signs of their fates in the midterms, would have changed the conversation. Our government is generally averse to undertaking big projects (except for wars), and it took everything breaking right to get this one through. Like most folks, I’m annoyed  that this legislation took so damn long and was subjected to so many ridiculous distortions, but if you’re a conservative, how can this last year (or hundred years, really) be insufficiently deliberate for your tastes?

G.D.

G.D.

Gene "G.D." Demby is the founder and editor of PostBourgie. In his day job, he blogs and reports on race and ethnicity for NPR's Code Switch team.
G.D.
  • Sometimes I feel as though conservatives who say these kinds of things can’t possibly believe what they’re saying. Like, they have to be saying it for the page views and the chance to get on CNN/Fox News/MSNBC and be Pundit for a Day. Otherwise, there is no way a conservative can look at what it took to get this bill passed and say his/her voice wasn’t heard. I mean, really.

    • I’m not begrudging her her right to not like the bill or its passage. She never wanted it to pass, and no incarnation of the bill would have satisfied her. That’s fine.

      But she’s whining because she didn’t get what she wanted, and trying to pretend as if there’s something fundamentally wrong with the system because what she didn’t get what she wanted.

      • R.A.B.

        I imagine G.D. meeting McMegan, and it being like that very first scene in American Gangster with the gas canister and the dark alley.