|The Ghosts of Liberal Pieties||Injustice, American Style|
by Christopher Chantrill
July 03, 2012 at 6:00 pm
WHAT IN the world was Chief Justice Roberts trying to do by voting with the liberals on ObamaCare? Conservative opinion is all over the map, but conservative talk show hosts were clear, as I drove south from liberal Seattle to liberal Ashland, Oregon, on June 28, 2012, that the ball was in the voters court.
Whatever you think of Roberts decision, his message was unequivocal. If you dont like ObamaCare then youd better vote it down in November. In this he gives conservatives real clarity.
If the Supreme Court conservatives had voted down ObamaCare by a vote of 5 to 4 the liberals would not have accepted it, any more than the pro-life movement accepts Roe v. Wade. There was only one way in 2012 to make a Supreme Court decision to invalidate ObamaCare stick, and that would have been for Justice Kagan to join the conservative majority in a 6-3 decision. Why Kagan? Look at the other three liberals: Ginsburg was a liberal ACLU lawyer; Breyer was a Kennedy staffer; Sotomayor an affirmative action pickliberal hacks every one. But Elena Kagan was dean of Harvard Law School and Solicitor General; she is the liberal educated elite. Her vote to overturn would have been an admission from the educated establishment that ObamaCare was unjust and wrong.
Good luck with that. So the only way to make liberals accept a repeal of ObamaCare is by the brute force of political power, the mandate of the voters expressed at the ballot box, just as Chief Justice wrote in the majority decision.
Chief Justice Roberts did his level best nudge the voters. First of all, he ruled that ObamaCare is constitutional because it is really a tax. This means that Mitt Romney and a dozen SuperPACs can tell the voters that President Obama has raised taxes on the middle class. Secondly, Roberts ruled that the federal government cannot penalize states that dont accept expanded Medicaid.
These two poison pills hand the president a poisoned chalice. Tell it like it is, Howard Cosell used to say: a tax is a tax. Forget using Medicaid as a bludgeon to force the states to enroll the near poor.
The central weakness of ObamaCare is the same as the HillaryCare of 18 years ago. It does nothing for the middle class. The middle class already has health insurance. The Obamis tried to surround this truth with a bodyguard of lies about everyone being able to keep their present health insurance and with the canard that a penalty is not a tax. Now Chief Justice Roberts has insisted on telling the American people the truth.
If Americans vote against President Obama in November it will be the third election that liberals have lost on the health care issue. Perhaps liberals will finally get the point.
It is, of course, grossly unfair that the liberals can create unjust law with the help of the Supreme Court but conservatives cant use it to repeal injustice. But life is unfair. Liberals get to use the Supreme Court as their pet pony because they are the educated elite and the aristocratic branch of government is naturally the branch of the educated elite. Conservatives merely add up to a sub-culture allied with movements of resistance on abortion, guns, and taxes.
The generation-long conservative strategy for turning the Supreme Court from a liberal rubber stamp into a bench with respect for the Constitution as written is a good one. But it cannot make liberals abandon their program of political domination and what James C. Scott in Seeing Like a State calls internal colonialism, the domestic liberal equivalent of the old imperialist program of using raw power to bring the benefits of civilization to the backward natives whether they like it or not.
This means that Chief Justice Roberts is right. There is no short cut to reforming the welfare state and ending its reign of injustice and oppression. It must be accomplished through the expression of the American popular will.
Ultimately conservatives must still persuade the liberal educated elite that their once noble program has turned into a cesspit of injustice and cruelty that visits its harshest cruelties on the people it is supposed to help, the folks in Charles Murrays underclass Fishtown, the single mothers on welfare and the men that have dropped out of the work force. But intelligent people dont abandon their closed system on their own. They will only be persuaded by the ruin of their hopes and the destruction of their power. That is what elections are for.
Today conservatives are disappointed. The Supreme Court failed to wave a magic wand over ObamaCare and make it disappear in a pinch of fairy dust. But it gave us a bracing dose of reality and did us the favor of handing President Obama a poisoned chalice to drink from. Tomorrow conservatives must return to the fight.
Buy his Road to the Middle Class.
[W]hen I asked a liberal longtime editor I know with a mainstream [publishing] house for a candid, shorthand version of the assumptions she and her colleagues make about conservatives, she didn't hesitate. Racist, sexist, homophobic, anti-choice fascists, she offered, smiling but meaning it.
Harry Stein, I Can't Believe I'm Sitting Next to a Republican
Families helped each other putting up homes and barns. Together, they built churches, schools, and common civic buildings. They collaborated to build roads and bridges. They took pride in being free persons, independent, and self-reliant; but the texture of their lives was cooperative and fraternal.
Michael Novak, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism
[To make] of each individual member of the army a soldier who, in character, capability, and knowledge, is self-reliant, self-confident, dedicated, and joyful in taking responsibility [verantwortungsfreudig] as a man and a soldier. — Gen. Hans von Seeckt
MacGregor Knox, Williamson Murray, ed., The dynamics of military revolution, 1300-2050
For [the left] there is only the state and the individual, nothing in between. No family to rely on, no friend to depend on, no community to call on. No neighbourhood to grow in, no faith to share in, no charities to work in. No-one but the Minister, nowhere but Whitehall, no such thing as society - just them, and their laws, and their rules, and their arrogance.
David Cameron, Conference Speech 2008
Imagining that all order is the result of design, socialists
conclude that order must be improvable by better design of some superior mind.
F.A. Hayek, The Fatal Conceit
[Every] sacrifice is an act of impurity that pays for a prior act of greater impurity... without its participants having to suffer the full consequences incurred by its predecessor. The punishment is commuted in a process that strangely combines and finesses the deep contradiction between justice and mercy.
Frederick Turner, Beauty: The Value of Values
[The Axial Age] highlights the conception of a responsible self... [that] promise[s] man for the first time that he can understand the fundamental structure of reality and through salvation participate actively in it.
Robert N Bellah, "Religious Evolution", American Sociological Review, Vol. 29, No. 3.
But the only religions that have survived are those which support property and the family.
Thus the outlook for communism, which is both anti-property and anti-family, (and also anti-religion), is not promising.
F.A. Hayek, The Fatal Conceit
[T]he way to achieve a system of determining admission to the public schools on a nonracial basis,
Brown II, 349 U. S., at 300–301, is to stop assigning students on a racial basis. The way to stop
discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.
Roberts, C.J., Parents Involved in Community Schools vs. Seattle School District
A writer who says that there are no truths, or that all truth is merely relative, is asking you not to believe him. So dont.
Roger Scruton, Modern Philosophy
Paul Dirac: When I was talking with Lemaître about [the expanding universe] and feeling stimulated
by the grandeur of the picture that he has given us, I told him that
I thought cosmology was the branch of science that lies closest to religion.
However [Georges] Lemaître [Catholic priest, physicist, and
inventor of the Big Bang Theory] did not agree with me. After thinking it over he
suggested psychology as lying closest to religion.
John Farrell, The Creation Myth
Within Pentecostalism the injurious hierarchies of the wider world are abrogated and replaced by a single hierarchy of faith, grace, and the empowerments of the spirit... where groups gather on rafts to take them through the turbulence of the great journey from extensive rural networks to the mega-city and the nuclear family...
David Martin, On Secularization