Progressive Myopia is a degenerative condition of the eye leading to blindness. Our partisan myopia is a degenerative condition leading to political blindness and is on display today.
Roger Cohen writes today on the healthcare debate, affirming The Public Imperative:
Whatever may be right, something is rotten in American medicine. It should be fixed. But fixing it requires the acknowledgment that, when it comes to health, we’re all in this together. Pooling the risk between everybody is the most efficient way to forge a healthier society.
Europeans have no problem with this moral commitment. But Americans hear “pooled risk” and think, “Hey, somebody’s freeloading on my hard work.”
To imagine that the debate about healthcare simply factors down to concerns over someone else "freeloading" is trite and inane. Are there aspects of such an argument in the debate? Of course, yet the debate has seen some fairly sophisticated analysis of the dangers that some of the proposed changes will engender. My particular concerns have been for the threat to innovation (see here for a current example) and the disincentives for our smartest young people to go into Medicine, but there have been a great many other particulars discussed by many other very smart commentators. For Cohen to base his entire article on this idea is not only lazy but smacks of someone trying to find a way to discredit "the other side" rather than someone willing and able to engage in an open and honest good faith debate.
Paul Krugman, in his inimitable style, goes Roger Cohen one better (or would that be one worse?)
There was what President Obama likes to call a teachable moment last week, when the International Olympic Committee rejected Chicago’s bid to be host of the 2016 Summer Games.
“Cheers erupted” at the headquarters of the conservative Weekly Standard, according to a blog post by a member of the magazine’s staff, with the headline “Obama loses! Obama loses!” Rush Limbaugh declared himself “gleeful.” “World Rejects Obama,” gloated the Drudge Report. And so on.
So what did we learn from this moment? For one thing, we learned that the modern conservative movement, which dominates the modern Republican Party, has the emotional maturity of a bratty 13-year-old.
But more important, the episode illustrated an essential truth about the state of American politics: at this point, the guiding principle of one of our nation’s two great political parties is spite pure and simple. If Republicans think something might be good for the president, they’re against it — whether or not it’s good for America.
Lets immediately note that Krugman conspicuously fails to mention the noxious rhetoric that came from his side of the divide, including barely disguised wishes for the United States to lose in Iraq (see Michale Moore's "Minutemen" quote, et al) all through the Bush administration. For Krugman to fail to appreciate that the Right found some Schadenfreude in Obama's Olympian humiliation for a host of reasons, the least likely being any pleasure at America failing, is disingenuous at best, an example of Progressive Myopia at its most overt. Krugman is a bright man so when he misses the point by such a large margin, it suggests that he is looking through a progressive lens that damages his perceptions.
There are some genuine reasons brewing that should be cause for disquiet on the Progressive side of the partisan divide, but their appearance in the Progressive sphere is minimal. Honest Progressives should be horrified by the Obama administration's efforts to support the UN in its attempts to limit Freedom of Speech, a right generally accepted as a fundamental in America. As per Anne Bayefsky: [All emphases mine-SW]
You Can't Say That
At the UN, the Obama administration backs limits on free speech.The Obama administration has marked its first foray into the UN human rights establishment by backing calls for limits on freedom of expression. The newly-minted American policy was rolled out at the latest session of the UN Human Rights Council, which ended in Geneva on Friday. American diplomats were there for the first time as full Council members and intent on making friends.
President Obama chose to join the Council despite the fact that the Organization of the Islamic Conference holds the balance of power and human rights abusers are among its lead actors, including China, Cuba, and Saudi Arabia. Islamic states quickly interpreted the president's penchant for "engagement" as meaning fundamental rights were now up for grabs. Few would have predicted, however, that the shift would begin with America's most treasured freedom.
For more than a decade, a UN resolution on the freedom of expression was shepherded through the Council, and the now defunct Commission on Human Rights which it replaced, by Canada. Over the years, Canada tried mightily to garner consensus on certain minimum standards, but the "reformed" Council changed the distribution of seats on the UN's lead human rights body. In 2008, against the backdrop of the publication of images of Mohammed in a Danish newspaper, Cuba and various Islamic countries destroyed the consensus and rammed through an amendment which introduced a limit on any speech they claimed was an "abuse . . . [that] constitutes an act of racial or religious discrimination."
The Obama administration decided that a revamped freedom of expression resolution, extracted from Canadian hands, would be an ideal emblem for its new engagement policy. So it cosponsored a resolution on the subject with none other than Egypt--a country characterized by an absence of freedom of expression.
...
The new resolution, championed by the Obama administration, has a number of disturbing elements. It emphasizes that "the exercise of the right to freedom of expression carries with it special duties and responsibilities . . ." which include taking action against anything meeting the description of "negative racial and religious stereotyping." It also purports to "recognize . . . the moral and social responsibilities of the media" and supports "the media's elaboration of voluntary codes of professional ethical conduct" in relation to "combating racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance."
This should disturb Progressives. After all, the modern left received a major infusion of credibility and youthful energy from the Berkeley Free Speech Movement of the early 1960s. Yet they are now willing to sell their birthright for warm feelings from the world's worst despots. Where are the Progressives warning the Obama administration of the danger to our most cherished rights?
[I am not naive. I know that the left has been trying to shut down debate for years, but there should be some who actually believe in their professed beliefs.]
Ross Douthat notes an even more problematic issue for the Progressives.
Not long ago, liberals were insisting that income inequality was America’s most serious economic problem.
The latest census figures show the gap between the wealthiest Americans and everybody else widening — rather than shrinking, as some economists expected — during the crash of 2008. An August report from Bank of America/Merrill Lynch suggested that middle-income Americans, buried in real-estate debt, will have to wait much longer than the rich to see their finances rebound.
This landscape will put liberalism to the test. Since Ronald Reagan was elected nearly 30 years ago, Democratic politicians have promised that their program could reverse the steady post-1970s growth of income inequality without sacrificing America’s economic dynamism.
But having promised win-win, they may deliver lose-lose. In the short run, Barack Obama could preside over an America that’s more economically stagnant and more stratified.
There’s only so much that politicians can do about broad socioeconomic trends. The rise of a more unequal America is a vexingly complicated issue, whose roots may wind too deep for public policy to reach.
Liberals, though, have spent decades telling a more simplistic story, in which conservatives bear all the blame for stagnating middle-class wages and skyrocketing upper-class wealth. So it’s fair to say that if a period of Democratic dominance doesn’t close the gap between the rich and the rest of us, it will represent a significant policy failure for contemporary liberalism.
Progressives have long declared they were the repository of societal fairness. Barack Obama, when out of reach of his teleprompter, on more than one occasion declared that fairness was more important than efficacy when it came to economic and taxation policy. If the Progressives fail to deliver greater fairness, they will have nothing to offer their supporters, yet it apparently required the lone Conservative voice at the New York Times to mention this inconvenient truth.
I could go on. The hoax at the core of the Anthropogenic Global Warming scam (the now shown to be non-existent "hockey stick") has not yet found its way into print, and is worth a post of its own, yet the resounding silence from the Progressives suggests a blindness that is worsening. The Progressives clearly have a debilitating case of Progressive Myopia.
*A more appropriate title for this post would be Partisan Myopia; although my focus is on the Myopia of the Progressive side of the political divide, there is plenty of Myopia on the right as well. The irresistible pun and my tendency to more clearly see the Myopia on the left made the title unavoidable.
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