Frum: Meaning of a GOP "Win" on Health Care

David Frum of the conservative blog New Majority on what a GOP "win" in the health care debate would mean.

The problem is that if we do that… we’ll still have the present healthcare system. Meaning that we’ll have (1) flat-lining wages, (2) exploding Medicaid and Medicare costs and thus immense pressure for future tax increases, (3) small businesses and self-employed individuals priced out of the insurance market, and (4) a lot of uninsured or underinsured people imposing costs on hospitals and local governments. We’ll have entrenched and perpetuated some of the most irrational features of a hugely costly and under-performing system, at the expense of entrepreneurs and risk-takers, exactly the people the Republican party exists to champion. Not a good outcome.

It seems clear that many of the tea-baggers haven't given the consequences of reaching their political goals serious consideration. As Andrew Sullivan points out on The Daily Dish, their fear and rage aren't necessarily about health care at all.

But the vicious anger from the far right, which is to say what is currently the right, seems totally out of proportion to these (health care) reforms. Where does that come from? It comes from the same place as the tea-party protests. It's partisan, of course...But it is also surely cultural - an expression of the rage some in white America feel at the new social make-up of their country.

If that is what you really believe - that people in cities or suburbs, that minorities, that gays, that blacks and Hispanics are not part of "real America" - then of course, you are angry. You believe a fake America has taken over. You cannot understand this. So you start believing that we have a fascist/communist dictatorship, that there was some fraud allowing a non-citizen to become president, that the government is about to "take over" all healthcare provision ... and on and on. And no one is left in the GOP to challenge this, to calm it down, to present practical alternatives to the obvious crushing problems the country and the private sector have in paying for increasingly costly healthcare.

To me, this is a triumph of ideology. And conservatism is now an abstract anti-government ideology, fueled by cultural, racial and sexual resentment. This is a recipe for more violence, and more marginalization.

--Ballard Burgher