{"id":12635,"date":"2009-12-23T15:08:31","date_gmt":"2009-12-23T20:08:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kith.org\/journals\/vardibidian\/2009\/12\/23\/12635.html"},"modified":"2018-03-13T18:54:01","modified_gmt":"2018-03-13T23:54:01","slug":"constantly-confronted","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/2009\/12\/23\/constantly-confronted\/","title":{"rendered":"constantly confronted"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

I keep meaning to mention that Jonathan Bernstein has a blog<\/a>. Some of y’all may know him—he’s David S. Bernstein’s brother, for one thing—and he’s a social acquaintance of mine from way, way back. He is a political scientist, and his blog is about politics, mostly current politics, although he does have both a background in theory and experience working on Capitol Hill, which occasionally provoke a really informative post. He also has (probably not by coincidence) an attitude toward representative democracy that is very near to YHB’s own.\n

Here<\/a>, for instance, is something I completely endorse: To be active—to really engage—in democratic politics means constantly being confronted with just how different everyone is, and how much that feels right and important and necessary to you is going to be threatened.<\/i>\n

Now, as y’all know, I think the fact that people are different, one to another, is what makes the world interesting and fun. But I do understand that it also makes the world complicated and confusing. I think Jon is right that what makes real engagement in politics so frustrating in a democracy is that you cannot escape that difference for a day or an hour.\n

On occasion, and even sometimes in this Tohu Bohu, I say to people that if I could appoint a President, anyone that I thought would be the best at the job, I wouldn’t do it. I would rather have a crappy President elected than a great one appointed. The point being that democracy is more important to me than good governance, and in a democracy, one person’s good governance is another person’s waste, fraud and abuse. And just because I’m right<\/i>, doesn’t mean my rightness has any more weight than another person’s wrongness.\n

This means that the health care finance reform bill that now seems very likely to pass is not going to be my<\/i> bill. I suppose that is easy for me; my bill was so far off the table that our Socialist Senator didn’t even introduce it. I think it’s a lot more frustrating for people who thought for some reason that the House Bill (leaving aside Sen. Stupak’s Amendment) was their bill. Or for people who have not (yet?) adjusted to that confrontation with political difference, and learned to celebrate it. Or for people who prefer good government to democracy.\n

Which I understand. I mean, it matters that this bill will not achieve Health Care for All. It matters that the redistribution of wealth that surrounds health care is in a direction that is bad for people. It matters that we have not really tackled the problems of private insurance as they affect people’s health. It matters that the resources within health care are so badly distributed. It really does matter. And when I am faced with somebody who tries to avoid paying out-of-pocket on a cold and then goes to an overburdened ER which is not able to treat their pneumonia—and maybe gets another infection on top of that—it isn’t all that much relief to mention that she lives in a democracy, where votes count equally, whether they know anything about health care or not. Or that the Senate is designed<\/i> to slow down the pace of change, a feature that made me extra-happy in 1995 and 1996. Or that I really do think, in the long, long run, that the battle is for the broad sympathies of the culture, and that we are winning it, slowly, slowly. Slowly.\n

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus<\/I>,
-Vardibidian.\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In Which Your Humble Blogger still wonders what it’s like in that alternate universe, the one where Abe Ribicoff wins the 1952 election for Senate.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[204],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-12635","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12635","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12635"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12635\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18962,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12635\/revisions\/18962"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12635"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12635"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12635"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}