WASHINGTON -- It's time to inflatable slides cast aside the political shorthand and ideological pigeonholing that distort our debates over health care in particular and government's role in American life more broadly.

The way words such as "centrist" and "bipartisan" are now deployed turns the discussion away from useful arguments over how various proposals might work and toward arid talk about how ideas fit into prefabricated boxes.

The impact of this warping of reality, brought home daily in the health care fight, was dramatized in last week's debate in the House of Representatives over a bill to expand federal aid to students by eliminating subsidies to bankers.

The bill, which passed 253-171, would allocate about $80 billion over the next decade for new loans, community colleges, school construction and early childhood programs without increasing taxes or adding to the deficit. How? Instead of paying bankers to inflatable water games provide loans for which they bear no real risk, the government would make the loans directly.

Liberals are always accused of spending money without worrying where it comes from, but in this case, costs are covered by making a government program more efficient -- yes, at the expense of bankers.

"We were paying these exorbitant subsidies to bankers who were taking government money, loaning it to somebody else, getting government guarantees that the loans would be paid back, and then taking all these profits," said Rep. George Miller, D-Calif., the inflatable tent bill's champion. This, he told me, led Congress to ask itself: "Hey, chump, what is it you don't get about what's going on here?"

The only knock on the proposal is ideological: that government is "taking over" the student loan program. But it's already a government program. The bill simply eliminates corporate welfare.

This is a classic case of how the Great Ideological Distortion Machine does its mischief: Instead of focusing on how the bill advances values typically regarded as "centrist" -- government efficiency, pay-as-you-go budgeting -- the banks' defenders bury the specifics behind abstract discussions of "big government." Yet I'd venture that middle-of-the-road Americans prefer that their tax money go toward education rather than to padding the profits of financial firms.

The same distortions have affected the health care debate. Opponents of a public insurance option don't want to talk about what it actually is--one alternative that would expand choice in the insurance marketplace. Instead, they pretend that it would amount to (that phrase again) a "government takeover" of health care.

But that would be true only if individuals themselves freely chose the public plan in overwhelming numbers, and the public plan has already been so hemmed in that its share of the market will be limited.

Or take a look at the efforts of Sen. Max Baucus, D-Mont., to make his health plan "centrist" by holding down costs. One way he does this is by cutting subsidies to middle-class Americans without insurance. Because the Baucus bill mandates that everyone buy a policy, many families in the $60,000 to $85,000 income range who now lack coverage could end up paying almost a fifth of their incomes on health care costs. What, pray, is "centrist" about hitting part of the middle class so hard?

This provision will almost certainly be changed at the insistence of not only Democrats such as Sens. Jay Rockefeller of West Virginia and Ron Wyden of Oregon, but also one of the last authentically centrist Republicans, Sen. Olympia Snowe of Maine.

That Snowe may be the single Republican who could vote for health care reform tells us a lot about the state of bipartisanship. In the days when there were a lot of moderate and even liberal Republicans, bipartisanship typically involved Democrats proposing that government undertake various worthy projects while moderate Republicans demanded efficient and market-oriented means to achieving those ends.

But all of the health bills on offer, even the supposedly "liberal" House bill, are already centrist compromises built on a private health insurance market and entailing less government spending than many liberals think is necessary. Why is Snowe almost alone in her party in acknowledging this?

 

Irving Kristol, who died on Friday at the age of 89, was often called the godfather of  neoconservatism. And so he was, along with Norman Podhoretz, who has actually done far more to set the (foreign-policy focused) agenda and (insistently combative) tone of inflatable products shape recent neocon thinking and writing. Kristol’s impact was felt earlier, as he led a group of moderately liberal academics and intellectuals on a rightward migration across the political spectrum during the 1970 and ’80s. It’s an important story that’s been told countless times. What’s less often recognized is that while Kristol was growing more conservative he was also undergoing a different sort of transformation—from a dispassionate analyst of American politics and culture to a fully engaged advocate for a comprehensive political ideology. Lamentably, it is this change more than Kristol’s gradual drift to the right that may have done more to shape the contemporary conservative mind.  

When Kristol and Daniel Bell co-founded The Public Interest in 1965, they did so as liberals. But their liberalism differed in one important respect from the outlook that motivated Lyndon Johnson’s vision of inflatable air dancer a Great Society. While the early contributors to the journal shared the goals of their fellow liberals, they were skeptical of Great Society liberalism because it was an ideology. In the editorial announcing the first issue of The Public Interest (which can be read here), Bell and Kristol voiced concern about the tendency of ideologues to “insistently propose prefabricated interpretations of existing social realities—interpretations that bitterly resist all sensible revision.” The Public Interest, they declared, would be “animated by a bias against all such prefabrications.”

And it was, in issue after issue, as social scientists, political theorists, and experts in PVC model public policy crunched the numbers and analyzed the outcomes of Great Society liberalism in an effort to determine what worked, what didn’t, and what might work better. The tone was consistently sober, pragmatic, moderate, urbane, ironic—in a word, dispassionate. The magazine’s editors and authors were obviously motivated in large part by public spiritedness. But they believed that the most responsible way to contribute to the good of the nation was to restrain the urge to promulgate an ideology, which though it nearly always “seems to go deeper, point further, [and] aspire higher” in fact frequently inspires thinking that is marked by a “bland disregard for opposing fact” and a “smug self-assurance.”

The measured tone persisted even as Kristol and his colleagues turned their critical attention to the impassioned radicalism of the New Left. In their early writings on the subject they avoided polemical denunciations of the illiberalism and anti-intellectualism they detected among some elements of the counterculture. Instead, they attempted to reflect carefully and cautiously on what was happening around them. In one of their most influential theories, they argued that when modern societies reach what Daniel Bell called a “post-industrial” level of development they tend to become increasingly dependent on a “new class” of highly skilled intellectuals, including scientists, teachers, journalists, lawyers, psychologists, social workers, and other professionals. Since all societies are dominated by some elite, the rise of this new class was unremarkable aside from one troubling fact: intellectual elites differ from others in their tendency to adopt an adversarial, even subversive, relation to their own societies. As literary critic Lionel Trilling noted in an important essay of the mid-'60s that significantly shaped the political imagination of Kristol and the other early neocons, the modern intellectual stakes out and occupies “a ground and a vantage point from which to judge and condemn . . . the culture that produced him.” Using these concepts to analyze America in the early ’70s, Kristol and his colleagues concluded that the tumult and turmoil of the time could be traced to the influence of a decadent and subversive elite.

 

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