Dewey’s Shadow, Chomsky’s Cloud, and the Health Care Debate

It’s nothing new for American politics to be subordinated to the dictates of capitalism and the business elite beneath and beyond the charade of popular governance. Sixty four years ago a brilliant young historian named Richard Hofstader noted that “the fierceness of [American] political struggles [past and present] has often been misleading, for the range of vision embraced by the primary contestants in the major parties has always been bounded by the horizons of property and enterprise” and been “fiercely…capitalistic” as well as “intensely nationalistic.”[1]

A generation before Hofstader, the great American philosopher John Dewey observed that “politics is the shadow cast on society by big business.” Dewey significantly observed that U.S. politics would stay that way as long as power resided in “business for private profit through private control of banking, land, industry, reinforced by commend of the press, press agents, and other means of publicity and propaganda.”[2]

Twelve years before Dewey wrote that passage the prolific American Socialist novelist Upton Sinclair used a fictional representation of Eugene Debs to observe that “the two [dominant U.S.] political parties” were “two wings of the same bird of prey The people [are] allowed to choose between their candidates, and both of them [are] controlled, and all their nominations [are] dictated by, the same [money] power.”[3]

Nearly four decades into the neoliberal era, however, the moneyed elite’s abject domination of the nation’s political and policy processes has reached a level that almost defies belief. Noam Chomsky put it very well last summer, in the wake of the grotesque elite-manufactured debt-ceiling crisis, when the leaders of both of the major parties agreed to slash government expenditures in standard defiance of majority citizen support for increased public investment to address mass unemployment. “Since the 1970s,” Chomsky observed, “[Dewey’s] shadow has become a dark cloud enveloping society and the political system. Corporate power, by now largely financial capital, has reached the point that both political organizations, which now barely resemble traditional parties, are far to the right of the population on the major issues under debate.” [4] 

Consider as one contemporary point among many the stark corporate and financial captivity and narrow state-capitalist contours of the sorry and constricted debate over the national health insurance reform bill currently being reviewed by the right-wing U.S. Supreme Court. In Washington and across the paranoid-style, neo-McCarthyite talk radio and FOX News airwaves, the Republican right is again (reprising themes that brought us the Tea Party phenomenon in 2009 and 2010) accusing the deeply conservative Obama[5] and the Democrats of attacking American liberty and prosperity with a state-socialist plan hatched from the writings and speeches of Marx, Lenin, and Hitler. They can hardly contain their fear for the republic, threatened by the “big government” dagger of totalitarian “Obamacare.”

The right wing business propagandists do not seem likely to inform those they have egged into dread that Obama’s “radical leftist” insurance bill is based on the legislative proposals of the right wing Republican Heritage Foundation in the 1990s. Modeled largely on a state-level plan that likely Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney passed and oversaw as governor of Massachusetts, it is dedicated to a vision of “change” that leaves a parasitic oligarchy of giant private insurance and drug companies free to extract and extort massive profits that drive health care costs to the breaking point for individuals, families, communities, non-profits, small businesses, and government.

So what if, as the economist Dean Baker has shown, we could eliminate the dreaded fiscal deficit by replacing the hopelessly dysfunctional privatized and employment-based health insurance system with a universal public model similar to what exists in other industrial nations – with a system that would cut health costs in half and yet deliver superior outcomes? And so what if a solid U.S. public opinion majority has long favored a Canadian-style single-payer system whereby the government grants equal health coverage to all citizens regardless of wealth, income, and other social distinctions?[6] 

None of this matters in the authoritarian U.S. “plutonomy” (Citigroup’s lovely 2005 term for America’s dollar-drenched distortion of democracy[7]). As Chomsky observed last year, “the financial institutions and Big Pharma are far too powerful for such options even to be considered.”[8]  

Welcome to Dewey’s dark cloud and the nation’s gaping “democracy deficit” – a much bigger problem than the related and much-bemoaned fiscal deficit.

The dominant propaganda says that a relevant moment for citizen input on matters of policy comes in the nation’s periodic, highly time-staggered election spectacles. Not really. Those highly personalized big money and big media “quadrennial extravaganzas” (Chomsky[9]) are less about serious policy matters than they are about the competing  mass-marketed images of establishment-vetted candidates,[10] who know that their elite sponsors do not tolerate popular challenge to the financialized corporate and imperial priorities of the regime.

The current epic Supreme Court deliberation hinges on whether or not the federal government has the right to compel all citizens who can afford it to be covered by the private health insurance mafia. Under the terms in which it is being debated before the high court, Obama’s misnamed “Affordable Care Act” would apparently pass muster if it was a single-payer bill whereby the federal government used its tax and administrative powers to become –in accord with technically irrelevant majority opinion – “we the people’s” insurance-provider: the de facto de-commodifier of health coverage. But, of course, no U.S. president is about to defy the nation’s real power centers by advancing a vision of health care that transcends the narrow “horizons of property and enterprise” to that degree.

It will not do to blame the ever crazier right wing Republicans alone for this unhealthy state of affairs. The Obama team and their fellow corporate Washington Democrats made sure to take serious progressive health insurance reform (single-payer) off the table of “the national health care debate” from the beginning of the “hope” presidency. The not-so leftmost wing of the nation’s bipartisan state-capitalist bird of prey dangled ever-more-meaningless versions of a mysterious “public option” (never seriously entertained in the face of business opposition) before the bewildered and marginalized populace while acting to entrench the unchallenged hegemony of the relevant corporate and financial players. [11]  In this as in so many other ways, the Obama-era Democrats showed that they are no less beholden to the “hidden primary of the ruling class” (Laurence Shoup) than the G. [Tea.] O.P. – a great experiential lesson that helped bring the Occupy Movement into being last fall.

As liberals fret over the power of unelected justices to veto Obama’s “duly legislated” corporatist health insurance bill we would do well to consider the deeper power of the nation’s unelected dictatorship of money[12] to prohibit progressive measures supported by most of the population at earlier stages in the policy process.

Paul Street (paulstreet99@yahoo.com) is the author of many books and studies, including Racial Oppression in the Global Metropolis: A Living Black Chicago History (Rowman&Littlefield, 2007); Still Separate, Unequal: Race, Place, Policy, and the State of Black Chicago (Chicago, IL: Chicago Urban League, 2005); and Empire and Inequality: America and the World Since 9/11 (Paradigm, 2004); and Crashing the Tea Party (Paradigm, 2011, co-authored with Anthony DiMaggio)

Selected Notes