Stick a fork in compassionate conservatism, because it’s done. The Bush-era formulation was always more of a marketing device than an actual philosophy — just ask New Orleans about that vaunted compassion — but the past few months have been particularly cruel. Already on its last legs, Republican compassion took a serious hit in the September 12 primary debate, when the crowd seemed to cheer the prospect of an uninsured 30-year old dying on the street. Ron Paul, who denounced the “welfarism and socialism” of government-sponsored health care and maintained that “freedom is all about taking your own risks,” was asked by host Wolf Blitzer whether “you saying that society should just let him die.” The audience erupted into cheers and shouts of “yeah!”
Coming on the heels of a debate in which the audience jeered a gay soldier and cheered at the mention of the death penalty, this was perhaps not a surprising reaction. Viewers shaking their heads at home could at least chalk up the response to an auditorium packed with Florida Tea Party members. But blaming the lack of empathy on the redneck wing of the GOP will only get you so far, as last week’s Supreme Court arguments over the Affordable Care Act demonstrated. Discussing the unique nature of the health care market, Solicitor General Donald Verrilli pointed out that, unlike car insurance, everyone will eventually consume medical services — and, insured or not, those people will at least receive emergency treatment. Take a look at the following exchange between Verrilli and Justice Scalia:
Verrilli: In the health care market, you’re going into the market without the ability to pay for what you get, getting the health care service anyway as a result of the social norms that allow — that — to which we’ve obligated ourselves so that people get health care.
Scalia: Well, don’t obligate yourself to that.
Yes, Justice Scalia — that’s the sort of America I want to live in, one in which the definition of “liberty” is the liberty to let the indigent die at the emergency room door. Why, in this land of absolute individual freedom, should a hospital feel any obligation to treat an uninsured gunshot victim or assist in the birth of a homeless woman’s baby? No matter how tongue-in-cheek Scalia’s impudent response, it betrays not only a lack of compassion but a lack of respect for the basic social contract. Government is not the only institution built on the human willingness to care for one another; libertarianism, if taken to the extreme, undermines the fabric of civilization itself. Even primates display altruistic characteristics, to say nothing of medical students supposedly binding themselves by the Hippocratic Oath.
Andrew C. McCarthy, writing in the conservative National Review, puts an even more apathetic twist on Scalia’s objection to basic humanity. McCarthy’s take is particularly sinister because he is completely serious, with none of Scalia’s cynical wit. For a party that trumpets itself as the defender of moral values, McCarthy is astoundingly amoral. Responding to Justice Kennedy’s assertion that the individual mandate changes the relationship of citizen to government “in a unique way,” McCarthy writes:
But how unique, really, is the Obamacare mandate? Assuming we are still a free society, of course it is offensive for government to coerce citizens into buying health insurance. But is it not equally offensive for government to coerce private hospitals to treat patients for free? . . . . In the law, a contract is a voluntary bargain. What we’ve tolerated for a very long time, however, are adhesive arrangements of involuntary servitude. The law’s usual word for that is extortion.
Extortion in the health care market is apparently “our longstanding, bipartisan, Big Government condition.” McCarthy advocates a return to something he calls “free-market health care,” which I can only assume refers to the vaunted 19th century tradition of abandoning the poor to outbreaks of typhus and cholera while the rich barricaded themselves in the relative sanitation of their mansions. McCarthy believes the federal government should stay out of health care altogether:
If people at the state or local level think everyone should be entitled to emergency medical care, that’s fine — they ought to raise taxes and pay the hospitals to provide it. If they think sick or high-risk patients who can’t get affordable private medical insurance ought to have their treatment paid for nonetheless, they ought to raise taxes to pay for that, too. It is great to be noble, but it’s not noble to throw around other people’s money.
I can picture it now: If you’re counting on an open-door policy at the ER, make sure you live in a blue state. Texas, Alabama, Mississippi — all those low-tax, anti-entitlement red states won’t be coddling residents with free emergency treatment. What, I’d like to know, is the Republican obsession with “other people’s money”? Witness Rick Santorum announcing that he doesn’t want to “make black people’s lives better by giving them somebody else’s money” (or, as he later claimed, “blah people’s lives). See the Wall Street Journal denounce the “lucky duckies” who are too poor to pay income taxes and thus supposedly live on other people’s dime.
If the Catholic Church, whose hospitals have a long-standing commitment to providing charity care, thinks it’s doing itself any favors by allying with the Republican Party on issues of contraception and gay marriage, it should take a look at McCarthy’s opinions. I see little evidence of “love thy neighbor as thyself” in his writing. This is a party that claims to love American exceptionalism and speaks ad nauseum about the shining city on a hill, yet dismisses the value of compassion with lines like, “It’s great to be noble,but.”
Antonin Scalia and the National Review are not fringe, Birch Society-type elements of the GOP. They’re not even as radical as Ron Paul. But if this is what passes for mainstream conservative thought, I can hardly imagine — or, rather, I can too easily imagine — what Glenn Beck and Andrew Breitbart’s followers will come up with next. The only lighthearted note in Andrew McCarthy’s jeremiad against the evils of socialized medicine comes at the very end, when an Onion-worthy footnote informs us that “Andrew McCarthy is the author, most recently, of The Grand Jihad: How Islam and the Left Sabotage America.”
Really, at this point, is it better to laugh or cry?
. . . So Well Read. . . 