Author Archives: Larry Franz

Ideology: A Very Short Introduction by Michael Freeden

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This is volume 95 in the Very Short Introduction series published by Oxford University Press. I suppose it was worth reading, although I expected more about particular ideologies as opposed to the general nature of ideology.

Freeden defines a political ideology as: “a set of ideas, beliefs, opinions and values that

(1) exhibit a recurring pattern
(2) are held by significant groups
(3) compete over providing and controlling plans for public policy
(4) do so with the aim of justifying, contesting or changing the social and political arrangements and processes of a political community.”

He identifies four main political ideologies (socialism, liberalism, conservatism and fascism) but argues convincingly that none of them can be precisely defined. What they share are general commitments to certain fundamental principles, which can also be understood as preferred ways of applying certain key terms. For example, a liberal and a fascist may both be in favor of “freedom” and “justice” but define those terms differently and apply them to different situations.

Freeden doesn’t think that having an ideology is a bad thing. He clearly favors some ideologies over others, but suggests that having a political ideology is like having fundamental principles or preferences, and that it’s almost inescapable to have an ideology if you take politics seriously. At least in the Western world, the four mentioned above, although they have evolved through the years, have been the most frequently adopted.

Throughout the book, Freeden emphasizes the importance of language in the study of ideology:

Ideologies compete over the control of political language as well as competing over plans for public policy; indeed, their competition over plans for public policy is primarily conducted through their competition over the control of political language.

The “Skinny” Repeal of the ACA Is Back

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Republicans in the Senate want to cut taxes so much for rich people and corporations that the federal deficit would go way up. That means they need to reduce government spending or find new revenue to offset the cuts. Their latest idea is to bring back the “skinny” repeal of the Affordable Care Act. The repeal would be “skinny”, because the only thing being repealed would be the “individual mandate”, the requirement that people have health insurance or pay a fine.

But why would getting rid of the individual mandate help offset tax cuts? The reason is that millions of low-income people would no longer buy health insurance, so the government would no longer need to give money to help them afford it. Right now, the government spends millions of dollars on health insurance subsidies for people who couldn’t otherwise get it. If those people don’t have health insurance anymore, the subsidies won’t be paid.

Unfortunately, there are serious problems with this approach. From The Washington Post:

 

Repealing the mandate would undermine … key parts of the Affordable Care Act. The health care law banned insurance companies from discriminating against people with pre-existing health conditions. But in order to prevent people from waiting to buy insurance until they got sick, the law … imposed financial penalties [the individual mandate] for individuals who did not maintain health insurance coverage.

 

Health experts say eliminating the mandate would destabilize the individual insurances markets set up by the Affordable Care Act, as they would be full of people with high health care costs but have far fewer of the healthy people that insurance companies bank on. In response, insurance companies would likely either massively raise premiums or pull out of the marketplaces entirely.

 

A powerful group of stakeholders, including the major health insurance and hospital insurance lobbies and two influential doctors’ groups, wrote a letter to leaders from both parties arguing that they should retain the individual mandate.

 

“There will be serious consequences if Congress simply repeals the mandate while leaving the insurance reforms in place: millions more will be uninsured or face higher premiums, challenging their ability to access the care they need,” the groups wrote.

The Congressional Budget Office (CBO), among others, analyzed “skinny” repeal earlier this year. Their conclusions led three Republican senators to vote against it on the night of July 27th (it was in all the papers). Maybe the same three will defeat it again if it’s part of the Republican tax bill, but there might be more pressure on them to accept it this time.

Meanwhile, Republicans in the House of Representatives have their own version of the tax legislation. Today, the CBO had something to say on that. From Yahoo Finance:

 

If the House GOP tax plan passes, it is projected to cut revenue significantly, likely increasing the deficit by $1.456 trillion from 2018 to 2027, according to the Joint Committee on Taxation and Congressional Budget Office.

 

… the CBO explained that without any more money to offset the fall in revenue, the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) would be required to issue a “sequestration order” to reduce spending in 2018 by $136 billion.

 

The effects of this sequestration order would trigger automatic cuts to various programs, including Medicare. According to the CBO, this could be as much as 4% for Medicare, which amounts to $25 billion in 2018. Furthermore, all non-exempt programs would be eliminated, which include some farming subsidies, border security, and student loan help.

So, in order to give the wealthy and corporations an enormous tax cut, Republicans will either raise insurance premiums for millions of average Americans or apply major spending cuts to programs like Medicare (or do both). This is in addition to increasing taxes on millions of people who itemize their deductions because they have big medical bills or live in states or cities with high taxes. All of this will happen while they increase the deficit by $1,456,000,000,000, give or take several billion. 

On the plus side, the president, his family, the billionaires in the Cabinet and lots of other plutocrats, including many CEO’s, will have a lot more money in their very deep pockets, a few dollars of which will trickle down to the rest of us. Inequality will increase, people will die too sooner, but that’s all right, because I’ve got mine, Jack!

This, That and the Other Thing

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There are few places as forlorn as a resort town on a chilly, cloudy, damp, out of season weekday afternoon. Thus, Virginia Beach, Virginia, last week:

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But let’s move on.

Paul Waldman writes about “The GOP’s Baffling Decision to Raise Taxes on Millions of Americans” at The Week.

If there’s one thing we thought we could count on in this crazy world, it’s that Republicans will never, ever, ever support a tax increase. It wasn’t always this way — Ronald Reagan, who to hear some people tell it practically walked the Earth without sin, actually raised taxes multiple times — but today there may be no more foundational belief to the GOP than the principle that taxes must come down, everywhere and always.

Nevertheless, “the GOP is right now rallying around a bill that will raise taxes on tens of millions of Americans.” It certainly is strange. One part of the explanation, however, is that Republicans aren’t very good at this governing thing. Another part is that they’re so eager to cut taxes for rich people and corporations, they’re willing to antagonize millions of voters and lie about what they’re doing.

As a partial antidote to the above, consider reading all about “The Relentless Honesty of Ludwig Wittgenstein”. Ian Ground presents an excellent overview of Wittgenstein’s philosophy, both early and late, at The Times Literary Supplement.

That Was the Year That Was

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The title of Michelle Goldberg’s overview of the past year in The New York Times is “The Anniversary of the Apocalypse”. I thought “apocalypse” was too much, but Merriam-Webster says it means “a great disaster”. That’s fair. In what follows, I’ve removed all descriptions of particular offenses:

In the terror-struck and vertiginous days after [the] election a year ago, as I tried to make sense of America’s new reality, I called people who lived, or had lived, under authoritarianism to ask what to expect. I wasn’t looking for concrete predictions — one of the disorienting things about that moment was that no one, no matter how learned, had any idea what was happening — but for insights into how the texture of life changes when an autocratic demagogue is in charge.

A secular Turkish journalist told me, her voice sad and weary, that while people might at first pour into the streets to oppose [him], eventually the protests would probably die out as a sense of stunned emergency gave way to the slog of sustained opposition. The Russian dissident writer Masha Gessen warned that there’s no way, with a leader who lays siege to the fabric of reality, to fully hold on to a sense of what’s normal. “You drift, and you get warped,” she told me.

They were both right. The country has changed in the past year, and many of us have grown numb after unrelenting shocks. What now passes for ordinary would have once been inconceivable….

… this nightmare year has upended assumptions about the durability of the rules, formal and informal, governing our politics. There’s a metaphysical whiplash in how quickly alarm turns into acceptance and then into forgetfulness….

Hannah Arendt once wrote of the role vulgarity played in undermining liberalism in pre-totalitarian societies: “The temporary alliance between the elite and the mob rested largely on this genuine delight with which the former watched the latter destroy respectability”…. In this administration, crassness has become a weapon, annihilating social codes that once restrained political behavior, signaling that old standards no longer apply.

Lately, the pace of shocks has picked up, even if our capacity to process them has not….In another administration this [take your pick] would have been a major scandal. In this one it barely registers.

How can America ever return from this level of systematic derangement and corruption? I wish there was someone I could ask, but we know more about how countries slide into autocracy than how they might climb out of it. It’s been a year, and sometimes I’m still poleaxed by grief at the destruction of our civic inheritance.

In moments of optimism I think that this is just a hideous interregnum….

Hey, all we have to do is win more elections, like we did tonight in Virginia and New Jersey. Or we could get the opposition to develop a sense of shame. One of those should be manageable.