[UPDATED] Obamacare isn't socialism nor is it a victory for the one percent -or- Your hyperbole isn't cute.

Twitter is all abuzz with the news of the individual mandate being upheld in the Supreme Court.  Of course, being Americans on twitter, this means one of three things:

                AMERICA HAS DIED TODAY.  WE ARE THE UNITED STATES OF RUSSIAN SOCIALIST FASCIST EVIL, NOW.  OBUMMER WILL KILL US ALL WITH HIS JACK BOOT OF INSURANCE MANDATES!

or

                WOO!! WE DID IT! WE HAVE WON THE WAR AGAISNT THE REPUBLICAN PROPAGANDA MACHINE THAT IS TRYING TO TIE OUR UTERUSES UP WITH BARBED WIRE AND FILL OUR LUNGS WITH SMOG FROM BIG BUISNESS! LONG LIVE OBAMA! FOUR MORE YEARS! FOUR MORE YEARS!

or

                OBAMACARE HAS PAVED THE WAY FOR INSURANCE COMPANIES TO MILK THE LIFE OUT OF THE POOR AND WORKING CLASS, AND IS ANOTHER TAX INCREASE THAT GOES TO FUND ONE PERCENTERS' VACATION HOMES!

                The thing is, elephants, jackasses, and occupiers: you're all wrong.  Fucking wrong.  So fucking wrong that it hurts my eyes to read through tweet after tweet of hyperbolic belly aching.  It's possible that you're all right, that you're all correct in your own little way and that Obamacare is really just a multifaceted killer of the American dream.  Or, more likely, we've devolved rapidly over the two centuries of American politics and now just scream the most extreme possible statements in an effort to draw attention to something that most people don't even fully understand.  Instead of having some level headed discussion of the pros and cons, or trying to find common ground, or trying to find a new point where all sides can agree, we start hurling rhetoric at each other, talking points fueled by the internet and the news media and douchebag bloggers like me until anyone who has any idea of what is going on is drowned out by the constant screaming orgy of angry -ists.
                This brings up a second point that I noticed while watching Jon Stewart and Marco Rubio chat:  everyone is wrong.  The important word in that sentence is EVERYONE. The constant vomiting of talking points and incoherent babble isn’t limited to one side of the aisle.  The only answer to the insanity of one is an equal insanity of the other.  When liberals start crying out about how unfair the right's rhetoric is when it comes to their politicians, they are throwing a block up around everything that they had been yelling about the right's politicians a few years back.  For every Obama is a socialist, there was a Bush is stupid.  For every Obama is a Nazi, there was a Bush is a Nazi or terrorist or etc.  Full disclosure: I had a George Bush is a Nazi patch during the 2004 elections.  I was young, punk rock(ish), and represented everything that is wrong with the twittersphere today.
                I'm as guilty as everyone when it comes to wanting to hyper-inflate the importance of every political decision.  That's not saying that the Obamacare court ruling isn’t important.  However, framing everything in the context of what will destroy or save America is getting old.  The Rush Limbaugh/Keith Olbermann* spew-a-thon is only bogging us down and making us believe that there are empirically right and wrong beliefs.  Surprisingly (it's not) this has lead us to a divided and deadlocked nation where our politicians focus on undoing or blocking the work of their rivals.  Like we're sports teams.  It's time to stop worrying about which side can beat the other, and start realizing that we're really all on the same side.  Maybe we can stop calling each other socialist hippies and racist obstructionists long enough to find out that we're all fucked unless we work together.



[UPDATE: A Response from Joe Hirsch]

THE POWER OF THREE
By Joe Hirsch
June 29, 2012



This is a response to yesterday’s post by Wyl Villacres following the Supreme Court’s ruling to uphold the Affordable Care Act – “Obamacare” – and the overall stupidity of the public debate surrounding the bill. His piece quietly touches upon a rarely made point about the way politics “gets done” today. I was compelled to take a minute to expand on this, as well as offer a sort of “friendly critique” of his piece.

Honestly, I’m not all that interested in talking about about who is right or wrong in the health care debate, I’ll leave the unfortunate task of shaping this debate in the hands of the folks working in the public policy and health care administration fields. What I am interested in, and what Wyl so subtly (and unintentionally?) alluded to in his posting, is highlighting the immense possibility for change found in the number three.

What is so utterly profound about Wyl’s piece is that he manages to break away from the discursive binary – the framing of a public conversation or debate under the faulty precipice that the outcome is limited to one of two options – that the corporate media and politicians, and consequently most of the American public, have yet to rid themselves of. In its broadest terms, the binary I’m alluding to is the classic one that’s haunted U.S. politics for a long, long time: the idea that all things are to be decided with the framework of “right versus left;” “Democrats versus Republicans;” “free market capitalist versus socialist;” or “environmentalist versus Exxon Mobil executive (the list could go on forever).

Apply this binary to the circus of a debate over Obamacare, and the “choice” that’s been presented to us will appear as either (a) the weak, private sector-centric reformist bill offered by the Obama and the Democrats – a far cry from the “universal coverage” most of us expected/wanted back in 2008 – or (b) supporting the Republican/Koch brother-backed repeal effort and thus avoiding the “imminent ‘socialist/Marxist-feuled downfall’ Obamacare is surely going to bring about.”

Wyl gets away from this faulty binary – a reductive set of two – and made it look easy. I don’t even know if he was trying to get at this!

So how did he do it? By paraphrasing what seemed to be the three primary views being expressed on Twitter after the ruling.

Three.

Along with the lackluster views of the “Jackasses” and “Elephants” the “occupier’s” perspective was given a rare mention, albeit in a similarly negative light to the others. Summing up the “Twitter perspective,” the third “occupy”[1] factor goes like this (in his words):

OBAMACARE HAS PAVED THE WAY FOR INSURANCE COMPANIES TO MILK THE LIFE OUT OF THE POOR AND WORKING CLASS, AND IS ANOTHER TAX INCREASE THAT GOES TO FUND ONE PERCENTERS' VACATION HOMES!

It’s certainly true that this type of bombastic, confrontational, and unapologetic tone is no better than the type of crap being spewed by everyone else, no matter what their views are, and I’m definitely guilty of dipping down to this level. However, it’s critical not to be fooled into thinking that this particular stance – one that’s addressing a far-more troubling, systemic, and dare I say cancerous flaw in our political system – can be looked at on the same plane as the establishment’s (not-so-different) “opposing” views.

The Right has brilliantly framed Obama’s stance as “radical” or bordering on “socialist.” In reality, this bill, as well as the broader and disappointingly regressive policy stance of the administration, is not even remotely close to warranting the label of “progressive,” let alone “socialist.” While people will certainly benefit in small ways from this decision, it must be made clear that this bill’s most profound and long-lasting impact will come in its blatant reinforcement of the private sector. The bill mandates everyone buy insurance – private insurance – or risk a tax penalty.

To be clear, this 2000+ page piece of legislation – branded as a “landmark” moment for progressives – is not a promise from government to populous affirming that they can rest easy in knowing they will be taken care of if they fall ill, something that the governments of every other industrialized nation have assured their citizens of. Rather, this is a government promising a group of large, for-profit corporations – who function under guiding premise that a human life can be assigned a monetary value – that the masses are now required to guarantee and pay into their already-monstrous revenue streams. Obamacare is nothing more than another corporate welfare measure, fundamentally rooted in the free market neoliberal ideology. Littered throughout this legislation are “perks” (i.e. raising the maximum age that kids can stay on their parents’ insurance to 26. Helpful, but not a game-changer), which function as a way to mask it as a big “step in the right direction,” all without bringing about the meaningful and decisive type of change that’s needed to fix this long-broken and corrupt industry.   This is the same ideology that continues to inform and allow bail outs for big banks, failing economies, and other floundering industries, all in the name of saving the face of a system (capitalism) that is undeniably in the midst of its global decline and collapse.

This distinction is the only major point of contention I have with Wyl’s argument. Opinion number three, essentially what I’ve just framed into more boring economic terms, can’t be thrown into the same category as the views of the “Jackasses” and “Elephants.” Three has a way of proposing an entirely alternative way of thinking and acting on political issues. Instead of negotiating with corporations and other moneyed interests, it provides an opportunity to build an entirely new bargaining table, sans the seats once exclusively reserved for and occupied by corporations and various other “non-human” interests. Interests that now have far more sway than, well, human beings – a curious and hilariously simple fact to reiterate, given that politics and systems of governance exist to serve humans, not profit-generating, non-breathing corportations.

If we can begin to work from a more honest and caring political framework that places human life above all else, we’ll have a much better chance of becoming far less “fucked.” The dominant discourse of health care in America is perhaps one of the most backwards in the entire political spectrum, but it does serve to blatantly illustrate the great need to separate people from profits, assuming the goal of reform is to spurn true and positive social change. Today, we aren’t working together to meet these challenges. It’s not a widespread “personality flaw” or “differing ideologies;” the present cash-soaked system simply does not allow for this type of discussion to even occur.

I have to agree with Wyl that on the hole, people are “so fucking wrong” about most of this stuff. No matter how much of a “Nazi” Bush may have been, or how many times Obama gets labeled a “Socialist,” the name calling and endless shouting doesn’t anything more than “hurt my eyes” and piss more and more of us off. Moreover, the vomiting-up of this sort of hyperbole is, to again quote Wyl, most certainly “not cute.” I’d bet that we’d learn a lot as a people if we began to think up and support more and more option threes. Then, perhaps one day, our leaders might finally have an incentive to sit down and have some honest discussions where people are the first and only priority.

After all, “we’re all fucked unless we work together,” right?

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[1] I’m wary to use Occupy’s name to represent this stance, as it certainly hasn’t been limited to within the movement. Many others feel this way about Obamacare.