What I find truly appalling and beyond understanding is the Republican abhorrence for helping people. The whole discussion of our Affordable Care Act, from its inception to the present day, is a vast canvass of Republican attitudes strewn over the field of Democratic struggles to bring Americans up to the standards of the rest of the developed world. Even the nickname “Obama Care” is an attempt to defame the act by association with their racist hatred of our 44th President.
One could try to justify the Republican attitude by aligning it with their time-worn hatred of Federal government versus state’s rights. But Republican states are no more likely to advance health care legislation either. One could also suggest that it is a matter of budget control. Republicans hate what they like to call “entitlement programs” and will do anything to eliminate them supposedly because they want to control spending and reduce the national debt. But, in fact, the idea that Republicans want to reduce the national debt by lowering spending is pure fantasy. History shows that every Republican administration since Regan has spent large and put us deeper in debt while every Democratic administration has brought spending down and reduced the debt. The Republican abhorrence for helping people runs deeper than all of this. I believe it is an essentially anti-social attitude built on an extreme fantasy of independence.
What is mysterious to me is where in our history this attitude began. Looking at our origin documents, the Declaration of Independence says, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.” That is a basic belief that government is created to secure “Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.” Thirteen years later, our Constitution says, “We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.” That is, one of the principal reasons for our government is to “promote the general welfare.” Nothing in all of this suggests that promoting the general welfare should detract from the “blessings of liberty” or other personal freedom and independence.
It seems obvious to me that taking care of our fellow citizens is entirely consistent with, indeed a fundamental part of, promoting the general welfare. Where are all those Republicans who adore the Constitution in all of its original words and notions?
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