The Decisive Reason Against Obamacare: Liberty Revisited

Republicans and others who decry the monetary costs of this contentious program inadvertently, and in spite of their protestations to the contrary, prove that their difference with the Democrats is one of degree, not of kind.

It is to my great delight that the healthcare plans that President Obama and this Democrat congress are determined to foist upon the country have been met with such powerful resistance by millions of Americans, both citizens and their elected representatives. No less is my delight over the courage and conviction that the vast majority of Republicans seemed to have recently recovered.

Yet although it most uncharitable to withhold from them the credit that is their due, the fact remains that, unfortunately, most of the criticism aimed by Republicans at "Obamacare" pertains to its monetary costs, and while the billions or trillions or whatever the projected cost of this plan turns out to be is, of course, no negligible consideration, it seems to me that to focus primarily on it is to misunderstand, or at least risk being perceived as misunderstanding, the significance of this issue.

By virtue of their excessive abstractness, the "billions," "trillions," or "gazillions" in terms of which any government program is described, though meaningful in a purely intellectual sense, are, for that very reason, incapable of enlivening in the overwhelming majority of people those passions that are the only means by which convicted action is born.

Another problem with opposing "Obamacare" primarily along the lines of its projected monetary costs is that such an objection implies that if only it did not cost so much, it would be acceptable. Hence, Republicans and others who decry the monetary costs of this contentious program inadvertently, and in spite of their protestations to the contrary, prove that their difference with the Democrats is one of degree, not of kind.

The decisive case against "Obamacare" is not locatable in its monetary costs but, rather, in the loss that it will cost us of that which Americans have always considered their birthright and without which their identity as a distinct people would collapse: their liberty.

Every American values, or at least claims to value, liberty, but the term "liberty" is mired in a swamp of ambiguity that has been cumulating for centuries, the result of the multiple meanings that have been fastened upon an otherwise appealing word. In order to go some distance in draining this cesspool, we must revisit this belief in liberty that is not only characteristic of the American character, but essential to it.

What is Liberty?  

Ingrained in Americans generally and, with few exceptions, American political commentators, in particular, is a seemingly intractable habit of identifying liberty with "Natural Rights" or "Human Rights." No doubt, in no small measure, it is the Declaration of Independence — one of our nation's two main founding documents — that is the inspiration for this habit, for the Declaration, as we all know, unequivocally affirms the "unalienable" rights, not just of all Americans, but of all people, to "life," "liberty," and "the pursuit of happiness."

Although it is admittedly alluring, not entirely unlike the fate of the protagonist of a classical Greek tragedy, the undoing of this universalistic vision of Liberty lies precisely in its virtue, for while the grand melodrama of Liberty in which the Declaration's claims of "Natural Rights" are typically situated — casting, as it does, each of us as enemy combatants, either Liberty's allies or her nemeses, in a perpetual battle upon the outcome of which the fate of the entire world hangs in the balance — can be resisted only with considerable difficulty, it is exactly because this conception of Liberty steadfastly refuses to make even the slightest accommodations for the countless contingencies of time and place that, in clothing people with flesh and blood, make them who they are, its enjoyment promises to be forever elusive. In other words, where Liberty is construed in terms of "Natural Rights," unconditional entitlements to which all human beings, irrespective of circumstances, have a claim, the world's inherent imperfections insure that cries of injustice over violations of these "Rights" will spring inexhaustibly one after the other, and life, political life specifically, will approximate, when it doesn't literally assume, a state of war without end.  

In any event, though the rhetoric and the narrative of "Natural Rights" have indeed awakened powerful passions within untold numbers of people that proved readily deployable during times of crisis, the concept of "Natural Rights" itself, owing to its inherently abstract and exceedingly metaphysical character, appeals exclusively to the cold, detached intellect, and only the meanest sort of intellect at that, for its intellectual appeal lies not in any profundity that it possesses or keen insight that it imparts but, because of its claim to be a "first principle" and, thus, the ease with which it lends itself to use as a key component in a syllogistic argument, its dazzling simplicity.  

The liberty to which Americans have grown attached and for which, when the need arose, they have sacrificed their very lives, is much more concrete than anything that has been said to be embodied by "Natural Rights." American liberty is not, first of all, something that supervenes from beyond time and place, as "Natural Rights" supposedly do. This, of course, isn't to deny that God may very well have played some role — quite possibly a central one — in assisting us to obtain the obligations, rights, and privileges that we prize; a denial of "Natural Rights" is, however, a denial that liberty is a "right" to which all are entitled just by reason of having been born human. Rather, the liberty that we value is not, strictly speaking, a gift at all but an historic achievement that was centuries in the coming. This means that liberty is not transcendent, but immanent.

Secondly, what we value is not Liberty in the abstract but our liberty. The liberty that we take for granted and for which we are willing to shed blood is not a universal phenomenon, but a municipal one. In reality, there is no "liberty," there are only "liberties," or, to put it another way, our liberty consists in the mutual coherence of multiple liberties that over vast stretches of time we have succeeded in establishing for ourselves.

Thirdly, we received this liberty not just by virtue of being human, but by virtue of having been born into an English-speaking world. That is to say, American liberty is a continuation of a tradition of liberty that began in England several centuries ago. Indeed, it is with no exaggeration that it can be said that all who love American liberty are, for that very reason, Anglophiles of a sort.

Fourth, our liberties are not, primarily, "rights," but obligations. The conditions that our laws require us to observe in our self-chosen engagements are our obligations and our "rights" are really nothing more nor less than the negative images of these obligations: e.g., the obligation not to act murderously toward anyone does not entail or signal a right not to be murdered; it is that right.    

Finally, and for the purposes of the present discussion, most importantly, the liberty that we enjoy consists in a wide diffusion of power. Those who on both sides of the political aisle never tire of lamenting "the divisiveness" and "lack of unity" of contemporary American politics know not of what they speak: our arrangements derive their value from and are explicable in terms of the "factionalism," as the authors of The Federalist Papers described the condition of a modern State, that they are intended to mitigate. There is indeed a sense in which it can be said that given its plethora of "checks and balances" on the quantum and exercise of power allowed to each agency and every branch, ours is a government that is divided against itself. Yet exactly because it is a government presiding over a richly variegated country, its complexity is its strength. 

James Madison, the Father of our Constitution and a man of genius, discerned this. He recognized that in his America — an America but a fraction of the size in population and territorial expanse of ours — "unity" of the kind for which all too many of our contemporaries are incessantly clamoring is not only impossible but perhaps even undesirable. That we can't recognize that our present circumstances render far greater the impossibility and desirability of that "unity" today only shows the extent to which we have gone awry of the vision embodied by the Constitution, and how sorely we lack Madison's wisdom and insight.   

The liberty that we enjoy is a centuries-old tradition. It lies in the interstices of our Constitution, in the denial to every institution and organization of a large concentration of power. As such, it also denies any one generation a monopoly of power over any and all others. Thus, to paraphrase Burke, "society" is like a "contract" between past, present, and future. With these considerations in mind, it is imperative that we divest ourselves of the illusion that the charge that the Democrats' "universal health care" is a threat to liberty is just Republican hyperbole. Because such a program necessarily demands for its implementation a concentration of power in the Federal government that is unprecedented in its size and scope, it is a standing repudiation of exactly those conditions in which our liberty consists, and it marks a radical departure from our tradition, ignoring both the wisdom of the past as well as the concerns of the future, both our ancestors and our posterity.    

This is the decisive case against "Obamacare."