I´ve talked a lot in the last couple of years of a sense of separation from the conversation America is having with itself on a number of issues.  It goes far beyond the Orwellian language of the last eight years of the Bush administration with its “enhanced interrogation techniques,” and “the clean air act.”  But more and more I feel as if the basis on which we first begin any conversation is no longer shared.

Reading Andrew Sullivan, a blogger whose politics I generally dislike, but whose writing I enjoy, over the past few days has put me in a deep funk.  I´m tired of his ongoing exploration of conservatism and what is true and what is not.  There is an evangelical furvor to the defining of the real terms that I find pointless and frankly obtuse.  It is theory without respect to reality.  Politics is exhausting, competing interests of business, idealogy, constituency, and more.  Yet it seems that it is all the more paralizing than it once was.  It´s been said that Truman was able to integrate the military with only 13% public support, but Obama is quiet as a church mouse with four or five times that much support.

But two statements of Sullivan´s particularly are troubling, in as much as they reflect much of what passes as even the moderate view of conservatism in the US.

First he spoke of Sonia Sotomayor´s:

The constant, oppressive consciousness of her identity – racial and gender – and the harping on it so aggressively so often does strike me as a classic mode of victimology deeply entrenched in her generation.

That the only harping that I have seen is about comments taken out of context and made more than nine years ago, and that Sullivan himself states there is no evidence that this affects her judicial judgement, is all beside the point.  Sullivan is trying to fit a situation into a pre-existing belief.  To him, identity politics are at the heart of the liberal machine and are always to be avoided, a form of entrenched victimization.  Besides the point is his own constant writing about his own experiences as a gay, HIV+, immigrant and Thatcherite.  Granted, he is not a candidate for the Supreme Court, but what evidence besides the full on right wing echo machine does he give for Sotomayor´s supposed obsession?

Another writer on the Atlantic blog, Ta-Nehisi Coates is powerful in his refutation of this sort of craziness (read him if you get the chance, I find him regularly fascinating and challenging):

A critique of liberal identity politics is not wrong on its face, but it almost always is unconcerned with the identity politics of power. Thus Sotomayor’s focus on her identity as a “wise Latina” pose is seen as the disturbing result of multiculturalism run amok, not having been raised in a country where the tangible mechanisms of white supremacy were in full effect.

It isn’t, for instance, the fact that Sotomayor was raised in an era where government-backed redlining was still legal, it’s the fact that some students at Yale demanded a Chicano history course that’s the issue. Likewise, it isn’t the oppressive identity politics practiced by conservatives for the past 30 years that’s disturbing, but Sotomayor’s response to it. To be a true conservative is to be more disturbed by victimology, than actual victimizing. It is to claim to abhor evil–but to abhor the response to evil even more. It’s like in the NFL–it’s the second who throws the punch who draws the flag.

Too often to be a conservative is to respect the past where those who had power still indisputably had it.

The other frustration of the day from dear Andrew is a comment about health care and the public option.  I believe we absolutely need a public option or we will have lost perhaps a once in a lifetime chance to have broad impact on a failed and failing system.  He begins by quoting Arnold King who believes there should be at least a 50% out of pocket expense as a way of controling cost.  Furthermore,

I’d like to see prescription drug co-pays be a percentage of the actual cost, rather than a flat fee. One way to discourage unnecessary meds, or expensive treatments when cheaper ones can perform as well (or nearly as well), is to give the consumer some kind of price constraint. We might be surprised by what that teaches us. And I’d much rather have patients making that call than some all-powerful government committee.

The underlying assumption here is that it is the health consumer that is the cause of the out of control increase in health care in this country.  That it might perhaps be that we have  a system run by profit based health companies with little incentives to hold down costs and few attempts to mitigate or reduce contributing health factors.  As I´ve said before, one of the differences here in Spain is that much more is spent on reducing and catching health care problems early.

Finally, the idea that some make believe all-powerful government committee (subject to the voters) is any worse that some HBO cost containment committee in regard to health care choices for the basic patient is flat out crazy.  The truth is that the patient never has and never will be the primary agent making the call in their health care.  There will always be committees of some sort making decisions.  The ultimate power though is to have any choice at all, by having an option for health care in the first place, unlike nearly 45% of our fellow citizens.