No regrets
There was an op-ed in the Times last week, and although it didn’t sit right with me, I wasn’t sure how to address it. I haven’t seen it discussed much. It is by Rachel Roth Aldhizer - here is a gift link.
Ms Aldhizer has a severely disabled four-year old son, David, who requires a tremendous amount of support and care, including from Ms Aldhizer herself. I don’t think there is any parent whose children do not have such disabilities who could read her story and not immediately think: there but for the grace of God. I am going to criticize what she wrote, but in no way would I think of minimizing the challenges faced by her family.
Her concern in the essay is that the care for her son relies crucially upon Medicaid, and the programs that she relies on are facing cuts from the federal government and, downstream, in her state of North Carolina.
Caring for David is holy work, but it takes a village. His extensive medical conditions mean he meets the criteria for institutionalized care. But because of Medicaid, David is able to live at home, where he belongs, surrounded by people who love him.
North Carolina’s Community Alternatives Program for Children, or CAP/C, is a home- and community-based services waiver that provides essential services to more than 3,700 children like David across our state. Doctors’ appointments, surgeries, many therapies, adaptive equipment, specialized food, medical supplies, respite care workers (who provide temporary relief to caregivers) and more are all provided for him by Medicaid. I am even paid a living wage to care for my son. David’s life simply wouldn’t be possible without this program — which keeps him healthy and alive. Medicaid is David’s village.
The White House insists that the passage of President Trump’s domestic policy bill won’t affect programs like David’s. I know better. North Carolina’s CAP/C program is majority-funded by federal dollars. States must now consider how to meet anticipated budget shortfalls when federal Medicaid cuts take effect over the next few years. Before the passage of the domestic policy law, when you paid your federal taxes, a fraction of your money helped support children like David through Medicaid. This ensured that their lives remained a communal responsibility and collective effort, reinforcing their value. That moral imperative has now disappeared. Children’s lives are quite literally on the line.
But I have skipped the opening to the essay:
I’m a registered Republican…
In other words, she voted for the party that is implementing the cuts she deplores, and which could bring some real hardship to her already very hard-pressed family.
I’m going to divide Republican voters into three types. The first type has no regrets right now, and is generally pleased with the actions Donald Trump is taking as president and with having a Republican-led Congress. Based upon polls of public approval, this first type constitutes the vast majority of Republican voters. And that shouldn’t surprise us. After all, Trump promised mass deportations, along with Elon Musk he promised vast cuts to federal spending, he promised to put Robert F. Kennedy Jr. in his cabinet, he promised greatly expanded use of tariffs, etc. etc. The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 was online and available to all to view well before the election. There is not one action taken by Trump so far in his presidency that I would call surprising or out of character.
The second type, a much smaller group, does have regrets. They don’t like how things are going at all, and now have second thoughts about how they voted. These people really ought to have paid attention before last November, and ought to feel a little bit foolish. But they have now changed their minds.
Ms Aldhizer falls into my third group. Nowhere in her essay does she express any regret about being a registered Republican, or for voting for them. She is a visiting fellow at the conservative Ethics and Public Policy Center, where I am going to assume the plurality of her colleagues are also registered Republicans. Nowhere in her essay is there a single mention of any of the hardships the current administration is imposing on other families (other than the ones who rely on the specific program upon which she depends). Even regarding Medicaid, the topic of her piece, there is no mention of the people who are going to lose their basic coverage due to decreased eligibility. She expresses no regret about voting for an administration that boasts about its cruelty.
There is the tired joke about the leopards-eating-peoples-faces party. But it doesn’t really apply here, since she shows no regrets about her choice of which party to support. She just wants her program protected, and asks nothing more: The state ought to fund the programs of my needs and safety, but there is no larger concern than my family, or those who are very nearly like it.
I hope David continues to get the funding support he needs, I hope his life goes as well as possible in his very difficult circumstances. I hope there is a little more reflection from people who have voted for the bundle of policies we must for now endure.
On social media, people have folded this essay into a fairly standard "I voted for the Leopards-Eating-Faces Party and..." where they say they have no sympathy for the author.
I confess I don't have a lot of sympathy either but that's partly because she constrains her concerns to Trump when in fact the essay--most crucially what you've quoted--is indicating a more fundamental dissonance between what she's coming to understand about caring for her son and her lack of ability to process its implications. What she's discovered is essentially that collective action in some sort of institutionally permanent form is essentially to sustaining a modern society, that the Republican hostility to anything like a social safety net since the late 1970s is incoherent and unsustainable. She's just not processing that discovery fully. In a society of isolated households living only in family, her son would be dead. Many sons and daughters, husbands and wives, brothers and sisters, would be dead, suffering or diminished who might otherwise live, aspire and potentially flourish. No community of care or church could by itself in a purely local setting overcome that difference. That's the deeper abyss at the heart of neoliberalism that both Republicans and Democrats in the US have fallen into since 1980, but the GOP fell especially hard.
It's just frustrating to see someone get close enough to seeing it but somehow stopping short of what should be obvious.
Having read the full op-ed I understand why it was upsetting. The key issue, of course, is Aldhizer's up-front identification as a Republican (although "registered Republican" does not necessarily mean "Trump voter"). The function of this opening could signal special pleading on at least two fronts, which have different types of significance: (1) GOP/MAGA politicians and readers should be responsive to my problem because of my politics; (2) GOP/MAGA politicians and readers should not dismiss my arguments by assuming my politics differ from theirs.
We've seen a number of recent cases of (1) in the news recently, MAGA people hurt by MAGA policies who want special treatment for themselves or for their particular issue. But I think Aldhizer's op-ed is not pursuing that line. "It takes a village" is most tightly associated politically with Hillary Clinton, and for a Republican to invoke those specific words grant legitimacy to a Democratic formula that undermines special pleading. The entire force of the phrase "Medicaid is David's village" recasts a government welfare program as a communitarian good, which would be a doubly self-defeating approach to special pleading.
Moreover, Aldhizer's final paragraphs make clear that this was no slip. She explicitly challenges traditional conservative preferences for private charity over government welfare programs by recasting the latter as the way national populations channel charitable giving through legislated programs funded by individual "gifts" in the form of compulsory tax payments. Her special case serves as a paradigm for a moral argument about taxation that is basically alien to MAGA politics and recalls instead a major pre-Reagan wing of the GOP.
I think it's a very interesting op-ed. I too am sorry to think of Ms. Aldhizer's personal plight, but I think the op-ed may be conveying discovery of a deeper idea of what conservatism should be that her situation has led her to embrace.