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.
Margaret Thatcher's "there is no such thing as society" is often misinterpreted - how could she not think society exists? - when what she meant was there is no such thing as the welfare of society beyond simply adding it up across individual families. But this has been absorbed , as you note, across both political parties in the main, where every social problem can be solved by a cost-benefit analysis, the centrists and the right differing only in how they've done their sums. A favourite essay, one I used to have my students read, is Charles Taylor's "irreducibly social goods", that the techniques for evaluating the costs and benefits of an improvement on a stretch of highway does not apply to those goods that hold us together as a society, which includes how we are going to care for those who need exceptional amounts of care. That how we ensure we can provide for one another is not analogous to our buying car insurance for the possibility that a tree might fall on our Audi.
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.
I understand your reading. But if her piece was truly an opening to a reconsideration of conservatism, what in Canada we would have back in the day called a Red Toryism (and I lament its passing), she could have, even with a few sentences, extended her concerns to people in quite different circumstances but who are also finding their supports crumbling.
Yes, she could have been more explicit. But I think this is what she meant to do by writing, "But this affects your neighbors. This affects you. At one point or another most of us will lose our independence, health, rationality and will. Eventually we will rely wholly on someone else to care for us. Dependence, weakness, need of others: These are features, not bugs, of the human experience," and "If you still believe that your dollar should go to care for people who cannot care for themselves, then you have a moral responsibility to charity. Medicaid is that charity."
I think we might reasonably wish that people discover that "this affects your neighbors" before, not after, they are themselves affected. I have supported something like social democracy my whole life without yet having to rely on social democracy precisely because I have understood that. If we all have to wait for people to have their own lives, their children's lives, their parents' lives, their neighbors' lives being needful of this larger institutional kind of social infrastructure, we will all of us always be lacking when the moment comes. It only happens if some of us--most of us--see it as valuable whether or not we have ourselves yet been so burdened, and indeed, whether or not we will ever be.
Yes … but with millions about to lose Medicaid coverage, could she not have said even a word about them? She is quite right - we need care in our very old age, and as a society we ought to protect that, ensure that. But her discussion remains within the service of her very particular needs of care.
I share your view that the expansive range of Medicaid services is a social good and I'm staggered that any party would take an ax to it as this Congress's GOP majorities have. However, I recognize that there are many conservatives who feel that the remit of Medicaid, which includes elements such as routine preventative care and medical services for minor complaints, is far broader than is warranted by ethical rationales. And, indeed, the reasoning behind these broader services is as likely to rely on long-term economic social benefits as on ethical imperatives such as the Golden Rule that Aldhizer invokes. (There are other ethical arguments that could be made concerning the justice of wealth distribution, histories of discrimination, etc., but an op-ed can't do what a book can.)
I think Aldhizer's case-based column combines an emotivist appeal to moral sense with a deontological argument for action imperatives. Trying to extend it to elicit support for broader utilitarian or communitarian considerations would, I think, detract from the force of her appeal, even if she were a Republican who shared our view of the value of a strong social safety net (which she may not be). I think that if her column moves anyone to reexamine their approval of Medicaid cuts in general it will be because she does not ask of that intended audience more than it would conceivably be likely to provide.
(And, I'd add, her son's case is not about old age; she does a pretty good job of universalizing it to a shared human condition of needing help.)
I had not seen the Op-Ed column when it appeared on Aug. 21. My criticism of the column is that I can't tell to whom it is directed. It seems to be directed to everyone — including the 75 million people who voted for Harris/Walz and the almost exclusively Democratic votes in the U.S. Congress against the cuts to the ACA which include the draconian cuts to Medicaid.
Ms. Aldhizer could have explicitly directed her plea to the "no regrets" Republicans, the 218 Republican Representatives, the 50 Republican Senators, and the Vice-President who voted for the "big beautiful bill". She chose not to, implicitly blaming those who opposed these cuts for what is happening to her and "people like her".
It is also a little odd to hear a conservative say that federal funding somehow creates a moral imperative. The Republican party has long demonstrated it does not believe there is any moral imperative for the state to finance medical care for those unable to pay for it themselves. Or to support public policies that would make affordable coverage available.
On Margaret Thatcher: It is just as true, in my opinion, to say that there is no such thing as an individual. As John Donne put it: "No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main."
Hi Michael -- I find myself thinking (vaguely) of Michael Oakeshott, who if I remember correctly indicated the need to not only focus on immediate "issues," but to seek to identify and describe the principles that underlie them. It seems to me that this is the kind of work we should be demanding of the public intellectuals (now called, dismissively, pundits). They should be discussing principles, instead of engaging in panicky imaginings of what crazy-awful thing MIGHT happen in the future.
When this same newspaper covered Bari Weiss and The Free Press last year, they noted, "There is a certain formula to the opening lines of The Free Press’s signature work: 'I am a 42-year-old St. Louis native, a queer woman, and politically to the left of Bernie Sanders …' But medical interventions for trans children have gotten out of control, and I am blowing the whistle." Other such paraphrased examples ensued. They called such arcs "predictable," but this op-ed reminds one of the sincerest form of flattery.
At any rate, the U.S. national debt is rising by $1 trillion roughly every 100 days. As an economist, you likely appreciate better than most how dangerous this is. All three of your categories of Republican are failing to deal with that, as well as every category of Democrat. I'm sorry for the author's hardship, but to my mind the salient shortcoming of the op-ed is discussing this allocation as if that background is not taking place. It makes Republicanism as such look unserious, somewhat as you note, but no one looks more serious in comparison except some outliers who can't get elected.
Perhaps the rather unspectacular answer is to accept a taxation regime rather like the one that pertained in the 1950s and 1960s in the United States, which rather shockingly, did not crush the economy, rather the opposite. One might also ask how social democracies (and even non-democracies like Singapore) offer considerably more capacious social support to their citizens and yet manage to go on. But no, by all means, go on with your idea that debt is unsupportable and therefore no social safety net is allowable. Perhaps you can point to an actually existing nation-state which balances its books, is resolutely determined to provide little to no safety net, and yet is fabulously wealthy for all of its people and across all of its territory?
The United States has the ability to devote tremendous resources to the health care sector, and does so, far more than any other country. It just does it in a fantastically inefficient way, with its overlapping insurance systems, tremendous administrative costs, unpredictability for people in the system, and still managing to leave many people uninsured. No system in the world is perfect - health care policy always operates in what economists call the world of the second best - but surely we can do better than this status quo.
The debt-to-GDP ratio in 1955 was 60%; it's presently 124%. Cumulative inflation since 1955 is 1100%; the dollar has lost 92% of its value and a 1955 dollar would presently be worth around $12. Entitlement spending was 1% of GDP in 1955; it's now 10% of GDP. 32% of workers had manufacturing jobs in 1955; now 8% do. The median age was 30 and life expectancy 69; now it's 39 and 78. Birthrates went from solidly positive to distressingly negative. Just as I have difficulty taking Rachel Roth Aldhizer's analysis of her situation entirely seriously, I'm dubious that the present economy would withstand a 1955 tax regime, much less thrive under it.
You asked about Singapore. I had no idea, so I looked it up and learned that its entitlement system is paid for out of a Central Provident Fund that maintains individually held accounts. You and your employer are forced to pay into them, but the money remains yours. (In our system, current workers pay for current beneficiaries. Schemes similar to Singapore's have been proposed in America, by George Bush for one, but were dismissed as "privatization.") Singapore's constitution requires YOY balanced budgets. The country is indeed fabulously wealthy. That comes somewhat in range of the nation-state at which you would have me point, though no system ever implemented in human history caused fabulous wealth "for all of its people and across all of its territory."
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.
Margaret Thatcher's "there is no such thing as society" is often misinterpreted - how could she not think society exists? - when what she meant was there is no such thing as the welfare of society beyond simply adding it up across individual families. But this has been absorbed , as you note, across both political parties in the main, where every social problem can be solved by a cost-benefit analysis, the centrists and the right differing only in how they've done their sums. A favourite essay, one I used to have my students read, is Charles Taylor's "irreducibly social goods", that the techniques for evaluating the costs and benefits of an improvement on a stretch of highway does not apply to those goods that hold us together as a society, which includes how we are going to care for those who need exceptional amounts of care. That how we ensure we can provide for one another is not analogous to our buying car insurance for the possibility that a tree might fall on our Audi.
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.
I understand your reading. But if her piece was truly an opening to a reconsideration of conservatism, what in Canada we would have back in the day called a Red Toryism (and I lament its passing), she could have, even with a few sentences, extended her concerns to people in quite different circumstances but who are also finding their supports crumbling.
Yes, she could have been more explicit. But I think this is what she meant to do by writing, "But this affects your neighbors. This affects you. At one point or another most of us will lose our independence, health, rationality and will. Eventually we will rely wholly on someone else to care for us. Dependence, weakness, need of others: These are features, not bugs, of the human experience," and "If you still believe that your dollar should go to care for people who cannot care for themselves, then you have a moral responsibility to charity. Medicaid is that charity."
I think we might reasonably wish that people discover that "this affects your neighbors" before, not after, they are themselves affected. I have supported something like social democracy my whole life without yet having to rely on social democracy precisely because I have understood that. If we all have to wait for people to have their own lives, their children's lives, their parents' lives, their neighbors' lives being needful of this larger institutional kind of social infrastructure, we will all of us always be lacking when the moment comes. It only happens if some of us--most of us--see it as valuable whether or not we have ourselves yet been so burdened, and indeed, whether or not we will ever be.
Yes … but with millions about to lose Medicaid coverage, could she not have said even a word about them? She is quite right - we need care in our very old age, and as a society we ought to protect that, ensure that. But her discussion remains within the service of her very particular needs of care.
I share your view that the expansive range of Medicaid services is a social good and I'm staggered that any party would take an ax to it as this Congress's GOP majorities have. However, I recognize that there are many conservatives who feel that the remit of Medicaid, which includes elements such as routine preventative care and medical services for minor complaints, is far broader than is warranted by ethical rationales. And, indeed, the reasoning behind these broader services is as likely to rely on long-term economic social benefits as on ethical imperatives such as the Golden Rule that Aldhizer invokes. (There are other ethical arguments that could be made concerning the justice of wealth distribution, histories of discrimination, etc., but an op-ed can't do what a book can.)
I think Aldhizer's case-based column combines an emotivist appeal to moral sense with a deontological argument for action imperatives. Trying to extend it to elicit support for broader utilitarian or communitarian considerations would, I think, detract from the force of her appeal, even if she were a Republican who shared our view of the value of a strong social safety net (which she may not be). I think that if her column moves anyone to reexamine their approval of Medicaid cuts in general it will be because she does not ask of that intended audience more than it would conceivably be likely to provide.
(And, I'd add, her son's case is not about old age; she does a pretty good job of universalizing it to a shared human condition of needing help.)
Bob, you make a good point
Thanks, Michael. And you write a good blog.
I had not seen the Op-Ed column when it appeared on Aug. 21. My criticism of the column is that I can't tell to whom it is directed. It seems to be directed to everyone — including the 75 million people who voted for Harris/Walz and the almost exclusively Democratic votes in the U.S. Congress against the cuts to the ACA which include the draconian cuts to Medicaid.
Ms. Aldhizer could have explicitly directed her plea to the "no regrets" Republicans, the 218 Republican Representatives, the 50 Republican Senators, and the Vice-President who voted for the "big beautiful bill". She chose not to, implicitly blaming those who opposed these cuts for what is happening to her and "people like her".
It is also a little odd to hear a conservative say that federal funding somehow creates a moral imperative. The Republican party has long demonstrated it does not believe there is any moral imperative for the state to finance medical care for those unable to pay for it themselves. Or to support public policies that would make affordable coverage available.
On Margaret Thatcher: It is just as true, in my opinion, to say that there is no such thing as an individual. As John Donne put it: "No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main."
Hi Michael -- I find myself thinking (vaguely) of Michael Oakeshott, who if I remember correctly indicated the need to not only focus on immediate "issues," but to seek to identify and describe the principles that underlie them. It seems to me that this is the kind of work we should be demanding of the public intellectuals (now called, dismissively, pundits). They should be discussing principles, instead of engaging in panicky imaginings of what crazy-awful thing MIGHT happen in the future.
When this same newspaper covered Bari Weiss and The Free Press last year, they noted, "There is a certain formula to the opening lines of The Free Press’s signature work: 'I am a 42-year-old St. Louis native, a queer woman, and politically to the left of Bernie Sanders …' But medical interventions for trans children have gotten out of control, and I am blowing the whistle." Other such paraphrased examples ensued. They called such arcs "predictable," but this op-ed reminds one of the sincerest form of flattery.
At any rate, the U.S. national debt is rising by $1 trillion roughly every 100 days. As an economist, you likely appreciate better than most how dangerous this is. All three of your categories of Republican are failing to deal with that, as well as every category of Democrat. I'm sorry for the author's hardship, but to my mind the salient shortcoming of the op-ed is discussing this allocation as if that background is not taking place. It makes Republicanism as such look unserious, somewhat as you note, but no one looks more serious in comparison except some outliers who can't get elected.
Perhaps the rather unspectacular answer is to accept a taxation regime rather like the one that pertained in the 1950s and 1960s in the United States, which rather shockingly, did not crush the economy, rather the opposite. One might also ask how social democracies (and even non-democracies like Singapore) offer considerably more capacious social support to their citizens and yet manage to go on. But no, by all means, go on with your idea that debt is unsupportable and therefore no social safety net is allowable. Perhaps you can point to an actually existing nation-state which balances its books, is resolutely determined to provide little to no safety net, and yet is fabulously wealthy for all of its people and across all of its territory?
The United States has the ability to devote tremendous resources to the health care sector, and does so, far more than any other country. It just does it in a fantastically inefficient way, with its overlapping insurance systems, tremendous administrative costs, unpredictability for people in the system, and still managing to leave many people uninsured. No system in the world is perfect - health care policy always operates in what economists call the world of the second best - but surely we can do better than this status quo.
The debt-to-GDP ratio in 1955 was 60%; it's presently 124%. Cumulative inflation since 1955 is 1100%; the dollar has lost 92% of its value and a 1955 dollar would presently be worth around $12. Entitlement spending was 1% of GDP in 1955; it's now 10% of GDP. 32% of workers had manufacturing jobs in 1955; now 8% do. The median age was 30 and life expectancy 69; now it's 39 and 78. Birthrates went from solidly positive to distressingly negative. Just as I have difficulty taking Rachel Roth Aldhizer's analysis of her situation entirely seriously, I'm dubious that the present economy would withstand a 1955 tax regime, much less thrive under it.
You asked about Singapore. I had no idea, so I looked it up and learned that its entitlement system is paid for out of a Central Provident Fund that maintains individually held accounts. You and your employer are forced to pay into them, but the money remains yours. (In our system, current workers pay for current beneficiaries. Schemes similar to Singapore's have been proposed in America, by George Bush for one, but were dismissed as "privatization.") Singapore's constitution requires YOY balanced budgets. The country is indeed fabulously wealthy. That comes somewhat in range of the nation-state at which you would have me point, though no system ever implemented in human history caused fabulous wealth "for all of its people and across all of its territory."
I don't appreciate your tone.