A conservative vision for America
Is there a single term for describing these people? Revanchist? Political Luddite? Social Darwinist? Misanthrope? None of those quite capture it.
Sen. Mike Lee (R) of Utah famously told a campaign-stop crowd in 2010, “It will be my objective to phase out Social Security, to pull it up from the roots and get rid of it … Medicare and Medicaid are of the same sort, they need to be pulled up.”
Last week, @BasedMikeLee (yes, it’s his personal account) asked, “Until the mid-1930s, the federal government’s footprint didn’t extend much beyond the departments of state, defense, treasury, justice, and interior, along with the postal system. Are we better off with everything we’ve added since then?”
His question is rhetorical. But Lee seems to think We collectively are not. We would be better off without Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and a host of other public services that make the United States a place of opportunity that people from around the world want to come to. That’s a problem?
Maybe making the U.S. a place where life is “poor, nasty, brutish, and short” is conservatives’ solution to inmigration by brown-skinned people. I don’t know.
But whatever-we-call-them is a peculiar pathology. A right-wing obsession.
I tweeted in reply: “Mike, I kinda like knowing hurricanes & tornadoes are coming my way & using GPS to find my way, that my hamburger won’t kill me & produce grown via New Deal aqueducts is trucked over Eisenhower interstates & my plane won’t crash into yours & I won’t get polio.”
Addle-headed liberal, I know. Better that we pull all that up by the roots too.
Another conservative wet dream for decades was to overturn Roe v. Wade, to make abortion — surgical and pharmaceutical — once again illegal everywhere, to return to the good old days of coathangers and uncontrolled bleeding in back offices at night.
Well, last summer conservatives on the U.S. Supreme Court delivered. They overturned Roe after a half century. Meaning more women like Deborah Dorbert will deliver dead and dying babies just as whatever-we-call-them intended (Washington Post):
Deborah and Lee Dorbert say the most painful decision of their lives was not honored by the physicians they trust. Even though medical experts expect their baby to survive only 20 minutes to a couple of hours, the Dorberts say their doctors told them that because of the new legislation, they could not terminate the pregnancy.
“That’s what we wanted,” Deborah said. “The doctors already told me, no matter what, at 24 weeks or full term, the outcome for the baby is going to be the same.”
Florida’s H.B. 5 — Reducing Fetal and Infant Mortality — went into effect last July, soon after the U.S. Supreme Court overturneda half-century constitutional right to abortion.
Deborah’s ultrasound on the day before Thanksgiving — Do those go too, Mike? — showed the fetus growing inside her suffering “a range of abnormalities, not only of the kidneys but also of the heart and stomach consistent with the diagnosis of “oligohydramnios,” or lack of amniotic fluid.” In fact, the fetus had no kidneys.
Diagnosis: Potter Syndrome. Fatal.
“Without working kidneys, newborns are unable to rid their bodies of deadly toxins and go into renal failure. Without amniotic fluid in the womb, they are born unable to breathe,” the Post’s Frances Stead Sellers explains.
Babies with Potter syndrome often die before they are born when their umbilical cords become trapped between their bodies and the wall of their mother’s uterus. Those that survive the birth process typically suffocate within minutes or a matter of hours.
The Dorberts feel financially unable to travel to another state where Deborah might receive an abortion to end her complicated pregnancy. They also worry about legal repercussions.
Deborah didn’t pay much attention to the laws when they were enacted, never believing she would want an abortion. But that has changed.
“It makes me angry, for politicians to decide what’s best for my health,” she said. “We would do anything to have this baby.”
They have resolved to wait in Lakeland, still confused by the law that is determining her care.
“We have never really understood,” Lee Dorbert said. “We were told there was an exception,”he said, recalling conversations with their doctors. “Obviously not enough of an exception in some cases.”
There is more to the sad story. And more health risk for Deborah the longer her doomed pregnancy continues.
I’m partway through the audio version of Michael Lewis’ “The Fifth Risk.” Lewis dives into what many of those agencies (and unsung mission-driven agents) of government that conservatives want gone actually do to make this country a more desirable place to live. The Department of Energy that Texas’ Rick Perry wanted eliminated (having no idea what it did before running it) devotes something like half its budget to securing the nuclear stockpile. It also secures loose fissionable materials floating around the world to keep them from becoming terrorist bombs.
The Department of Commerce contains the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Its decades of weather and satellite data make tornado and hurricane prediction possible as well as helping increase crop yields.
And there is no telling how much other taxpayer-funded research, including medical research into devices like ultrasound scanners, makes our lives better in ways we’ll never know.
But no, all that has to be torn up by the roots by whatever-we-call-them obsessives like Lee. It’s a particular brand of misanthropy that needs a name. “Probably there is a word in German, yet lamentably not in English,” James Fallows tweeted of Elon Musk whose Teslas and other tech ventures would not be possible without billions in federal grants.