Healthcare and the Paranoid Style

With regard to the coming battle over health care, Obama's declining popularity in the polls and the fear of including a government option, this despite the fact that 40 percent of health care is already run by the government, I would like to quote from Richard Hofstadter from his essay The Paranoid Style in American Politics: "...much of our national anxiety can be traced to the fear that the decline of entrepreneurial competition will destroy our national character, or that the same effect will be brought about by our hedonistic mass culture and by the moral laxity that has grown up with and is charged to our liberal and relativistic intellectual climate." In other words, the real economic issues, other than "higher taxes", become obfuscated by so called cultural issues i.e. family values, abortion, secular versus religious morality etc. in a shit storm of calculated and cynical bluster and hot air as put forth by the right wing media, and as supported by the lobbyists, special interests and their stooge politicians who are bought and paid for by these interests. They dial up the fear and hysteria, overstate the obvious, invert the arguments of the opposition, exagerate or twist the intentions of many facets of the health care bill and when all else fails, they lie through their teeth.

According to Hofstadter, none of this is new. Two hundred years ago they were slandering the Masons and the Illuminati. Then it was the Catholics(read immigrants!), the Jews(international Jewish banking conspiracy), and then it was the labor movement, the communists, and now "terrorist's". By the way, while you're at it, why don't you go ask someone in Baghdad, Damascus, Beirut, Kabul or Islamabad who the terrorist's are? You probably won't like the answer, but this is the way much of the world thinks of us as. The Paranoid Style is alive and well.