So, just to get this out of the way: I’m wholly unqualified to have an opinion on health care reform.  But since it doesn’t seem to stop anyone else, and since this is apparently what one must comment on now if one is the commentatory sort, what the hell. A couple odd things I note about the internal dialog on the left right now.

First, I keep seeing defenders of the individual mandate against progressive arguments framing their case in political terms: If you don’t have a mandate, insurers will revolt against the “nondiscrimination” language and block its passage.  That’s probably true, but it’s like pointing out that a UN resolution to nuke China would likely face a Security Council veto. They’d be opposed because private insurance would cease to exist, which seems in some tension with the goal of getting people covered. I think the reason for putting it this more roundabout way is that they all agree insurance companies are foul pitspawn, to the point that it’s hard to persuade people that there’s a downside to a policy that would annihilate them. I watch debates ping-pong across Twitter where each side claims, as though it’s definitive proof of error, that the insurance lobby support’s the other’s position.

Second, I keep seeing people point out that the current bill, for all its flaws, is an improvement over the status quo from the progressive perspective. This is, uh, true… but I don’t want anyone who finds this compelling to represent me as a negotiator.  Look, suppose someone offers to let us split $1,000 as long as we can agree on a distribution.  If I offer you $1 and propose to keep $999, hey, you’re better off! You’d be downright irrational to turn it down! Though you might rationally start to wonder why the irrational people keep walking away from these exchanges with fatter wallets.  The answer, of course, is that I have no reason at all to offer you anything more than the bare minimum unless I’m convinced that you’re prepared to “irrationally” walk away from the table with nothing. That’s what politics is: The art of making irrational threats credibly. On the other hand, this logic only works if I actually get something out of the agreement. If I’m not any worse off because you decided to walk away from the table, well, ciao!

Finally, I saw some progressive blogger or other — this is my rant space, I don’t go hunting for links — drawing a rather strange connection between the current debate and the Iraq war.  The folks on the side of killing the bill, s/he noticed, were mostly opponents of the Iraq war from the outset, while many of those in favor of taking what’s on the table were grudging supporters.  Now, granted that it’s just weird to treat these as related, the interesting thing is that the “walk away” logic is actually more characteristically hawkish.  That is, be prepared to risk your worst outcome in hopes that you won’t have to make good on your threat, because your clear intransigence  will make the other site yield.

Conor Friedersdorf pokes some holes in Matt Continetti’s desperate attempt to paint substantive criticism of Sarah Palin’s published arguments as some kind of mob persecution. He’s got a fine case on the specifics, but I think misses the mark when he dubs the modern right’s obsession with its own supposed victimization  an instance of the “politics of schadenfreude.”  If you’re going to import hoity-toity foreign terms into your political analysis, you may as well play fully to type and pick a French one, which happens to be more accurate in the instance anyway.  Schadenfreude is as ubiquitous in politics as in any other competitive game; you can bet Democrats in the ’20s were  laughing their asses off over Teapot Dome. The word he wants is ressentiment:

Ressentiment is a sense of resentment and hostility directed at that which one identifies as the cause of one’s frustration, an assignation of blame for one’s frustration. The sense of weakness or inferiority and perhaps jealousy in the face of the “cause” generates a rejecting/justifying value system, or morality, which attacks or denies the perceived source of one’s frustration. The ego creates an enemy in order to insulate itself from culpability.

Conservatism is a political philosophy; the farce currently performing under that marquee is an inferiority complex in political philosophy drag. Sure, there’s an element of “schadenfreude” in the sense of “we like what annoys our enemies.” But the pathology of the current conservative movement is more specific and  convoluted.  Palin irritates the left, but so would lots of vocal conservatives if they were equally prominent—and some of them are probably even competent to hold office. Palin gets to play sand in the clam precisely because she so obviously isn’t. She doesn’t just irritate liberals in some generic way: she evokes their contempt. Forget “Christian conservative”; she’s a Christ conservative, strung up on the media cross on behalf of all God’s right-wing children.

Think back to the 2004 RNC—which I happened to be up in New York  covering. After witnessing three days of inchoate, spittle-flecked rage from the people who had the run of all three branches of government, some wag (probably Jon Stewart) puzzled over the “anger of the enfranchised.” And it would be puzzling if the driving force here were a public policy agenda, rather than a set of cultural grievances. Jay Gatsby learned too late that wealth alone wouldn’t confer the status he had truly craved all along. What we saw in ‘04 was fury at the realization that ascendancy to political power had not (post-9/11 Lee Greenwood renaissance notwithstanding) brought parallel cultural power.  The secret shame of the conservative base is that they’ve internalized the enemy’s secular cosmopolitan value set and status hierarchy—hence this obsession with the idea that somewhere, someone who went to Harvard might be snickering at them.

The pretext for converting this status grievance into a political one is the line that the real issue is the myopic policy bred by all this condescension and arrogance—but the policy problems often feel distinctly secondary.  Check out the RNC’s new ad on health reform, taking up the Tea Party slogan “Listen to Me!”  There’s almost nothing on the substantive objections to the bill; it’s fundamentally about people’s sense of powerlessness in a debate that seems driven by wonks. To the extent that Obama enjoyed some initial cross-partisan appeal, I think it owed a lot to his recognition that most people care less about actual policy outcomes than they do about feeling that they’re being heard and respected.

Or consider the study Ryan Sager highlighted a while back, showing that many SUV owners don’t merely think their choice of vehicles is harmless or morally neutral, but positively virtuous. Apparently the “moralistic critique of their consumption choices readily inspired Hummer owners to adopt the role of the moral protagonist who defends American national ideals.” Note two things here.  First, this is classic ressentiment: It’s not just that SUVs are great in themselves because they somehow “embody” some set of ideals. They’re good just because they symbolize an inversion of the “anti-American” values of critics. Second, think what it reveals that people feel the need to construct these kinds of absurd rationalizations—to make their cars heroic rather than simply denying that they do much harm. It betrays an incredible sensitivity, not to excessive taxes or regulations on the vehicles, but to the feeling of being judged.

Since everyone’s favorite way to excuse indefensible political behavior is to point out that they staaaaaarted it, let me point out that the ’70s mantra that the “personal is political” and some of the the ’90s obsession with policing language and attitudes  probably exacerbated the blurring of lines between questions of public justice and matters of personal virtue. Hell, we can translate the the basic beef of the Tea Partiers into faddish 90s jargon easily enough: They’re reacting against a hegemonic discourse in the centers of power that constructs them simultaneously as a bearers of class privilege and as a bestial Other.  The elevation of figures like Palin represents an attempt to reappropriate an oppressive stereotype, akin to the way some hip-hop embraces a caricaturish racist vision of violent black masculinity. To be sure, most of what gets cast as “oppression” here is just the decline of privilege, but the perception is what matters for the social dynamic.

Ultimately, this is a doomed project: Even if conservatives retook power, they wouldn’t be able to provide a political solution to a psychological problem, assuming they’re not willing to go the Pol Pot route. At the same time, it signals a resignation to impotence on the cultural front where the real conflict lies.  It effectively says: We cede to the bogeyman cultural elites the power of stereotypical definition, so becoming the stereotype more fully and grotesquely is our only means of empowerment.

To see how the difference between ressentiment and simple schadenfreude matters, consider Palin one more time.  If the goal is just to antagonize liberals, making her the Republican standard-bearer seems tactically bizarre, since ideally you want someone who isn’t so repugnant to independents as to be unelectable. If the animating force is ressentiment,  the leader has to be a loser to really deserve the role. Which is to say, expect the craziness to get worse before it gets better.

Among Bianca Velez’s many complaints about a recent rally for reproductive choice she attended:

As upset as I was to not physically be at the rally, there were other issues with the overflow room that were really irksome. We were surrounded by men and women who traveled with us on [the National Latina Institute for Reproductive Health]’s bus that did not speak English, and yet there was no interpreter in sight. Uh, BIG problem. They came to show their support, but how could they when they couldn’t understand what was going on? This was an example of inexcusably poor organizing.

Man, do I ever know the feeling. Whenever I show up at an event with a large, organized group of Spanish-speaking people, and they haven’t thought to provide an interpreter for us, I get so frustrated that I write a long irate blog post about it.

And when I say “write a long irate blog post,” I mean “translate.”

Excellent post from IOZ on the absurdity of treating drug treatment facility executives as neutral experts on the Dire Threat to Our Youth. A local news story on rising marijuana use quotes a number of these folks, including one who offers these pearl of wisdom:

“We’re seeing more and more younger folks who are admitting to using” marijuana, she said. These younger adults usually range in age from 18 to 25, and many behave as though using marijuana is not that serious.

“People don’t see it as a big deal,” she said. “That’s the thing that’s the scariest.”

Ms. Martin attributes the slight resurgence in marijuana use to the coverage the drug has received in recent months during the California legalization debate.

“When it looks as though someone is condoning the use of it or saying, ‘Oh it’s not that bad. There’s a good use for it,’ it makes [marijuana] look less threatening,” Ms. Martin said.

IOZ responds:

[E]ven in judgment I have never, to my recollection, heard a twelve-stepper announce that the problem is that our society doesn’t take alcohol, marijuan, heroin, ad inf. seriously enough.

Treatment facilities, on the other hand, are business ventures, and prohibitionary public policy is good for business, not only because the courts and prisons funnel thousands of people into treatment every day, but also because addicts like my brother who are insincere in their desire for recovery use treatment facilities as means of escaping and preempting social, financial, and legal problems.

Presumably R.J. Reynolds executives find it “scary” that sitcom characters don’t talk muchabout the smooth relaxing flavor of a Camel these days, but there, at least, most journalists know better than to dignify their cupidity with coverage.

Ok, Fred Barnes, I know those Twilight books are captivating, but you can’t possibly be paying this little attention:

Up to now, the president hadn’t done anything to upset any of the constituency groups of the Democratic party.

Possibly Fred doesn’t know any progressives, civil libertarians, or gay people. But we have this Google thing now.