Highly respected academics are on record arguing that those who refuse to consider bipartisan compromise are “a disruptive, meddlesome, dangerous, and often pathological set of fanatics” whose criticism of the president is “excessive” and even “pathological,” comparable to “the mean and vulgar methods used by Goebbels and Stalin.” Their “fanaticism,” this criticism holds, is “an unstable and aggressive mixture” that is totally uninterested in “pragmatic” reform and demands “a total solution” that brooks no compromise. Two weeks ago on the floor of the House, for example, a Democratic Congressman “likened Republican critics of Obamacare to the Nazis and their propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels….”
This week, writing for The New Republic (“The Pathology of Repeal”), Jonathan Chait argues that Republicans are “not interested in actually altering the individual mandate of the Affordable Care Act.” If they were really concerned about policy, he continued a day later, they “would be willing to pursue alterations … , especially given President Obama’s professed willingness to negotiate changes.” Rather than a rational debate about policy, Chait charges, Obamacare “has become to the right a symbolic totem that has little to do with actual policies,” and he favorably quotes the Washington Post’s like-minded Greg Sargent’s discussion of
Tea Partyers talking about the repeal of “Obamacare” in fervent and even messianic tones. They are prepared to invest years in realizing this goal. It’s clear that for an untold number of base GOP voters, major questions about political and national identity are now bound up in repeal. An entire industry has been created around this new Holy Grail. There is now a big stake for a whole range of actors, some less reputable than others, in keeping millions of Americans emotionally invested in the idea that total repeal is not only achievable, but absolutely necessary to preserving their liberty and the future of the republic.
Echoing those analysts I quoted in my opening paragraph, Chait concludes that “The GOP is operating not on the basis of some analysis of public policy but from a sheer pathology.”
If you follow the links, however, you’ll see that those analysts were psychologizing opponents of slavery, not Obamacare, but one does not have to believe that Obamacare is as bad as slavery in order to recognize that abolitionists are always regarded as pathological nuts by defenders of entrenched but unpopular policies.
