I am trying to institute a pretty strict policy against blogging about Megan McArdle, since it seems like a never-ending rabbit hole of nonsense and false logic, but her response after the House passed the Senate version of the health-care bill last night was a special sort of ridiculousness. The entire post was histrionic and self-contradictory, especially this paragraph.
Are we now in a world where there is absolutely no recourse to the tyranny of the majority? Republicans and other opponents of the bill did their job on this; they persuaded the country that they didn't want this bill. And that mattered basically not at all. If you don't find that terrifying, let me suggest that you are a Democrat who has not yet contemplated what Republicans might do under similar circumstances. Farewell, Social Security! Au revoir, Medicare! The reason entitlements are hard to repeal is that the Republicans care about getting re-elected. If they didn't--if they were willing to undertake this sort of suicide mission--then the legislative lock-in you're counting on wouldn't exist.
As to the first sentence, there are recourses to the tyranny of the majority, but tyranny is hardly what happened here. This was a long process that went through all the normal legislative channels, and the minority party actually did a pretty good job of gumming up the works. For that reason, we have a much more centrist bill than we might have otherwise. She bemoans our lack of a parliamentary system with its vote of no confidence measure but ignores that we have the filibuster and other procedural measures that truly threatened this bill. This is an elected majority that just wants to enact its agenda: It's not a demographic majority that's systematically oppressing a real minority. The recourse to this "tyranny" is pretty easy, if it's true the public doesn't like it. The Democrats will lose in November.
She then goes on to simultaneously argue that Democrats would hate it if a Republican majority repealed the social safety net measures already in place and that Republicans wouldn't do it. She admits that this is because Republicans want to get re-elected but doesn't seem to understand why. Perhaps it because Americans actually like these programs once they're instituted, finally understand that they don't bode some evil socialistic agenda, and don't want to see them gone once they benefit from them. Maybe that's the tyranny McArdle fears, one in which she's entirely alone in understanding the logic she's made up for herself. But that's already true.
-- Monica Potts
