And David Brooks wept:
Once partisan reconciliation is used for this bill, it will be used for everything, now and forever. The Senate will be the House. The remnants of person-to-person relationships, with their sympathy and sentiment, will be snuffed out. We will live amid the relationships of group versus group, party versus party, inhumanity versus inhumanity.
We have a political culture in which the word “reconciliation” has come to mean “bitter division.” With increasing effectiveness, the system bleaches out normal behavior and the normal instincts of human sympathy.
Like Ezra Klein, I'd prefer a system of government where the majority party didn't have to resort to "procedural gimmickry" to pass a bill with a simple majority. But this is the system we have, and whatever party happens to be in the majority rails against the minority party for obstruction, while the minority party accuses the majority of tyranny. This state of affairs is so banal and predictable that it makes the level of emotional distress in Brooks' column really alarming. Someone get this man a Kleenex.
I also reject the premise of Brooks' argument, which is that reconciliation will lead to a place where the "normal instincts of human sympathy" have been "bleached out." We're already there. The "normal instincts of human sympathy" didn't prevent the last administration from authorizing torture, or its most radical members from accusing their political enemies of treason for upholding due process now that the administration is over. The prospect of denying health care to 31 million people swayed Democratic members of the House from the cowardly "no" votes they pray will win them re-election.
The fact is that, as Tim alluded to earlier, humans are generally very good at ignoring the suffering of other humans, and passing the health-care bill won't change that. But it will cement the idea that government has a responsibility to help those who don't have insurance get coverage, which seems to me like a very rational response to humans' distinct lack of sympathy.
UPDATE: And then there's the fact that Brooks was wrong about his factual claims.
-- A. Serwer
