Settle Down, Republicans, Healthcare Reform Won’t Destroy Liberty

By Scott Galupo, Thomas Jefferson Street blog 

Healthcare reform is about to become the law of the land, and here's what I'm thinking: If America ever did become a totalitarian state under the radical despot Barack II, would Glenn Beck have run out of chalk or swastika logos or tennis shoes before it happened? 

We Are Doomed: Reclaiming Conservative Pessimism author John Derbyshire shared these characteristic thoughts on the (shall we say) morning after House passage: 

"I once tried to compute the sheer quantity, in man-years, of lives lived under the despotic order--Egyptians and Assyrians, Persians and Chinese, Romans and post-Alexander Greeks, Incas and Aztecs, Umayyads and Abbasids, Ottomans and Zulus, Tsars and General Secretaries ... as against humans in liberty, ruled by common consent. It came out at around a hundred to one." 

Uh, thanks, Derb, I guess.

My brothers and sisters of the (broadly speaking) right should probably get a grip. I opposed the Democrats' plan for prudential reasons along the lines of Washington Post columnist Robert Samuelson. (Here's another piece by Samuelson on Real Clear Politics.) 

Let's say, worst-case scenario, the plan is "socialist." I'm happy to report we'd still be living in a free country. Last I checked, "Saskatchewan" is not considered interchangeable, in the informal sense, with "Siberia." 

Conservatives, over the past year, have walked onto a rhetorical ledge from which it's going to be difficult to return--especially in the event that Republicans recapture one or both houses of Congress. (How fast will it take them to beat a "just kidding" retreat from Rep. Paul Ryan's "Roadmap"?) 

In a way, we've become like the increasingly kooky Gore Vidal, who has pegged the end of "republican" America, and the concomitant establishment of a militarized national-security state, to--depending on when you ask him--both Abraham Lincoln's prosecution of the Civil War and Harry Truman's kicking off of the Cold War. 

Mainstream conservatives, to their credit, have traditionally been more pragmatic; they absorb this and that federal expansion and subsequently move the goal posts of what constitutes full-on collectivization. Ronald Reagan famously said Medicare was a trojan horse for "statism." Today we decry cuts to the very same program. 

This is politics, and to be expected. 

But at some point, the non-Tea Partying public may come to tune out warnings about creeping socialism or the impending destruction of the Constitution or the--pace Derb--Umayyadification of America. 

• Check out our editorial cartoons on healthcare. 
• Become a political insider: Subscribe to U.S. News Weekly, our digital magazine. 
• See our photo gallery of the last week of the healthcare debate.

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