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The End of America as we know it

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Apr 1st, 2009 by Berkeley Grimball

It is not news that the core reason for the minimal social safety net in this country is racism.  We don’t want our precious tax dollars to go to help them. We are the only developed country without universal health care because of the legacy of slavery. We don’t admit it , of course. We have these myths- the myth of the rugged individual, the risk taker, the bootstrapper. We beat our chests and channel imaginary inner mountain men and rail against those wimpy socialist Europeans. Rush Limbaugh recently said that if we passed socialized medicine it would be the “end of america as we know it”.  Hear , hear, I say, it can’t happen too soon. “The greatest country in the world”? By what standards? Even the French, possessing a cultural arrogance sans equal, offer health care to all, whether from Cote’dIvoire or Algeria.

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One Response to “The End of America as we know it”

  1. Comment by Christopher:
    Wednesday, April 1st 2009 at 5:45 pm | 

    “It is not news that the core reason for the minimal social safety net in this country is racism.”

    It is indeed not news. It is a hypothesis. It is an as-yet-unsupported guess.

    It may for all I know be true. Many guesses are. But it still looks like a guess.

    Here is a related factual inquiry: which was the one industrialized nation that was earliest in planting a significant social safety net beneath the feet of large numbers of its people?

    So far as I know, the right answer to that question is: 19th century Germany. Under Otto von Bismarck. There was the Health Insurance Bill of 1883, the Accident Insurance Bill of 1884, and the Old Age and Disability Insurance Bill of 1889.

    This didn’t come about because Germany was free of racism. The Germans of the era were hotly engaged in the diplomatic struggle for colonies in Africa, and the German intelligentsia were cooking up theories of Nordic supremacy that were to enliven the first half of the twentieth century for their country and so many others.

    No, I submit that this earliest of safety nets came about because Bismarck saw it as a valuable protection against class conflict. Specifically, he thought that social welfare measures could buy enough loyalty from the proletariat to make life difficult for would-be socialist revolutionaries.

    I submit, furthermore, that the contrary of this situation is one reason the US has a relatively undeveloped social safety net. We went a long time without any significant body of socialist revolutionaries. Some such organizations arose eventually, in the 1930s, and any threat from that direction was defused in a somewhat Bismarckian fashion. Still, that threat (from anybody to the left of, say, Norman Thomas) was never very grave, so the measures needed to defuse it were relatively slight.

    Your second sentence has significance independent of your first.

    “We don’t want our precious tax dollars to go to help THEM.”

    I suspect there is such a sentiment. Still, my hypothesis is that the “them” of whom many middle-class Americans think when they think such thoughts is defined in class rather than race terms.

    I’d like to emphasize two points here. First, I haven’t said anything about what ought to be. I haven’t said “Yippee!” for American exceptionalism, nor have I bemoaned it. I have offered a hypothesis about how things might have happened, not about whether they happened for the best or otherwise. I will note, though, that Bismarck in securing for his country a significant safety net failed to secure for it a trouble-free future.

    The second point I want to make is that the hypothesis I have put forward above, the possibility that the threat of class warfare is the real key to which countries have which sorts of safety net, might well be wrong. I don’t claim that it is right. I claim only that it is at least as plausible a hypothesis as your own.

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