In Barack Obama’s new health care commercial the velvet-smooth narrator intones, “On healthcare reform, two extremes, on one end government run healthcare, higher taxes. On the other end, insurance companies without rules, denying coverage. Barack Obama says both extremes are wrong. His plan? Keep employer paid coverage, keep your own doctor, take on insurance companies to bring down costs. Cover pre-existing conditions, cover preventive care. Common sense, for the change we need.” As my favorite talk show host, Michael Medved would say after hearing such pie-in-the-sky drivel, “uh-huh.” Of course the brilliant thing about this tax–ahem–healthcare plan is the third way aspect. Barack Obama stole one right out of Benito Mussolini’s handbook! As Jonah Goldberg put it in his superb book Liberal Fascism, “Fascist and Nazi intellectuals constantly touted a ‘middle’ or ‘Third Way’ between capitalism and socialism. Mussolini zigzagged every which way, from free trade and low taxes to a totalitarian state apparatus.” Goldberg later continues, “The ‘middle way’ sounds moderate and un-radical. Its appeal is that it sounds unideological and freethinking. But philosophically, the Third Way is not mere difference splitting; it is utopian and authoritarian. Its utopian aspect becomes manifest in its antagonism to the idea that politics is about trade-offs. The Third Wayers say that there are no false choices–’I refuse to accept that X should come at the expense of Y.’ The Third Way holds that we can have capitalism and socialism, individual liberty and absolute unity. Fascist movements are implicitly utopian beacause they–like communist and heretical Christian movements–assume that with just the right arrangement of policies, all contradictions can be rectified. This is a political siren song; life can never be made perfect, because man is imperfect. This is why the Third Way is also authoritarian. It assumes that the right man–or, in the case of Leninists, the right party–can resolve all of these contradictions through sheer will.”
Are the pieces falling together now? Is this portrait clear? Barack Obama, the man who would be king–who fosters so much ambition that he can’t serve more than a year in a national office before starting a Presidential campaign–is now advocating a Third Way, and this isn’t likely to be confined to just healthcare. Obama’s overriding ambition and utopian idealism are a dangerous combination. And with a Democratic majority in both the house and the senate, the damage that could be done might be monumental. Don’t be fooled by Obama’s promise to let us “keep employer paid healthcare” (is that better than allowing people to buy and choose their own healthcare?) he is promising to allow those without healthcare to get the same coverage that government workers get. Which is, of course, better than many or perhaps most of employer subsidized health care plans. So how many people are going to keep their employer paid healthcare if they can get cheaper coverage from the government? Just reading Obama’s healthcare plan exhausts an entire year’s worth of suspended disbelief. But this is the man who requires that you believe in to such an extent that he can raise spending by a trillion dollars yet still cut the budget–without any proposed budget cuts to speak of. Is this hope? The true believers sure have hope. They believe. Call me a doubting Thomas, but I want proof.
