Bad Medicine

The "Big Beautiful Bill."

The “Big Beautiful Bill” is marching through Congress, on its way to gut Medicare and Medicaid, devastate the administrative ability to effectively govern the country, and balloon the deficit by trillions of dollars.

It is, of course, an overt betrayal of Trump’s campaign promises not to cut Medicare or Medicaid, but if you believe any promise that he, or his junta should make, I have run out of sympathy for you. You are just a prime sucker, a full-on mark, a prize chump. I don’t waste my time on such. I’m not the Apostle to the Chuckleheads. Anymore.

Unfortunately though, there’s more than just politics going on here. Millions will lose their medical care. Public services will be crippled. Public health, including pandemic preparedness, vaccine distribution and education and medical research will be hampered.

Many will die. Many, many more will be impoverished and immiserated. And for most of the victims, there will be no one to call to for help, and no way to help them.

Sometimes, pain and punishment brought about by one's own inability to acknowledge and interact with reality can have a salutary effect. It might wake some people - although, I suspect, too few, to the danger of putting demagogues, who are interested in ruling, rather than effectively governing, in charge of a complex and powerful public institution. How many people will have to suffer to teach the electorate a lesson that history would have taught them relatively painlessly is another question.

In the United States, the alternative to the bigoted, authoritarian populist pitch looks like a garden party full of ineffectual milquetoasts. And for that, the Democrats have only themselves to blame. The electorate believes that the neoliberal, corporatist centrists will not fight for them, and they have good reason to think so. The average worker is being kicked in a dark alley from all angles, and they want it to stop. Now. So they will accept a promise from anyone who says they will protect them, and accept any explanation from someone who seems willing to fight for them.

But, of course, these same people, when confronted with the firehose of untruth and overt slander pointed at them every day, will shrug and say, “Well, all politicians lie.” They do? Then why are you so determined to believe one group of politicians, one clique of liars over another?

There’s really only one answer to that question. They know they are being lied to, and still enthusiastically support what they know to be a lie. Why? Because this lie makes them feel better than that lie. Why is that? Because if there’s one thing a demagogue knows, it’s how to craft a lie that flatters the hearer. And not being restrained in the slightest by truth or responsibility, they are free to press those feel-good lies constantly and relentlessly.

Of course, the solution to this is to simply pay attention. All the information that refutes the authoritarians’ lies is out in public. There are many voices who are, and have been, shouting out the danger, ringing the alarm bells. But they are not being heard. Or where they are heard, they are being answered with a fatalistic shrug.

So, the hard lessons will have to be learned, the bad medicine taken. We can only hope it doesn’t kill too many of the patients. But let’s be clear - the American populace brought this on themselves - Republicans who rode the populist, authoritarian bigot train, yes, but also Democrats who refused to hold their party to account for decades of kowtowing to the very class of corporate vampires who have sucked the lifeblood from their veins, and blighted their children’s futures.