“For all the political and economic uncertainties about health reform, at least one thing seems clear: the bill that President Obama signed on Tuesday is the federal government’s biggest attack on economic inequality since inequality began rising more than three decades ago,” wrote economics reporter David Leonhardt on the front page of Wednesday’s New York Times.
“For better or worse (mostly worse), the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act is now law. After 14 months of bitter, divisive and partisan debate, Democratic leaders in Congress scraped together barely enough votes to pass the president’s health-care bill,” wrote Michael Tanner in the New York Post.
“Democrats have turned Congress into the Politburo the problem is the arrogant assault on our constitution by Barack Obama and his minions in the House and Senate. The way they forced the national takeover of our health care system is the greatest threat to our democracy since Russia placed nuclear missiles on Cuba,” said right-wing zealot David Horowitz in a fundraising e-mail.
Whichever of these assessments you accept—if any—three things are obvious : (1) interpretation is a game anyone can play; (2) it’s an important enough game that lots of interested parties indulge in it, because political actors tend to act on their interpretations, and from their actions more actions follow; and (3) the divergences suggest something deeply, even traumatically unsettled in the collective understanding.
Still, given how consequential the bill signed Tuesday by President Obama may be—one way or the other—it’s striking to me how muted the campus response is. I haven’t seen Morningside Heights plastered with fliers. I haven’t seen rallies or announcements of rallies. I haven’t seen public forums debating the meaning of the bill-now-law, or what ought to follow from it.
It’s likely that many more students are anxious about their economic prospects than about the health care they often shrug at, blessed as they are with illusions of immortality—but in that case, why have public encounters about the causes and consequences of the economic breakdown been so few and far between? Are there no intellectual implications? With so many students presumably knowledgeable about how the economy works—not just at Columbia—why didn’t the educated world see disaster coming? What lessons are to be learned?
With one in six Americans either unemployed or underemployed, why is the world so quiet now? Is the discussion to be confined to specialists? How did a financial meltdown of vast proportions and unending repercussions take place with so little public reckoning?
Some will say that the public encounters on health care, market reform, and all manner of other issues take place on Facebook and in dueling blogposts—in debates between such associations as 1,000,000 Americans Freaked Out by Death Panels and 1,000,000 Americans Freaked Out by Americans Who Are Freaked Out by Death Panels. But online discussion networks tend to rev up the intensity and extremity of polarizing positions without expediting the instructive exchange of views which is supposed to be part of the work of a great nation and, in particular, a great university.
The Obama mobilization among the young in ’08, despite the prevailing inertia, gave rise to some gaudy talk about how radically and thoroughly a degraded political world was about to change, as if the galvanizing slogan had been “Yes We Can In the Next 15 Minutes.” Obama himself, like the community organizer he once was, cautioned against cartoon expectations. In his Grant Park victory speech, he paid tribute to—among others—“the young people who rejected the myth of their generation’s apathy who left their homes and their families for jobs that offered little pay and less sleep,” but quickly turned to “the enormity of the task that lies ahead. For even as we celebrate tonight, we know the challenges that tomorrow will bring are the greatest of our lifetime—two wars, a planet in peril, the worst financial crisis in a century.”
Whatever you think that he, Nancy Pelosi, and Co. accomplished this week, however you assess the lapses that preceded the victory—emergencies continue, and the current silence is eerie.
The author is a professor of journalism and sociology, and chair of the Ph.D. program in communications. His next book, “The Chosen Peoples: America, Israel, and the Ordeals of Divine Election,” written with Liel Leibovitz (Ph. D., 2007), will be published by Simon & Schuster in September.
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