The Dog That Caught the Car

I catch the same whiff of quiet desperation in Mickey Kaus’s recent piece in Newsweek:

For liberals, this should be especially terrifying–most crucially for backers of “Medicare for All” and other ambitious health plans. I think I’m one of them — I’ve always supported some kind of universal, national health insurance. Medicare seems like a program that works–why not expand it? Claims from conservatives that this gives government too much power have always seemed like a rote application of abstract dogma. Did Medicare — run by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services — have too much power? Hard to see how. There’s no obvious rationing. No death panels. Of course there are always worries about cost-cutting, and the insidious culture of “good death,” including creepy end-of-life maneuvers (like the UKs infamous Liverpool Pathway). Yet we could seemingly rely on voter demand for care to overhwelm lugubrious proponents of medical austerity.

But what happened last week was not abstract: The near-hijacking of a universal medical instiution, and a potential denial of care, not in the name of budget-cutting but in the name of two-wrongs-make-up-for-racism social justice. Fight it and you’re not just self-interested and wrong. You’re self-interested and wrong and racist.

Where’ll this line of argument crop up next? Do I have to worry that in the future, when I’m wheeled into the ER, some Ivy League bioethicist will have decided I’m too white to get care? Or — further up the medical supply chain — that valuable medicines won’t even be developed because’If the government paid for this procedure it would save lives, but they would not be diverse lives …’

If you thought Woke CDC was bad, wait till you see Woke CMS.

Yes, I’m quite paranoid about this, for good reasons. Put crudely, our colleges have been churning out these Woke folk for many years now. They’ve infiltrated themselves into every institution of society — including the state, apparently– where they reward each other with tenure and civil service protections. They’ll be hard to root out! You can’t fire a civil servant without months, or years, of due process. Even then you can’t fire them just because their loony views clash with the policies endorsed by the voters. That would violate the First Amendment! (See Elrod v. Burns, 427 U.S. 347). Now I know how Joe McCarthy felt.

Here’s his conclusion:

If you’re a Big Government liberal, you want to strangle the Woke baby in the bathtub, before it grows up to thoroughly undermine public support for finishing the great Democratic project (including universal health care, but also ending exclusionary zoning and stratified schooling, providing a safe environment, etc.).

Biden’s not ‘the perfect man for the job’–that would be 1992’s Bill Clinton. (Ask Sister Souljah.) But Biden’s a solid candidate. He’s already pushed back against the left wing of his party on Medicare for All, and more recently on immigration– where he contradicted his whole campaign pitch by suddenly worrying, post election, about “two million people on our border” trying to get in. There are signs he’s ready to do the same thing on the HUD “fair housing” plan that Trump warned would “destroy our suburbs.”

It’s not hard to see Biden drawing the line at Woke. He’s not typically mealy-mouthed about such things. ‘C’mon man.,’ he might say. ‘That’s not what this is about.’ It wouldn’t exactly be a Souljah moment — and it would be far more effective if some woke bioethicist were slam-dunked, Souljah-style. (May I suggest Harald Schmidt?) But it’s a start, and it could be enough — especially if it were coupled with a less-publicized plan to keep the Woken out of government.

We’re told Biden doesn’t have a “vision.” He doesn’t. We’re told he doesn’t have an ideology. He doesn’t. But he has a public image, which is that he’s a middle-class guy in the center who knows what he doesn’t like — and he doesn’t like departures from common sense. In this initial, breath-gathering post-Trump moment, that might do as a Vision Substitute. It’s not asking not what your country can do for you or having a dream or a shining city on a hill or “as Americans that is not enough we must be equal in the eyes of each other.” It’s just “C’mon man.” Like Biden, it might do.

Now make the same argument for Kamala Harris.

If it were a dozen years ago, Mickey might be onto something but I’m not sure that the Joe Biden of today has enough energy or acuity to stand up to the torrent of demands from “Wokedom” that will be coming his way.

I can only repeat the question I’ve asked before: the center of what? If, as I suspect, President-Elect Biden has remained steadfastly in the center of the Democratic Party, to Mickey’s dismay inch by inch he’ll embrace “Wokeness” since their influence in the Democratic Party is increasing not remaining the same or decreasing.

There’s another reason that “the Woke” should frighten progressives like Mickey. From their point of view he’s an apostate and for such radicals apostates are worse than infidels. He and other progressives will be the first to be cancelled.