One of the key phrases being wielded in response to the House’s second passage of the healthcare insurance reform has been ‘entitlement’. This struck me as strange because ‘entitlement’ is typically used to denote benefits being given to a specific group (e.g. military veterans, Midwest farmers, displaced victims of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, etc). Yet the healthcare reform bill, as passed is not specific to a particular group but to all Americans. Sure, there are parts which provide graduated assistance to those who are under a certain percentage of the poverty line, but is that enough to claim the entirety of the reform bill is a great entitlement — as these same opponents also decry of programmes such as welfare, Medicare, and Medicaid?
This kind of crying foul that the government should not help the less fortunate is faulty on two counts. It rests on the assumption that ‘social justice’ is something that should be voluntary. This is particularly difficult for religious conservatives who tend to accept that humans are inherently ‘bad’ (whether it be moral corruption through Calvinism’s ‘Total Depravity’ or something similar). If humans are inherently bad (or at the very least morally cuplable), why should we accept that humans will reach through this fault and give willingly and unselfishly? In other words, humans are selfish (and I believe this is something implicit in my previous post on social justice). If it weren’t for humanity’s selfish nature, I could accept voluntary giving as a viable alternative.
The second assumption this line of thinking rests on is the assumption that ‘social justice’ is not part of the government’s role. This is problematic because equality for all people and the right to ‘life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness’ is written both explicitly and implicitly throughout the Declaration of Independence and the US Constitution. However, it has changed over the last century as the public sphere has degraded into a culture of opposition and war. In fact, I would go so far as to say that notions of the ‘common good’ have been superceded by the notion of the private consumer (the four part BBC documentary Century of the Self has a good analysis here). We can see this in a historical look at actions such as exorcism in which people were removed from communities because they were harmful to the community has become a battle between the many fragments of Self and Other within individuals. We’ve tried to erase the public sphere in order to protect our isolations, to protect our Selves from the Others. What we did not expect was to find that even individuals have many Selves and Others already from which an identity emerges. And now, we isolate ourselves so that we do not meet the Other face-to-face, we turn the mirrors away so that we do not see the Other within. Instead, we seek exorcism of the individual in the hopes that we will find a complete Self beneath the rubble, equally afraid that we will only see fragments! From this, we have transformed government into our own pet that should console us, pamper ourselves as individual Selves, and hide the Others from our sights. This is most evident in the lack of cooperation between political parties as all major votes now fall to partisan lines: as long as Our Party is in power, we can have our way and excise the Others from our midsts! ‘Social justice’ and ‘equality’ are within government’s role only if they benefit us! We don’t truly care for democracy, equality, liberty, or freedom; we only care for our own as we pay for it! We, as social-political creatures, have become consumers of rights! We should only have the right to buy; if one cannot pay the costs, one does not deserve it! If one does not deserve it, then that one is not of Us! — And all outsiders should be rejected lest they reveal our own inadequacies! The role of government is to continue to isolate Us from Them, equality and freedom be damned! Perhaps these opponents are using entitlement in terms of rights, but do they seriously want to contend that people have no rights whatsoever to healthcare? Only the right to consume is needed in our perverse consumer society where those unable to consume are less than human and worthless…
I think this kind of view turns government into a capitalist corporation. For the kind of thinking above, the best government is one which operates like a for-profit industry, subjugating people by marketing — as our present day capitalist corporations do — and to do so without concern or apathy. The documentary The Corporation did a good job in arguing that if capitalist corporations are persons (which the Supreme Court of the US just ruled), then they are amoral psychopaths. We want fascist dictators — not the kind that tell us directly what politics are right but the ones that tell us what to buy and use product placement to tell us which politics are good to buy!
This is, I believe the heart of the matter when it comes to criticising something as ‘entitlement’: it runs against the grain of capitalist consumerism. People are provided necessities not on the basis of their status as a consumer but on their status as a human who is part of the public sphere which haunts the consumer market. We’ve created many illusions of the public sphere (such as the American Idol phenomena in which we believe we get direct representation for once!) because we fear there may be a reality ‘out there’ in which not everything fits our utopian fantasy. Movies like Avatar are horrific because they’ve turn the Real into a fantasy which we consume as a brief foray into entertainment (‘it was a good movie with awesome effects, but the story’s been done before in Fern Gully or Pocahontas‘) before returning to our own fantasies that we mistake for the Real! Programmes like Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, and welfare need to be opposed because they don’t fit our fantasy of consumerism — and that is why many conservatives criticise the healthcare insurance reform as it interrupts our utopian consumerist fantasy and makes us look at Others for what they are: human beings.
