"Were I in the shoes of Michael Steele, I would buy up billboard space"...Paul Rahe may be a history professor, but he seems to understand *marketing* better than the people who are now running the Republican party and the various Republican campaign organizations. I get about 5 pounds of political direct mail a week, and almost all of it, in terms of its ability to motivate and to convince, is just plain awful. I will be sad if the United States fails due to a lack of professional marketing talent in places where it really matters, but it could happen.

Also, I just put up a post on the topic of "Ambition in Goethe's Faust," which may seem a bit esoteric under the circumstances, but which I believe is highly relevant.

The stimulus bill, cap-and-trade, healthcare reform: with these Barack Obama, Rahm Emanuel, Nancy Pelosi, and Harry Reid have brought home to the American people, as never before, the tyrannical propensities inherent in the progressive impulse.

So I'm curious, Erin. Do you agree with this statement? Or would you concede that it is the slightest bit "inaccurate and loaded," to quote another of your blog posts?

Yup, Peter, it's a bit loaded. So is your comment.

Nevertheless, for what it's worth, there is strong scholarship backing Rahe's point about the tyrannical impulse at the heart of progressive thinking. For a general overview, see Richard Ellis' The Dark Side of the Left: Illiberal Egalitarianism in America. For a more particular one having to do with progressive education, see Diane Ravitch's remarkable Left Back: A Century of Failed School Reforms. Rahe, for his part, has written several books on the subject of when and how democracy begets tyranny, most recently Soft Despotism, Democracy's Drift: Montesquieu, Rousseau, Tocqueville, and the Modern Prospect (Yale, 2009). So I think he's earned the right to make his claims.

A comment on the post below this one nentioned Aldoux Huxley. Here's a relevant excerpt from his novel Ape and Essence:

In the field of politics the equivalent of a theorem is a perfectly disciplined army; of a sonnet or picture, a police state under a dictatorship. The Marxist calls himself scientific and to this claim the Fascist adds another: he is the poet–the scientific poet–of a new mythology. Both are justified in their pretensions; for each applies to human situations the procedures which have proved effective in the laboratory and the ivory tower. They simplify, they abstract, they eliminate all that, for their purposes, is irrelevant and ignore whatever they choose to regard an inessential; they impose a style, they compel the facts to verify a favorite hypothesis, they consign to the waste paper basket all that, to their mind, falls short of perfection…the dream of Order begets tyranny, the dream of Beauty, monsters and violence.”

David,

Thanks for the interesting quote. The question, for me, is whether drawing implicit or explicit comparisons between progressives and Marxists or conservatives and fascists is particularly useful in the current political conjuncture.

Whether you agree with the outcome or not, the healthcare bill is anything but a "dream of Order": it is a messy behemoth, the result of compromise and political wrangling (albeit mostly within the Democratic party). But it's important to note what it *isn't*. It isn't single payer, but rather a restructuring of the private insurance industry. Perhaps you and Erin are right that this restructuring is misguided. Perhaps *any* government attempt to regulate healthcare is a bad idea. Perhaps tort reform and deregulation are the solution. I have no idea. But let's at least be clear about what we're dealing with.

The other issue raised by Erin is the question of process. It is true that healthcare is unpopular in the polls. But we live in a *representative* democracy, with regular elections, so let's see what happens in November. And yes, it should have been more bipartisan, though there is plenty of blame to go around on that count. What really worries me, in the end, is the increasingly partisan tone on both sides, the temptation to preach to the choir, the cheap caricatures of one's political enemies, and so on.

A year and a half ago, progressives were talking about a political realignment to the left. Now we're hearing about a realignment in the opposite direction. Only time will tell, but I wish that we could start looking for common ground, rather than trying to figure which way the zeitgeist is blowing.

PeterS..."the healthcare bill is anything but a "dream of Order": it is a messy behemoth"

Indeed it is (nice phrase), and I think excessive centralization *always* tends to create "messy behemoths" in implementation. This is because the less you count on autonomous individual decision-making, the more you need to create bureaucratic policies.

To take a business rather than political example...until a few years ago, GM had a policy specifying how much could be spent on the stamping dies for any new car model (as a % of the price of the car). This is insane: obviously, the cost of these dies needs to be controlled, like other investments & expenses in the model, but these decisions should be delegated to a product line executive who has P&L responsibility *and accountability*, rather than controlled on some overall corporate level. When you centralize excessively, though, you wind up with a policy guide with about as many pages as the healthcare bill.

David,

That's a very interesting point about the "messiness" of centralized administration. I'm sure tort reform and intelligent deregulation would bring down average costs, but expanding coverage, particularly to those with pre-existing conditions, requires some kind of government intervention, either in the form of subsidies or a mandate. My sense is that the GOP has been playing a bit of a shell game with their notion of some kind of "universal access" that won't cost the taxpayer a cent (except, of course, through the redistribution of tax burden through "tax incentives" and the subsidies necessary for high risk pools).