The Veterans Administration waiting-list scandal is a travesty exposing how we treat those who have honorably defended this country with their military service. The administrators who kept secret waiting lists for those seeking medical care need to be called into account. This is not an isolated problem limited to one Phoenix, Ariz., hospital where it is said that possibly more than 40 veterans have died while waiting for treatment. The affair actually suggests that we need to look beyond demonizing rogue medical staff, and must also be prepared to go beyond laying blame at the feet of incompetent executive branch leadership.
Scandal after scandal has washed over President Obama’s second term building the case that he is not a strong executive and lacks the needed skills to lead the government. Yet, Obama is just the latest, if most vilified, example of how conservatives have for years been continuously setting a very basic trap for liberals who seek to enact and implement social welfare programs. This trap has a consistent storyline with its own narrative arc where both liberals and conservatives perform their assigned roles.
Conservatives for decades now have championed smaller government and insist on prioritizing tax cuts that inevitably lead to underfunding or imposing other constraints on most social welfare programs. As a result, there has been a hollowing out of the welfare state with most programs being forced to run on a shoestring and with severe limits on what they can do to operate effectively. Inevitably, this leads to inadequate implementation that the general citizenry all too often only hears about after some resulting scandal pushes the chronic implementation failure into the headlines.
At that point, conservatives reappear, this time as the defenders of those who have been harmed by the government’s implementation failure and use that opportunity to castigate the liberals for being deluded in thinking that government can capably undertake initiatives and responsibly execute programs. An underfunded, understaffed agency and its remaining employees are demonized as underachieving incompetents or, worse, as corrupt workers taking taxpayer money while ignoring their public responsibilities. Conservative refusal to support a functioning government leaves liberals holding the bag and looking like fools for trying to still implement government programs without adequate support.
It is a trap that liberals too often have no choice but to try to work around. Yet, all too frequently the work-arounds that administrators come up with result in cutting corners and skirting the law, or worse. Conservatives create the conditions that produce government implementation failure, then blame liberals for the failure, and in the end help undermine public support for government initiatives. This vicious cycle furthers the push to rely less on the government to address our common problems and more on the private sector – either through turning government programs over to businesses to implement them, or just not having government programs and telling people to rely more on the market to solve their problems.
We live in an era where neoliberalism is the reigning philosophy of government. Governments are said to work best when they are marketized and made to run in market-compliant ways. Privatization of basic services is preferred over providing necessary funding. In February, before the veterans scandal broke, Senate Democrats pushed to expand VA health care access in legislation that also included tuition assistance and job training. Senate Republicans, however, again killed legislation that would improve funding for the VA.
The VA scandal is about something bigger than just making Obama look bad. It is actually part of the recurring pattern that follows an established storyline where liberals and conservative play their assigned roles in a drama designed to repudiate the welfare state. Take other recent scandals of the Obama Administration: the IRS targeting groups for auditing, the refusal of Republican-dominated states to expand Medicaid in order to make Obamacare fail, and even the failed initial rollout of Obamacare itself.
The IRS, understaffed, fell back on shortcuts to identify filers who should be audited. This included looking for groups that had political leanings, one way or the other, and when it was toward the Tea Party we heard an outcry about alleged politicization of the tax agency.
The refusal by Republican states to expand Medicaid involved not so much under-funding but constraints that arose despite the federal government committing to pay almost all the cost for the expansion. The state Republicans offered the not really credible claim that future costs might not be covered, making them fearful of expanding the program to low-income families without health insurance. The Medicaid expansion was itself a patch put in place only because conservatives in Congress would not support a public option on the health insurance exchanges – and the Medicaid expansion was made optional for states in the split Supreme Court decision that upheld Obamacare only with that proviso. As a result of these constraints, almost 4 million Americans remain without health insurance, making Obamacare less a success than it could be.
Finally, the botched health exchange rollout was in part due to another constraint: the constant threat of repeal. As a result, there was a fear in the administration that if Republicans knew about the problems with the exchange as it was being developed, one of the over 50 votes to repeal Obamacare might actually succeed. In the end, the threat of repeal led the executive branch to keep the rollout secret, and created an environment where mistakes were not being openly discussed and corrected.
In all cases, there is plenty of blame to go around. On the one hand, liberal proponents of the welfare state need to find their voice and stop cowering for fear that their liberal intentions will be publicized. It is campaign season and Democratic candidates are running in most cases without embracing Obamacare, which is poised to save lives and money by beginning the process of reforming our broken health care system.
On the other hand, it is a mistake to see the current situation as simply a problem where both sides share equal blame. In their recent book about polarization and gridlock in Congress, "It’s Even Worse Than It Looks: How the Constitutional System Collided with the New Politics of Extremism," political scientists Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein highlight important research showing that what is most fundamentally wrong about our politics is that the Republican Party has shifted radically to the right and dragged the Democratic Party along with it. Both parties increasingly are dominated by big money, and recent U.S. Supreme Court decisions like Citizens United and McCutcheon have opened the floodgates to allow super wealthy donors to give as much as they want to campaigns.
Mann and Ornstein show it is the Republican Party’s radicalization that has made our class-biased political system all the more impervious to addressing the concerns of ordinary Americans. Increasingly right-wing radicals in Congress exploit polarization to produce gridlock and prevent the government from making public policy that can address the concerns of the 99 percent. As a result, the government is increasingly seen in just the way they want it be depicted – as incompetent – and calls for privatization increasingly become the default response, even if privatization has again and again led to mismanagement and abuse in pursuit of profits.
At some point, it all starts to look like an elegant set-up. Starve the beast, complain about dysfunctional government, call for privatization, then allow the corporate sector that funded the campaigns of the policymakers to take over the government programs for their plunder and profit. C. Wright Mills, the author of The Power Elite (1956), said there is nothing wrong with a conspiracy theory if it is true. The VA scandal reminds us this is in fact the case when it comes to government operating today. We live with a corporate conspiracy to discredit the social welfare state and let profiteers make money as a result, while our collective needs continue to go unmet. An anti-government narrative reinscribes the conditions that make a corporate heist of public resources possible. It is a set-up for a big government bait and switch where the 1 percent profits on the misery of everyone else.
Sanford Schram is a political science professor at Hunter College, CUNY, and co-author of the award-winning book "Disciplining the Poor: Neoliberal Paternalism and the Persistent Power of Race."
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