Obamacare as culture

Health care is a culture issue

This issue indeed lays bare the great divide between two cultures in the contemporary United States: a European-style, “progressive” rule by elites, versus a consumer-oriented, reformist coalition based on the premise of natural rights embedded in the Declaration of Independence. Like the Tea Party movement, the “unprecedented level of activism and engagement among Americans” in opposition to Obamacare is evidence of a long-delayed recognition by much of the public that what’s wrong with progressivism is not the particular policies it espouses but its assumption that rule by elites is better than freedom of choice.

The passage of this health care bill is a great triumph of progressivism. Under the spell of progressive ideology, for the last few decades public schools across the country have increasingly refused to educate children in the founding values of the nation and in fact have often openly taught contempt for them. In turn, a public without a…