The violent reaction to President Obama’s health care reform proposals must surprise many non-Americans, especially those living in Switzerland. After all, who could object to some form of nationalized health insurance that guarantees a minimum coverage for all? Why have the town hall meetings across America turned so ugly with references to Hitler and communism?
The answer is that the Cold War never really ended. If we simplistically imagine that the Cold War was an ideological battle with liberal capitalism pitted against socialism, then the “victory” of the United States was the affirmation of liberal capitalism. The Soviet Union imploded, so our system was better since socialism was obviously a failure. And, if this is true, then any form of national health coverage would be part of a socialist plot to destroy the foundations of a liberal capitalist system and force a failed system into the United States. It would, in fact, be a continuation of the Cold War, an intrusion of the ideology of the Soviet Union into the United States, which is the bastion of free market liberalism. Somewhere in the deep background of the yelling and screaming in the town meetings are visions of Khrushchev banging his shoe and hollering “We will bury you”.
The same argument, we might add, deals with the right to housing or any form of economic, social or cultural rights. This argument has been going on since the late 1940’s. It stopped the possibility of having one covenant for human rights which became divided into a covenant on civil and political rights and another on economic, social and cultural rights, which the United States has never ratified. And we see the remnants of the “Red rights” argument attributed to economic, social and cultural rights campaign in 1948 with us today on the issue of the right to health.
In other words, the Cold War has never really ended.
