Law & Medicine & Intellectuals (was Re: geels)

[Yoshie Furuhashi]

> > From: Gordon Fitch <gcf at panix.com>
> > In addition, my observations correspond to
> > the curious failure of single-payer to become an advantageous
> > political issue for leftish politicians, so I think it would
> > behoove someone to look into it.
>
>[Warning - inconsistency alert, for those who just read my
>comment on Krugman in my last post.  I actually find a lot
>of good comments in his writings; I just get irritated when
>he seems to be jotting off 'wise remarks' on a napkin while waiting
>for his dinner, after killing a bottle of wine.]
>
>He put it the most eloquently of any writer that I've seen mention
>this aspect of Americans.   To the best of my memory:
>
>Start:
>
>Americans are strange.  Most of them have far more chance of
>needing the social safety net than of becoming independently wealthy,
>but they tend to vote as if the chances were reversed.
>
>End.
>
>Barry

Liberal & well-meaning John Rawls might have thought that "the veil 
of ignorance" could help Americans use reason constructively & arrive 
consensually at a notion of redistributive justice that would 
strengthen "Great Society" programs & social-democratize America, but 
evidently it didn't catch on.

The material & ideological power of capital is the strongest in the 
belly of the beast.  Perhaps, being the most powerful empire & global 
guarantor of capitalism and being social democratic in European 
fashion are mutually exclusive (the UK, the global hegemon before the 
USA, is also the least social democratic among West European powers; 
in fact, some of the English don't want to be part of Europe). 
Besides, racism is not compatible with universal programs.

Americans lost a couple of chances to lay the groundwork for social 
democracy: black reconstruction after the civil war & mass 
mobilization during the Great Depression.  In 1947 any hope for 
social democracy in America got buried.  And now we are seeing the 
Endgame of social democracy in the Third Way (with Green scissors in 
Germany) in Europe.

Yoshie