In a blue funk
The New York Times published one of its probing analytical pieces last week. The article explored that poor states needing the social safety net more than others have transformed in recent years into red states embracing Republicans vowing to undo that social safety net.
The article—headlined “Who Turned My Blue State Red?”—emphasized Kentucky, Maine, West Virginia and Kansas, but was addressing Arkansas as much as any place, more than some of those it mentioned, and vividly.
The Times piece says people on the eastern and western coasts tend to “shake their heads over godforsaken white working-class provincials who are voting against their own interests.”
What I like about the article is that, regardless of personal views, it stimulates one’s consideration of other thinking in what is an altogether unfortunate social and political circumstance, indeed a dilemma.
First: Recipients of safety-net assistance in these red-turned states have not been voting against their own interest. They have not been voting at all. They have checked out politically.
Second: Those turning Republican in those states tend to be low-income people who work for meager livings and resent the safety net not because it exists to meet genuine need, but because they think it’s become a permanent way of life for recipients who have checked out not only politically, but as participants in the economic system.
One woman told the Times that she received public aid earlier in life that gave her the opportunity for college training, which, in turn, she explained, helped her get work in a dialysis outpatient center where, she now observes, people on medical welfare come in with senses of entitlement and no intention of using the aid for the purpose that ought to be intended, which is to restore enough health to enable them to be economically productive even in some limited way.
I checked: The National Kidney Foundation says a person on dialysis can do some jobs—not heavy lifting— after getting accustomed to a regimen of treatments.
By the way, the Times found that woman at a Rick Santorum speech.
Another person told the Times that he resents that, nowadays, the social safety net means he must contribute to public assistance to sustain the status quo for a young member of his own family wasting away on painkillers.
All of that helps to explain that the coal-miner in Kentucky who once voted for pro-union Democrats now votes for Rand Paul for the U.S. Senate and for a new Tea Party governor who likely will undo the Medicaid expansion that has succeeded in Kentucky almost as well as the private option in Arkansas.
If we keep the private option in Arkansas under our new Republican rule, we’ll do so only with all the work-seeking requirements the federal government will permit—which could be none—and not because the program helps poor people, but in spite of that.
What policymakers in Arkansas like about the private option is that it saves state government money that can be turned into tax cuts and bails out private hospitals and private insurance carriers.
Bill Clinton knew all of that in the 1980s. That’s what his welfare reform was all about.
And it’s what Medicaid reform is all about at this very moment in Arkansas: Bureaucrats pore over rolls to purge recipients; legislators try to tie the private option to work or other forms of personal responsibility, and policymakers consider transforming some of Medicaid into a managed-care system with a middleman who would administer a finite sum of money to ration care, essentially.
It’s a perilous way to proceed. But it may be politically essential. And it may not be altogether mean-spirited and cold-hearted.
If accomplished reasonably—a big “if,” of course—it conceivably could turn our prevailing political debate to other defining issues that wouldn’t necessarily accrue to Republicans’ benefit.
By the way, in that regard: A few of my social media respondents have faulted the Times piece because it fails to develop the powerful role played in the red-state phenomenon by heavily politicized fundamentalist and evangelical churches. Some have been known to teach congregants they’ll go to hell if they vote Democratic, mainly because of abortion and gay rights.
The irony of the nation turning more secular as pockets become more religiously fundamental, and of religion serving a conservative political advantage even as Pope Francis demonstrates that there’s a lot of liberalism in Christianity—well, this is entirely too late a juncture in this column to bring that up.
We’ll explore the subject soon and see if we can’t gin up letters to Voices.