The rapid reverse polarizing of the public view of the individual mandate can tell us something deeply important and troubling about our politics

by Ken

In the current (June 25) issue of The New Yorker, Ezra Klein has a really interesting piece that's misleadingly titled "Unpopular Mandate: Why do politicians reverse their positions?." Oh, it is about that, and quite informatively so. Ezra digs persuasively into the remarkable phenomenon whereby the universal mandate in the health care law -- as we know, originally a Republican position -- has come to be monolithically and savagely opposed by -- yes -- Republicans. He's fascinated, and understandably so, by the dizzying speed with which this transformation occurred. With regard to the question of the unconstitutionality of the individual mandate, he points out, "a legal argument that was considered fringe in 2010 had become mainstream by 2012."

But for me the individual mandate itself is almost the least important part of the story. For one thing, as Ezra notes, this process of opinion transformation doesn't concern just the individual mandate.

In 2007, both Newt Gingrich and John McCain wanted a cap-and-trade program in order to reduce carbon emissions. Today, neither they nor any other leading Republicans support cap-and-trade. In 2008, the Bush Administration proposed, pushed, and signed the Economic Stimulus Act, a deficit-financed tax cut designed to boost the flagging economy. Today, few Republicans admit that a deficit-financed stimulus can work. Indeed, with the exception of raising taxes on the rich, virtually every major policy currently associated with the Obama Administration was, within the past decade, a Republican idea in good standing.

What makes this piece so absorbing is the explanation Ezra comes up with. I want to discuss it more carefully at some point in the future, but the key idea, as I understand it, is the basic human capacity to think as part of a group. His experts point out that this ability to believe what your group believes has served the species remarkably well, providing both adaptability and teamwork that have been invaluable to our survival. But maybe not so happy for our politics. I'm no doubt oversimplifying a little, but maybe not too much, because it appears to be in large part a process of simplification: To a remarkable degree, it appears, people don't really know what they believe until they get cues from the people they look to for those cues -- after which it's quite possible for them to insist on those views with a vehemence that you'd think comes from long and deep conviction.

Do I have to spell out the obvious forms this takes in terms of our political systems? Yes, to an extent it applies to liberals too. Just look how many people who call themselves progressives fervently support positions of the president which have historically been conservative positions. It's not that anything about those positions has changed; what has changed is who supports them. But of course the overwhelming impact is among citizens who knowingly or not want nothing more than to be told what to believe.

I'm especially fond of one example Ezra provides of the radical lack of symmetry between Left and Right: media coverage of judicial rulings favorable to the unconstitutionality of the individual mandate. He quotes Yale law professor Jack Balkin: "

Once Republican politicians say this is unconstitutional, it gets repeated endlessly in the partisan media that's friendly to the Republican Party [Fox News, conservative talk radio, and the like] and, because this is now the Republican Party's position, the mainstream media needs to repeatedly explain the claims to their readers. That further moves the arguments from off the wall to on the wall, because, if you're reading articles in the Times describing the case against the mandate, you assume this is a live controversy.

And once hack Republican judicial appointees started ruling the individual mandate unconstitutional, the process acclerates.

The fact that a judge -- even a partisan judge in a district court -- had ruled that a central piece of a Democratic President's signature legislative accomplishment was unconstitutional led the news across the country. [Actively partisan Virginia Republican District Court Judge Henry] Hudson's ruling was followed by a similar, and even more sweeping, ruling, by Judge Roger Vinson, of the Northern District of Florida. Vinson declared the entire bill unconstitutional, setting off a new round of stories. The twin rulings gave conservatives who wanted to believe that the mandate was unconstitutional more reason to hold that belief. Voters who hadn’t thought much about it now heard that judges were ruling against the Administration. Vinson and Hudson were outnumbered by other district judges who either upheld the law or threw out lawsuits against it, but those rulings were mostly ignored.

At the Washington Monthly, Steve Benen kept track of the placement that the Times and the Washington Post (where I work) gave to stories about court rulings on the health-care law. When judges ruled against the law, they got long front-page stories. When they ruled for it, they got shorter stories, inside the paper. Indeed, none of the cases upholding the law got front-page coverage, but every rejection of it did, and usually in both papers. From an editorial perspective, that made sense: the Vinson and Hudson rulings called into question the law's future; the other rulings signalled no change. But the effect was repeated news stories in which the Affordable Care Act was declared unconstitutional, and few news stories representing the legal profession's consensus that it was not. The result can be seen in a March poll by the Kaiser Family Foundation, which found that fifty-one per cent of Americans think that the mandate is unconstitutional.

It's a good guess that most of "that fifty-one per cent of Americans" has never read the Constitution, and really has very little idea what's in it. That doesn't stop them from being rampaging constitutional absolutists, though.


FOR A BETTER EXPLANATION (I HOPE!) OF WHAT GOT ME SO
WORKED UP IN EZRA KLEIN'S POST, SEE TOMORROW'S POST

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