Anti-Climacus

So I'm taking a break from the tedium of formatting my dissertation, and happen to be reading a long complaint about the health care bill, and a few previously disparate thoughts have organized themselves:

I've long been of the opinion that the social conservative focus on abortion as the most important of all moral issues is a mistake (for the purposes of this blog post, we'll call it a 'tactical' mistake. whether it's also a moral mistake is another question). By focusing on that one issue, it has induced conservatives to be prepared to overthrow principles in the name of achieving the correct moral outcome. It is for something like this reason that conservative jurisprudence, which often preaches the virtue of restraint and the importance of legislation, will occasionally abandon this restraint if it thinks something better can be gained. This is not intended as a criticism, just as an observation.

There was a certain kind of social conservative rejection of the health care bill that took this form: if one federal dollar goes to fund abortions, then the bill is immoral and cannot (morally) be passed. This concern was generally embraced to the exclusion of others: there might have been other problems with the bill, but this was the intolerable one. The consequence is exactly what happened with Stupak: his objection rested only, ultimately, on the question of abortion. Once that compromise was made, though, the game was over, because there were no other objections with equal force. People might care about CBO-scoring and whether the bill would really be deficit-neutral, but it's not seen as a moral issue, and no one will get voted out of office in 2010 for raising the deficit in 2016. A social conservatism that could conceive of multiple significant problems with the bill would be one more likely to find the other side willing to compromise or hold the whole thing up altogether. Once the question of health care became a question of abortion only, the social conservative side was bound to lose because exactly the Stupak kind of tactical compromise becomes possible. By putting all their eggs into one basket, it becomes that much easier to be outmaneuvered.