Barack Obama and the View of Dostoyevsky

An indisputable achievement by Barack Obama in his first year is having adopted the precise means for the United States economy to escape the abyss.

It hasn’t been easy because these measures did not immediately increase employment and the middle class resents the fact that their money might be used to benefit big banks and finance companies.

Additionally, high expectations have given way to a feeling of unachieved goals. Even so, his administration has unleashed extraordinary actions and opened debates that have entered the United States into a different relationship with the world by cooperating and resolving through dialogue.

After the electoral defeat for the Senate seat in the state of Massachusetts, Obama will try to avoid the loss of electoral advantages. Health reform seems to be the nearest victim. The original format no longer exists but the persistent president intends to achieve a minimum of acceptable measures for the reform to materialize.

An interruption in the process would mean to lose a historic opportunity to correct a major injustice in today’s system that leaves 49 million people without health coverage paying astronomical costs for medical services.

If health insurance was able to be purchased, it would be similar to the constitutional reform of Ricardo Lagos [former Chilean president]: an idea that had found its moment but that had to be moderated and converted into a virtual exercise in seeing the glass half full rather than getting overwhelmed with a glass half empty.

In the health reform program, an emblematic act in the administration, the problem is the Democratic Party’s historic lack of unity regarding key structural reform messages in some decisive instances.

It happened with Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter, contrary to the iron will of the Republicans backing the president, with some periods of exception.

The Republican agenda has been generally simple and clear with the electorate. It consists in reducing taxes, minimum government interference and an audacious foreign policy for American supremacy.

This way the Republican voter responds loyally to the requirements of its party.

In Massachusetts, health reform like the Democrat administration’s proposal had already been carried out. The Republican candidate for the Senate won because he maintained that they would have to pay for everyone else’s reform.

The political problems that confront Obama, aside from the context, are like those that confronted the [Chilean] Coalition during its 20 years.

The similarity is not a coincidence.

These are the problems of the “third way,” or modern social democracy, in the face of a very conservative climate leaning toward reform with a capitalist mold approach disguised as neo-liberal, which the third way can barely scratch.

Aside from the times, conservatism expressed in the simple Republican recipe tends to prevail because reform to the heart of the capitalist system appears threatening to the people’s pockets.

And so it is that health reform, which would only damage the great financial interests of the pharmaceutical and insurance companies, ends up entangling itself in the political mess of the Democrat Party, risking President Obama’s political capital.

The question needs to be asked: Why is health a product of company profit and not of social well-being with a margin of profitability to sustain itself?

Why is education not a product of knowledge and social productivity rather than primarily being conceived as an industry that produces profit?

Not everything can be reduced to the bank and the market. There is something called collective well-being. The state cannot be only a financier or a producer of power. It should once again assume the roll of guarantor of well-being for which 25 years of economic structural adjustment has not worked.

This is what Barack Obama is trying to do with health, but the Republican right has gone to the extreme by calling it “Bolshevik.”

Adjustments in the 1980s failed as well as the political system that sustained them. After 25 years, the world suffered a regression until the explosion of the financial bubble. When modernization is spoken about few dare to reformulate these adjustments.

Reducing Obama to the category of Bolshevism is a policy that is pared down to very basic coordinates. It is like a return to the Czar monarchy. The “Modernists” of today are acting like the Czarists that are represented by economic empires immune to popular clamor.

We hope that by his second State of the Union Address, Obama and the Social Democrats will have achieved the views of Dostoyevsky.