Second Opinions

by Hendrik Hertzberg
The New Yorker
August 3, 2009

LADY BRACKNELL: May I ask if it is in this house that your invalid friend Mr. Bunbury resides?
ALGERNON (stammering): Oh! No! Bunbury doesn’t live here. Bunbury is somewhere else at present. In fact, Bunbury is dead.
LADY BRACKNELL: Dead! . . . What did he die of?
ALGERNON: Bunbury? Oh, he was quite exploded.
LADY BRACKNELL: Exploded! Was he the victim of a revolutionary outrage? I was not aware that Mr. Bunbury was interested in social legislation. If so, he is well punished for his morbidity.
—“The Importance of Being Earnest.”

Oscar Wilde was obviously fond of Lady Bracknell—he gave her some of his best lines. But his affectionate satire had a serious point: like many in the class for which she was a stand-in, the haughty dowager saw little difference between subversive radicalism and ameliorative reform. Observers of the current brawl over health care will have noticed that some leaders of today’s Republican Party labor under a similar confusion. But a certain resonance between “social legislation,” on the one hand, and all sorts of figurative outrage and explosions, on the other, is metaphorically apt—particularly in Washington.

In other free countries, legislation, social and otherwise, gets made in a fairly straightforward manner. There is an election, in which the voters, having paid attention to the issues for six weeks or so, choose a government. The governing party or coalition then enacts its program, and the voters get a chance to render a verdict on it the next time they go to the polls. Through one or another variation of this process, the people of every other wealthy democracy on earth have obtained for themselves some form of guaranteed health insurance or universal health care.

(More here.)