[NYTr] GOP: The Party of Moral Depravity

[All the News That Doesn't Fit]

TomPaine.com - Nov 20, 2007
http://www.alternet.org/story/68378/

The GOP Has Become the Party of Moral Depravity

By Digby

Democratic Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan wrote a groundbreaking paper
back in the 1960s about the alleged weaknesses of often female-headed
African-American families. He described a culture of loose morals and
indulgent self-destructive behavior which the right successfully
demagogued into a decades long, thinly veiled racist attack on
government welfare programs. The common wisdom was that welfare
institutionalized and rewarded failure leading to an immoral social
order. Throughout the period there were sustained conservative attacks
on those who defended such programs and participated in the vast
cultural transformation of the era, characterizing these behaviors as
"moral depravity."

As recently as the early '90s, Moynihan himself was busily coining
snappy slogans to illustrate liberalism's essential immorality, the
most memorable being "defining deviancy down":

    It appears to me that this is in fact what we in the United States
have been doing of late. I proffer the thesis that, over the past
generation, since the time Erikson wrote, the amount of deviant
behavior in American society has increased beyond the levels the
community can "afford to recognize" and that, accordingly, we have been
re-defining deviancy so as to exempt much conduct previously
stigmatized, and also quietly raising the "normal" level in categories
where behavior is now abnormal by any earlier standard. This redefining
has evoked fierce resistance from defenders of "old" standards, and
accounts for much of the present "cultural war" such as proclaimed by
many at the 1992 Republican National Convention.

    Let me, then, offer three categories of redefinition in these the
altruistic, the opportunistic, and the normalizing.

    The first category, the altruistic, may be illustrated by the
deinstitutionalization movement within the mental health profession
that appeared in the 1950s. The second category, the opportunistic, is
seen in the interest group rewards derived from the acceptance of
"alternative" family structures. The third category, the normalizing,
is to be observed in the growing acceptance of unprecedented levels of
violent crime.

Moynihan and others had been convinced that the biggest problems in
American society stemmed from destructive behaviors among common folk.
He, and many of those culture warriors he describes so benignly, were
particularly concerned with the personal and sexual habits of the
underclass, believing that America had normalized certain "animalistic"
behaviors which led inevitably to poverty and social unrest.

Moynihan wrote that paper on the heels of the L.A. riots, and being
considered something of an expert in race relations because of his
earlier work on urban problems (and that famous paper) people listened
avidly. But it was also on the heels of the greatest taxpayer bailout
of private business in history -- the savings and loan crisis. Somehow
that didn't factor into the descriptions of a decline of morality or
the redefining of deviant behavior in American society.

So, while marriage and kids are still popular enough that the allegedly
decadent gay community clamors for the right to have a normal bourgeois
family (and ironically are being fought every step of the way by those
who claim to be concerned about family's demise!), we hear nothing from
the culture warriors about this particular kind of moral depravity:

    One of the state's largest health insurers set goals and paid
bonuses based in part on how many individual policyholders were dropped
and how much money was saved.

    Woodland Hills-based Health Net Inc. avoided paying $35.5 million
in medical expenses by rescinding about 1,600 policies between 2000 and
2006. During that period, it paid its senior analyst in charge of
cancellations more than $20,000 in bonuses based in part on her meeting
or exceeding annual targets for revoking policies, documents disclosed
Thursday showed ...

    The bonuses were disclosed at an arbitration hearing in a lawsuit
brought by Patsy Bates, a Gardena hairdresser whose coverage was
rescinded by Health Net in the middle of chemotherapy treatments for
breast cancer.

Every day in the news we have horror stories about average Americans
who happen to get sick and are forced to deal with a byzantine health
care system designed to prevent them, if at all possible, from getting
the care they need, while conservative presidential candidates declare:

    "I don't like mandating health care. I don't like it because it
erodes what makes health care work in this country -- the free market,
the profit motive. A mandate takes choice away from people. We've got
to let people make choices. We've got to let them take the risk-do they
want to be covered? Do they want health insurance? Because ultimately,
if they don't, well, then, they may not be taken care of."

Unsurprisingly, we also have the decadent business elite, awash in cash
and privilege during this second gilded age, being lavishly rewarded
time after time for risky behavior. People like Merril Lynch's Stanley
O'Neill who, after being fired for overseeing the loss of 8 billion
dollars the company invested in sub-prime loans, was forced to settle
for a mere 160 million dollar golden parachute -- on top of his 48
million dollar salary.

And let's not forget the decadent elites in Washington, who having
passed punitive bankruptcy reform that makes it extremely difficult for
people to even get a clean slate when things don't turn out well for
them financially being asked to bear the burden for Stanley O'Neill's
risky ventures. They are now expected to tepidly try to pass some
mitigating legislation which the Bush administration will likely veto.

Meanwhile, you have the e. coli conservatives making huge profits
selling lead toys to your kids (when they're not accidentally dosing
them with date rape drugs), enabling mine-owners to take shortcuts that
end up killing their workers, and simply pretending that threats such a
global warming don't exist. The stories of war profiteering in Iraq are
so appalling and grotesque that it's almost impossible to absorb. And
then, of course, there's is torture.

So, here we find ourselves more than 40 years after the conservatives
began decrying the moral depravity of the left and 15 years after
Patrick Moynihan told us that our liberal culture was defining deviancy
down and we find that they were right all along. They just got one
little detail wrong. It wasn't the liberal left who were morally
depraved. It was them.

While the culture at large was adjusting to the idea that families
don't all look the same and that private sexual morality was not the
business of the state, the decadent economic elite and right wing
ideologues had systematically defined deviancy down to the point where
Moynihan's deviant "altruism" can be illustrated as giving bonuses to
workers who denied cancer patients their medicine; his deviant
"opportunism" is seen as giving hundreds of millions of dollars to
failed business leaders who lost their companies billions; and his
deviant "normalizing" can be observed as society tossing aside its
taboo against government-sanctioned torture.

If those are the "old" standards the culture warriors of the right have
been trying to defend, they're killing us. Literally.

Check out Digby's blog, Hullabaloo:
http://digbysblog.blogspot.com/

© 2007 Independent Media Institute.