Regular readers should understand by now that 2k has less to do with politics than with the church and her ministry. On that anti-2kers and 2kers agree. But sometimes 2k does arise even among those who are engaged in the business of doing or theorizing about politics. On the political front, then, 2kers may be intrigued to know about a couple of recent items.
The first is the candidacy of Ben Sasse for the Republican Senate nomination in Nebraska. Those familiar with Ben from his associations with Modern Reformation may know of his Lutheran-turned-Reformed ecclesiastical background and I can personally vouch for his 2k outlook. Ben served in HHS for the George W. Bush administration and has spent a lot of time recently thinking about health care in the United States. Slate recently interviewed Sasse about the subject (and others). Surprise, no Lordship of Christ or Satanhood of Democrats came up in his answers:
Well, let’s go back. In Medicaid, there’s no demonstrable evidence right now that people with Medicaid have better health outcomes than people who have no insurance. So, just saying, “I empathize and I feel your pain and I want to therefore make the government solve all these problems,” we don’t have evidence that that actually works. So if you want to actually help people, what we need to do is create a society that has a lot more people who are healthfully and steadily and stability in a middle class and believe that there is a growth economy, and that there’s opportunities for their kids and grandkids that are as great as what our grandparents knew, when we felt like America was still on the upswing. America should still be on the upswing, but our optimism should be about the American people, and about the ability of communities and neighborhoods and schools and small businesses to solve these problems. Big government programs haven’t demonstrated that they actually ameliorate these problems that you’re talking about. I mean to you, point about Oregon or West Virginia, more Medicaid signups, you can put more names and more numbers on government programs, but it isn’t clear that that actually benefits them, so I think we need to go back to the drawing board.
I think most Americans believe in a basic social safety net. But if there are 3–5 million hard-to-insure people right now, why are we disrupting the 165 million persons in an employer-sponsored insurance market? As of now we don’t know how many enrollees there are in these programs, but we know that millions of people have been kicked off their plans already because of Obamacare. The president said if you want to keep your plan you can keep it. We know that’s not true and right now we don’t even know that the benefits, in scare quotes, of the new exchange programs are even going to add up to the amount of people that lost their individual market insurance in New Jersey and Florida and Nebraska. So I think that this is hugely disruptive, and trying to solve a problem it’s creating unintended consequences that are creating more problems than its even solving. And it’s at a price tag we can’t afford. There are better solutions.
The other item of note is the new book by Jeff Taylor, who teaches political science at the very Kuyperian Dort College. Here is an excerpt from a review of Politics on a Human Scale: The American Tradition of Decentralism:
Jeff Taylor, the chair of a political science department at a private college in northern Iowa, successfully shifts the focus on federalism from its institutional moorings to the way it was scuttled in the Twentieth Century by party politics gone astray. In this respect, the book is unique. What one learns by thinking about decentralization through the lens of political party evolution is that the rush for electoral advantage in building national coalitions came at the cost of sacrificing a good deal of liberty and sanity. Most critically, the hunger for power and national scale led to a forfeiture of politics on a human scale: the politics of decentralism.
Nowadays, we have 315 million Americans spread across 3.8 million square miles of American territory. Oddly, the higher the population and wider the range of policy preferences, the more intense the push becomes to settle on one brand of economic justice, one approach to health care, one ideological conception of best practices, and one oversized approach to national defense. Lost in this cacophony for centralization are the sober voices who remind that symbolic diversity in the face of considerable constraints upon community autonomy is a hollow pursuit.
If Jeff Taylor’s book was merely a retelling of the benefits of federalism, it would have less value. Political scientists like Thomas R. Dye have already made the case that federalism—rooted in multiple, independent governments with considerable responsibility for the welfare of people within their jurisdictions—protects important political values such as individual liberty, pluralism, party competition, political participation, and the management of conflict (American Federalism: Competition Among Governments, 1990, 175). While Taylor’s book addresses these considerations, it is much more focused on the idea that decentralization helps nourish attitudes, understandings and relationships that are central to real human flourishing.
Don’t get me wrong. I am not claiming that Taylor is 2k. But a word search at Amazon of the book indicates that the words “kingdom” and “Lordship” are absent, which is an indication — in addition to Taylor’s own blogging at Front Porch Republic — that despite his Kuyperian surroundings, he is not running his studies through a neo-Calvinist grid.
Old Life 