Yes they'd go crazy for sure, "civil war" might be a tad strong but they'd definitely pull all the stops. What a lot of truthers and other alarmists forget is just how deeply ingrained the term "democracy" is in the American character. Sure, money has corrupted the system and choosing between Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum may not change the lot of the poor all that much but if we look back over the last century it was
democracy that brought about a whole host of changes that really did matter.
Our distance from these events and the glacial pace of change may cause us to forget that things like extending the vote to women, civil rights reforms, health and safety regulations for the workplace, the 8-hour work week - all these things happened democratically. A lot of it was incremental.
Sure, prohibition, the japanese internment and other things most people would deem negative (Malkin excepted) occured through democratic machinery as well - but the point is a civil war was tried once, with devastating consequences, and its not likely to occur anytime soon - if ever.
Take Tom Delay. The biggest dirty trickster and influence peddler of the Republican party. A truly odious figure whose stock and trade was wringing whatever he could out of democratic machinery. Other less criminal individuals observe quite closely the letter of the law, but trample all over the spirit. But even Delay was talking about a "permament majority", his vision was for a country that was finally wrested away from the effete, immoral, do-gooder liberals once and for all - not physically, but mentally. The mind of America would once again return to the values - as he perceived them - that were its guiding principles. And this mind would of course vote Republican - the treasonous liberals forever consigned to the fringes of electoral influence, all major battles would be played out within a conservative coalition of sorts, dominated by Republicans.
America can't go to socialized medecine right now - it just not going to happen in the current political environment. But it can take baby steps away from the market fundamentalism that has guided its health care policy implementation so far. Maybe they'll end up striking an interesting balance eventually - after all, there are systemic issues that plague public health care as well.
What I take heart from recently is the fact that it wasn't the classic Republican/Democrat battle this time around. Even McCain acknowledges that changes are needed. Sure, I think that in the end his version would end up being more similar to the status quo than Obama's, but the fact that political conditions have required him to modify the traditional REpublican approach is a positive sign. What I would look forward to if Obama's plan eventually gets implemented is the sky
not falling a few years after it gets started. It will become the new status quo, and the lie would be given to the alarmist talk of his health care plan being "socialist" (code for "un-american" really). After a while, I think it would make further reforms easier, since Americans would get used to a little more regulation and maybe even come to demand its continuation.
Put another way, this is the dreaded "slippery slope" towards socialism and eventually its big brother communism that is spoken of in quavering fear in the right-wing media.
I just happen to see it as a splendid spiral whose endpoint would be somewhere in the center of the political spectrum. It is completely far-fetched and ridiculous to suggest that America has even the possibility of becoming a communist state, let alone a socialist one. Its just preposterous.
All of this is going to happen within a democratic framework though Oliver. It would seriously take a calamatous event a few orders of magnitude higher than that of 9/11 to shock the American public sufficiently enough to overcome this deeply ingrained and deeply
felt American tradition. It is to them as beer drinking is to you Germans..
