If Obamacare Succeeds, The Republican Party Fails. Permanently.

"Republican Governor, Bobby Jindal, on The Party of Stupid"
http://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2013/10/bobby-jindal-and-government-shutdown.html

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Absolutism's weak spot is its existential need to make categorical distinctions between people, ideas and institutions. 

Every proposition is either/or - right/wrong, good/bad, saved/damned.

There is no room for compromise because every impurity is equally polluting, equally damning.

In any diametrically-linked pair of people, ideas or institutions, one of them is "absolutely right," the other "absolutely wrong." 

Here's the rub...

By portraying Obamacare as "absolutely wrong," Republicans MUST be proven right or Absolutism itself is proven wrong.

If, however, Obamacare proves successful, Republican absolutists reap the whirlwind of their own condemnation.

Republicans have invested so much sturm und drang in categorical condemnation of Obamacare that their resulting brittleness is prone to smithereen breakage.

Conservative insistence that Obamacare is catastrophically evil and consuming calamitous means that if not proven catastrophic and calamitous, Conservatism itself will be judged  absolutely wrong -- by its own criteria. 

Either/or dynamics recall the Law of Physics that invests every action with an equal and opposite reaction.

Although Obamacare's health exchanges are only two days old, it appears they are moving unstoppably toward success.

If Obamacare proves successful -- and actually provides good, universal healthcare coverage at lower per capita cost -- then the "free market" system that dominated 20th century economics is proven inferior (not damnable, just inferior) to the workings of Socialized Capitalism.

Once this demonstration takes place, Rugged Individualism loses its longstanding battle with The Common Good just as surely as Communism lost its battle with Capitalism.

Yes, the human psyche is imbued with limitless capacity to dodge, evade and avoid.

To this day there are legions of diehard ideologues who see Franklin Delano Roosevelt as Satan's sibling, a God-damned advocate of God-damned Liberalism -- that cursed heresy sprung fully formed from the meaningless mind of Moloch.

But eventually there comes a day of reckoning when "the old gods" die off: Zeus quits Olympus to occupy comic books and video games.

When gods die, those who believed in them absolutely flee the high altar for obscure side chapels where they lick their wounds and tend the sputtering flame of belief.

Blinded by irrepressible "need" to be "absolutely right" and "impeccably pure," these keepers of The One True Torch are unable to see any evil within, only evil without. 

Thus blinded by belief in their own absolute goodness, they have no choice but to prove Pascal right: "Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction."

"The terrible thing about our time is precisely the ease with which theories can be put into practice.  The more perfect, the more idealistic the theories, the more dreadful is their realization.  We are at last beginning to rediscover what perhaps men knew better in very ancient times, in primitive times before utopias were thought of: that liberty is bound up with imperfection, and that limitations, imperfections, errors are not only unavoidable but also salutary. The best is not the ideal.  Where what is theoretically best is imposed on everyone as the norm, then there is no longer any room even to be good.  The best, imposed as a norm, becomes evil.”  

"Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander,” by Thomas Merton

http://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2012/04/merton-best-imposed-as-norm-becomes.html

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It is, I think, fair to say, that absolutists subscribe to a cornerstone heresy that denies "Original Sin."