In the aftermath of the Senate’s failure to pass even a “skinny repeal” of Obamacare, Senator Chris Murphy (D-CT) celebrated by tweeting out yet another in the Democratic Party’s long line of quasi-fascist notions:
As usual, Democrats seem to believe that politics is the essence of life rather than merely a way for us to protect our rights and solve collective action problems. And if politics grant ultimate meaning to your life, that means that you’re going to consider every fight a matter of life and death. That frays the social fabric in extraordinary ways.
It’s also true that Murphy has yet to meet a government action he doesn’t like. Which means that he truly believes that government cures “anxiety or sadness or fear.” That’s patently insane. Using the vast bulwark of government to cure people’s emotional ills only leads to oppression of some in the name of others. The entire “microaggressions” subculture on college campuses is built on this faulty substructure.
It is true that people require a life purpose. But that life purpose shouldn’t be political action, per se, but something deeper: building up families and communities, instilling virtue in our children, creating new and better products and services. Treating government as the be-all, end-all and control of government as palliative care does nothing but make our politics more disastrously polarized.