Anwar al Awlaki, dead after Hellfire missile attack

Anwar al-Awlaki
courtesy, Wikimedia.

Laura Kasinof, Mark Mazzetti, and Alan Cowell report for the New York Times that American-born al Qaeda preacher Anwar al-Awlaki is dead. A predator drone delivered a Hellfire missile killing Awlaki. RITN previosuly commented on the Awlaki case. Read here and here.

Check back later for further reflections on the significance of this successful strike against al Qaeda.

Health Care: The Bigger Questions

Reed Abelson and Nina Bernstein report today for the New York Times that U.S. health insurance costs are rising sharply. In some respects, that is not news; health insurance rates have been rising sharply since the 1970s. In another respect, however, the news comes at a turning point in American history—and quite likely a chapter demarcation of world history. Arguably, we are at a moment of transition equal in significance to WWII and the Cold War. Obama was elected to office by calling for change, but the changes we face exceed those he promised.

Image Courtesy Pass3456, Wikimedia

At stake, as the Abelson and Bernstein piece illustrates, are the promises made by liberal states—the United States and Europe—about retirement benefits, health insurance, education, care for children, and the like. As these societies age, non-wage earners (retirees, the sickly, and children) burden wage earners to the breaking point. A worker who retires at 67 may live another 20 or 30 years, nearly equally to the time he or she worked. And the cost of providing healthcare in this period will be extraordinary. On the other side, each child leads to immense child care, educational, social, and medical and dental costs, further dampening the birth rate.

We have known for some time that the revenue model of liberal states would prove unworkable, but we have wanted to have it both ways: to give to those who need (education, health care, retirement) and to keep as much as possible for ourselves (low tax rates). Even as we projected revenue shortfalls, we became more and more convinced that corrupt government—rather than a dated model—was to blame. Along came calls for ever-reduced taxes, as if that would solve rather than exacerbate the revenue crisis.

These domestic issues are set within a context of massive changes to the global structure: the end of the Cold War, the rise of non-state actors (terrorists, most notably, but also powerful corporations, the denizens of social media sites, bloggers, and the like), and the quickly growing ascendancy of China, India, and other developing states. Just as the U.S. became most dominant with the former Soviet Union’s fracturing, our mode of dominance has proved unsustainable and increasingly irrelevant.

We have staggering military power at our behest, but we also fear that this power is not enough. Against this backdrop came the attacks of 9/11. The ‘war against terror’, fundamental compromises of our legal and human rights traditions, and the wars against the Taliban and Saddam Hussein that followed 9/11, however necessary they may have been in one respect, were driven as much by desire to assert our dominance (with the added consolation of proving it to ourselves) as they were to protect us from harm. What protected us in the short term may have redcued longer term prospects for meaningful revitalization.

Image: PD-USGOV, Wikimedia

Arguably, the Great Recession is a product of these changes, not their cause, but that is unknown. Whatever the causes of the recession—and one should not underestimate the ‘real estate bubble’ and dangerously overleveraged financial system—it is rendered more toxic by a sense of doom, that many of us fear America’s day in the sun is over. The Great Recession was prefigured by a period of orgiastic excess, and we have not yet fully grasped what went wrong.

One place to turn is core values that underlie the American Proposition, as it was called by the 20^th century Roman Catholic theologian John Courtney Murray. But the deeper strands of our culture—religious, philosophical, and historical—are inaccessible to many who hold anti-religious assumptions about how history works. Intellectuals such as Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, and Christopher Hitchens suggest that these deeper (religious) traditions are the primary source of our maladies.

The Tea Party may be wrong about many things (a tendency to anti-intellectualism, a penchant for stoking xenophobia, a fundamentalist impulse), but they have a keener sense of what has been lost, or is being threatened, than political aficionados, left and right, who want to play by the old rules. What we need is a thoroughgoing re-envisioning of America’s core purposes and fundamental values, but political stalemates in Washington suggest that we are not yet ready to hear articulated a viable forward-looking strategy.

The progressive impulse (Obama’s healthcare legislation, for example) has not asked, let alone demanded, shared commitment to fund its main initiatives. A progressive strategy requires increased revenue, or it is dangerous fantasy. The libertarian impulse (Ron Paul, for example) is guileless about unfettered individualism, but the larger issues we face outflank the nation as a whole, let alone individuals in their solitary, nasty, and brutish stations. The conservative impulse (Rick Perry, for example) wants to recover historically significant traditions but seems not to realize that such a recovery will require applying (and therefore altering) these noble traditions.

So what we have is an underfunded progressive impulse, an individualistic sense of accomplishment until someone ‘we’ love is in need, and a conservative strategy that stokes fears and harkens to yesteryear but fails to grasp the challenges of tomorrow. We do have something to fear besides fear itself. But do we have something greater? That’s the religious and social question being raised by the imperiled healthcare legislation.