Today's Healthcare Debate Looks Like the Salem Witch Hunts

The recent healthcare reform debates look a lot like the Salem witch hunts to me. Dialogue has broken down. In town halls across the country, we're talking about the actual fine points of "health care" to the same extent that people in Salem were talking about the fine points of "witches." People are paranoid, with a need to protect the existing social order, no matter what form their argument takes.

In Salem in 1692, people experienced anxiety that look a lot like our anxiety in 2009:

*Cost of the recent wars. William and Mary had just begun King William's War, a war with France in America, and the costs of war threatened to unsettle the existing social order in the relatively affluent town of Salem.

*Immigration issues. People fleeing the war were entering Salem, and Salem residents didn't know how to handle the financially insecure immigrants. Salem was also expanding in search of farmland and fighting Native Americans for the land.

*A New Leader. Salem had elected their first ordained minister, in the controversial Samuel Parris. Having a new, charismatic leader felt frightening to many of them.

*Race and gender issues. The witch hunts essentially started because two little white girls--Parris's daughter and niece--had a friendship with Parris's slave, Tituba. When the daughters dabbled in Tituba's religious customs, the town went crazy with a need to protect existing social structures. The first three "witches" accused were the town's social outcasts: Tituba, the black slave; Sarah Good, a white beggar; and Sarah Osborne, a white woman who had slept with her indentured servant and stopped attending church. The witch hunts were as much about race and the status of newly independent-thinking women as it was about anything else. For obvious parallels of all of the above, see our questions about race surrounding Obama and about gender surrounding Hillary Clinton.

In Salem in 1692, people felt economically and socially threatened. The result was a loss of rational thinking. And the witch hunts took shape akin to modern town hall meetings. Towns would gather in a seemingly open, democratic process in which people could bring their grievances public. The dangerous thing was that a "legal case" made against a witch could rest on what was called "spectral evidence": claims that people were haunted by the witches and therefore hallucinating. The evidence, in other words, was invisible--and considered sufficient to sentence people to death.

We're seeing a nearly parallel process these days, in that people are furious about the health care bill, but evidence is largely spectral. There are no "death panels" in the bill, but people claim there are. People are making false claims about socialized medicine (see this link), even death threats against the President (see this link), without reading the bill (called America's Affordable Health Choices Act of 2009, H.R. 3200, available online here). The argument about the health care bill seems to be an argument about something else: about race and class anxiety that we have not articulated.

(To dabble in facts, here's one thing I understand about the health bill: It demands that small businesses--those with 8 to 10 employees--either provide their workers with insurance up to federal standards, or pay about an 8% payroll tax. If small businesses can't provide the insurance, those workers will go with the public option.)

But the facts have been radically obscured, and the country's dialogue has broken down. Where do you sit with the facts and the feelings here?

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