The little dust up over health care reform, and especially the role Medicare is playing in it, calls to mind this quote by G.K. Chesterton:

The whole modern world has divided itself into Conservatives and Progressives. The business of Progressives is to go on making mistakes. The business of Conservatives is to prevent mistakes from being corrected.

Particularly relevant to this quote is the way Democrats have emphasized simply expanding our messy patchwork system of health care coverage, and finding overall “cost savings” at the same time, while Republicans have jumped at this as an opportunity to posture as the concerned guardians of Medicare. Republicans recently put forth a “Health Care Bill of Rights for Seniors,” which claims that Medicare will be fatally “raided” in order to pay for the Democrats’ “government-run health care experiment.” Thus, Republicans are now declaring that “we need to protect Medicare and not cut it in the name of health-insurance reform.”

It probably isn’t necessary to point out just how disingenuous and purely opportunistic Republicans are being here. But I will anyway. Republicans, after all, have a history of opposing, seeking to scale back, and wishing to reduce dependence on social entitlement programs like Medicare. Seriously, if Republicans and conservatives had had their way, there wouldn’t even be a Medicare for them to talk about “protecting.” It is largely because of Democrats that we have programs like Medicare in the first place.

In fact, pick pretty much any social program or progressive agenda over time – be it Social Security, Medicare, or every attempt for universal health care – and you will find the same fearful conservative/Republican opposition arguing that such programs would present a “slippery slope” to “socialism.” So the really amusing part of Republicans now talking about “protecting” Medicare from some “government-run health care experiment” is that before it was enacted, Medicare was for them just such a scary “experiment” that had to be stopped.

When the idea of Medicare was first proposed in the early 1960s, for example, Ronald Reagan warned,

[If this program passes], behind it will come other federal programs that will invade every area of freedom as we have known it in this country, until, one day…we will awake to find that we have socialism. And [if we don't stop this], one of these days you and I are going to spend our sunset years telling our children and our children’s children what it once was like in America when men were free.

Right. Those sunset years that are now often longer, healthier, and less likely to be impoverished thanks to things like Medicare?

Now, it is true I think that when most programs like Medicare are enacted, they are the end result of compromises of larger progressive ideals. So they are limited, and progressives often do hope to strengthen and expand them over time. Yet, in spite of limits, shortcomings, and initial scare-mongering, it turns out that such social programs fill such an important need and become so popular, there is little political support to scale them back.

But the really great irony comes when the popularity of such a program can be used as a wedge to maintain the current status quo and oppose more progressive legislation. This is the incredible irony we’re seeing now. Senior citizens, as a group, are the most opposed to the present health care reform proposals. Yet, while the rhetoric of opposition consists mostly of cries about the dreaded “evils” of “socialism” and “government-run health care,” what the elderly seem to be most fearful of is the possibility that their own, very popular “government-run” health care will be negatively affected.

How can such contradictory thinking persist, you might ask? Well, as Slate has been reporting, there is some question about how many people fully realize Medicare is actually government-sponsored, single payer health care coverage. As one citizen infamously, and hilariously, said to a congressman in a South Carolina town hall, “keep your government hands off my Medicare,” apparently without a hint of irony.

Many Republicans, it seems, have been more than happy to shamelessly exploit such dissonance, as well as exploit the anxieties of the elderly, in order to fight the reform effort. I don’t know how else to describe that but as the dark side of shameless opportunism for short-term political gain. I don’t doubt that it all-too-often happens on both sides, and Democrats have certainly voiced similar loud opposition over proposed Medicare cuts in the past. But Republicans, particularly, have been going off the deep end in finding just about any reason to oppose/criticize everything. And in this instance it seems clear, if the circumstances were not a wider reform being put forward by Democrats, Republicans would be saying precisely the opposite, decrying Medicare’s unsustainable path and wanting to cut its costs or advocate for some kind of diverting scheme.

Instead, because of immediate political considerations, Republican leaders are ironically defending leaving a current entitlement totally untouched and indefinitely leaving the fiscal problems we face in this area for some other day (even as they rant and rave about “out of control” spending and deficits, yet reject ever raising taxes to pay for anything). Beyond this being quite irresponsible, shortsighted, and contradictory, some have pointed out it doesn’t even make long-term sense strategically, and might end up backfiring against other conservative goals. As Matthew Yglesias writes,

I hope the right-wing enjoys the giant tax hikes we’ll be enacting down the road once they show the political world that any attempt to trim Medicare spending, no matter how modest, will be savaged by opportunists on the other side.

But, if there is any kind of actual strategy to speak of here, I think there are a couple cynical ways to understand what Republicans are doing. One, they must stir up a ton of opposition to just about anything the Democrats propose, because they do not want the Democrats to get any meaningful, and potentially popular, reform through in such a key area. Two, Republicans fear that said reform could possibly open the door to more popular social services that they don’t want the government to have to pay for. With that in mind then, they likely feel that temporarily defending Medicare is the lesser evil to ending up with anything beyond it (see RNC chairman Michael Steele, who argued we need to “protect” Medicare, but then later cited Medicare as an example of why “government cannot run a health care system”).

I personally do not think, however, that the Republicans have much desire to make Medicare sound for the future. I don’t think they’re terribly worried about us enacting future “giant tax hikes” either. I think they will simply go on hoping they can “starve the beast” by continually hammering away at the already weak political will to raise taxes and properly fund services, and by encouraging privatized, market solutions. Remember, back in the mid-1990s it was Republican, Newt Gingrich, who expressed his hope that they could make traditional Medicare “wither on the vine” by drawing recipients into a “free-market plan.” Hmm, sounds kind of like some other Republican’s recent plan for Social Security too.

The point is, that is just the way the GOP, and especially the “conservative movement,” thinks about government and social welfare in general. So, if I were 65 or older, I would be completely suspicious of this sudden Republican concern for my welfare and benefits; lest I forget that those 65 or older would not even have a right to such benefits, nor such a social commitment to their welfare, if it had been left up to Republicans.