Blue State Blues: The Week Socioeconomic Rights Died

Democrats used this week to hype the anniversary of the January 6 riot at the Capitol, but they were quietly, inadvertently burying one of the worst ideas in American politics: that “socioeconomic rights” should be guaranteed by the government.

These rights, also called “second-order” or “positive” liberties (as opposed to the “negative” liberties, like freedom of speech and religion, that tell government what it can’t do), have long been the cherished goal of the Democrats’ left-wing base.

The notion of socioeconomic rights is central to Critical Race Theory, for example, which is the idea that American institutions are inherently racist because the Constitution was ratified at a time when black people could still be owned as property.

The leading theorist of Critical Race Theory, the late Professor Derrick Bell, said the only remedy was to add socioeconomic rights to the Constitution that would transcend the white supremacism and economic inequality that were slavery’s legacy.

American legal scholars had the opportunity to put these ideas into practice when they advised post-apartheid South Africa in drafting its own new Constitution in the 1990s. In addition to a long list of protections against discrimination, South Africa’s  Constitution includes an ambitious list of socioeconomic rights, including the rights to health care and education — though in practice, these rights are “[m]ore honor’d in the breach than the observance,” as Shakespeare’s Hamlet said.

In recent decades, Democrats have given voice to similar ideas by insisting that health care be considered a “right,” and must therefore must be provided by, or at least guaranteed by, the government. Socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) led the way, and others followed: “Health care is a right — not a privilege,” then-candidate Joe Biden tweeted during the 2020 campaign.

But in recent months, Democrats and their supporters in the media have let that principle slide. They have embraced the idea that those who are unvaccinated against COVID-19 must be denied access to hospitals, given lower priority for care, or made to pay more.

On CNN, Arthur Caplan, a medical ethicist (!) at New York University, said this week that unvaccinated people should be shamed, and worse: “You can’t get life insurance, disability insurance at affordable rates if you aren’t vaccinated,” he suggested, adding that vaccinated and unvaccinated people should not be treated as equals by the health care system.

What this means is that health care is not, in fact, a “human right” for Democrats. It is to be granted by the government on condition that the recipients comply with favored policies.

Note that Democrats do not apply this principle to any other category of patients — drug users, for example — but only to a population generally perceived as politically conservative (though there has been considerable hesitancy about coronavirus vaccines among black Americans and other minorities).

Last fall, the Biden administration took over the distribution of monoclonal antibodies, which can prevent hospitalization among those already infected with coronavirus. The immediate result was to ration those treatments, to the disadvantage of patients in seven southern states.

Republicans claimed that the Biden administration was attempting to punish those states for resisting mask mandates and vaccine mandates. White House press secretary Jen Psaki denied Thursday that any rationing was taking place, but media coverage of the administration’s policy tended to support the idea of limiting those states’ access.

Some on the left have noticed that Democrats are giving away the idea of health care as a right, and are warning them to stop — but those warnings are being ignored, as are warnings that shutting down schools hurts poor and minority children most. Yet that is what Democrats’ allies in the teachers unions are doing in cities like Chicago, forcing schools to close this week.

In San Francisco, 20% of teachers called in sick on Thursday, ostensibly to protest the public schools’ reopening in the midst of a new coronavirus wave. The district received nearly $100 million from Biden and the Democrats in coronavirus “relief.” Yet much of the funding was spent on staff retention and hiring more nurses and guidance counselors — i.e. union priorities.

President Biden tried to blame the lack of coronavirus tests nationwide on school districts and states, but while there has been mismanagement, there has also been no oversight from the administration. Moreover, the relief bill Biden signed allowed school districts to sit on the coronavirus money until Sep. 30, 2024. The mismanagement is a feature, not a bug, of the law.

So much for the “right” to education, which means nothing to teachers unions and the Democratic politicians they control.

Of course, everyone should have health care and education. But these are moral imperatives that we should provide in our communities — whether through the government or through private means.

Making government the sole or primary provider of these “rights” often means that these “rights” are not actually provided, or are provided in low quantities and poor quality.

Take coronavirus testing, for example. Now that the Biden administration is scrambling to buy 500 million tests, after failing to anticipate the winter coronavirus surge, and failing to fulfill its own campaign promises to make testing a priority, it has cornered the market on tests.

The result is that some Americans who cannot wait for government-provided tests to arrive in late January cannot find tests even if they go to their local pharmacy: the government is buying up the available test kits.

As much as Democrats talk about socioeconomic rights, we learned this week that they do not actually care about them. The right to health care does not apply to unvaccinated conservatives, and the right to education does not apply to poor black and Latino children in Chicago.

The real attraction of socioeconomic rights, for Democrats, is the power these rights give to the government to control our lives. While they were ranting against Trump’s so-called “Big Lie”, they were exposing their own.

Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of the recent e-book, Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. His recent book, RED NOVEMBER, tells the story of the 2020 Democratic presidential primary from a conservative perspective. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.