One of the gravest errors partisans are making with HCR is the false belief that ideals...

[Writer]

will lead to a workable end. In truth, they never do. Or at least, they don't lead to a realistic end.

Take, for example, the ideal of the Enlightenment. The Enlightenment assumed that people are rational and that, through discourse in the public sphere, "truth" would eventually arise. We've discovered that, actually, people generally are not rational beings, and that the public sphere cannot be viewed ideally in the spirit of Habermas. As much as we claim that we do, we don't truly wish to engage in fair and meaningful discussions with ideological enemies in order to improve the human condition. The spirit of fairness, and the general belief that knowledge is dialectical and metaphysically based and requires only Cartesian analysis to unearth it, is an ideal that has long been rendered unrealistic.

The same is true for another ideal Enlightenment-based theorist, Karl Marx, who assumed that knowledge can be discovered through material forces of production in a dialectical movement that was in reverse of the German idealists. His dialectic also assumed that people are rational, but that their being estranged from the value of their labor disrupts their life-value and renders them oppressed by the ideology of the superstructure. Resistance to the superstructure, he proposed, can be developed and lead by "organic intellectuals" in the base. However, the revolution that Marx was waiting for in Western capitalist nations hasn't occurred as he predicted, because of his false belief in the rational individual and the general - although recently troubled - success of traditional capitalism. Also, Marx was an idealist who assumed that sharing the value of labor would permit people to reconnect with their life-value, and hence, lessen the repression of ideology within the superstructure. However, socialism assumes that economic conditions would always improve, not foreseeing what would happen if suddenly the bottom fell out, forcing everyone to go down together. That's why many European nations are not fully socialist nations, but mixed economies. Socialism as a whole would never realistically work in practice, and the Leninist form we witnessed in the Soviet Union collapsed for the very errors that Marx made in judgment.

Other idealists, such as John Dewey, various Marxian scholars from the 20th century, and other social theorists who have tried to apply Totalistic Ideal A to Situation B without contending with the material realities of Situation B will never achieve a workable praxis. As we've witnessed for the last forty years, deterministic approaches will only maintain a rhetorical test of wills with those holding alternative ideals, failing to actually create any workable solutions. Our nation has suffered because of this. The abject failure of the neo-conservative goals of the Project for a New American Century, as one example, are a tried and true testament to this fact.

So why do we continue to assert a political ideal as a pragmatic means to fix a problem, then hem and haw when the end result doesn't match our staunch beliefs? The truth is that, while pragmatism borrows from ideals and blends them with other ideals, the material reality in which those ideals must operate will never look like the initial concept. This is what we refuse to acknowledge when we press for specific, uncompromising solutions, and why if we ignore material realities, our nation will continue to fail in achieving any end result.

And this is why HCR will never look anything like our greatest hopes. Yes, a single-payer system that benefits all, leaves none behind, while providing excellent, non-commodified health care would be ideal. But a major systemic change like this cannot simply be injected into our society like a syringe of antiseptic, while ignoring cultural history or our current social practices. Ideals are not themselves wholly workable plans. And our ideal expectations - while completely human - will ultimately meet debasement within the material world.

And acknowledging this is the best way to make lasting, workable change.