Health Care Reform Through an NPL Lens

By Charlie Barber
Staff Writer

Nobody Owns Us.
-Joe Gilbert, Non-Partisan League, 1918

Socialism Works.
-Bismarck Tribune, February 17, 2010

When Dennis Kucinich, Bart Stupak, and thousands of nuns agree on something, one can be sure that “the times they are a changin’,” and not just on the health care bill.

While my training as a professional historian cautions me to be pessimistic, as an activist I have always been an optimist. The optimist in me says that the long nightmare of single-issue politics is giving way to a politics of cooperation, if only long enough to reverse some of the worst excesses of national narcissism.

Americans are slowly recovering from a long, drunken binge of self-centeredness, summed up by MSNBC’s Chris Matthews, when he declared that Ronald Reagan had “hijacked” egocentrism from the 1960’s hippies and sold it to the country at large in 1980, where it has dominated both political parties ever since.

Once upon a time, Americans of differing opinions used to work together, as if in peace time, despite wars beyond our borders. Nationwide it was called The New Deal, or The Square Deal, or The Great Society.

Fifteen years earlier in North Dakota, during World War I, it was called The Non-Partisan League.

One of my favorite teaching moments at my university in Chicago was to tell the story of the Nonpartisan League Movement of North Dakota to students brought up in the Democratic machine culture of both the New Deal and Richard J. Daley.

My term for the NPLers was “a bunch of socialist Republicans.”

Although simplistic, it was literally true. The NPL filed in the Republican Primary in 1916 and 1918 for the simple reason that most North Dakotans voted Republican at that time, regardless of what the Party stood for—sort of like today.

It’s still true that North Dakota harbors thousands of socialist Republicans, although they are much more “in the closet” nowadays. Most importantly, two of our most successful market institutions are socialist, the Bank of North Dakota in Bismarck, and the Grain Mill and Elevator in Grand Forks.

What was important to farmers and ranchers in the NPL was not an experiment in Marxism; it was that they no longer be cheated by the large grain and railroad companies of a fair price for their produce. They also needed relief from loan shark practices of out-of-state banks. To do this they legislated state-owned cooperatives in banking and flour production in the teeth of corporate propaganda that they were agents either of the Kaiser’s Germany or Lenin’s Russia.

In 1920 the U.S. Supreme Court, in a 9-0 decision, agreed with the NPL that socialism was legal and proper in state government.

After their victory, the NPL succumbed for a while to infighting, due to some greed and a great deal more ego-centrism. Nevertheless, their accomplishments from 1915-1955 produced great prosperity for North Dakota farmers, although these were forgotten over time in a sea of smugness, produced by waves of mineral wealth and orgies of self-satisfaction.

A shameless culture of aggressive avarice, to which all are susceptible, has been rampant here for forty years. Toxic combinations of Cold War weariness, disillusionment with civil rights and anti-war idealism, and proactive “greed is good” mantras from the Reagan-Bush I-Clinton-Bush II era replaced the collectivism of the New Deal era with narcissism. It flourishes today in greed at the top of our faceless corporate world, where executives are awarded millions for failing, and in fear and loathing, face-to-face, at nasty picket lines where tea-baggers taunt folks with legitimate illnesses.

It flourishes as well in the petulant lawsuit against health care law, joined by ND Attorney General Wayne Stenehjem. With this craven suck up to tea party voters Stenehjem shows he is as out of step with North Dakota needs as Republican Boss, Alex McKenzie, 100 years ago. Fortunately the Democratic/NPL has nominated a capable Fargo attorney, Jean Boechler, to run against Stenehjem, giving North Dakota voters a chance to say “NO” to the Party of “No” on November 2, across the board.

Sore losers these Republicans. They dish it out, but they just can’t take it.

Despite generations of waving the American flag in Democrats’ faces to get their way, Republicans like Stenehjem join those who wave the flag of the Confederacy and promote nullification and secession, just because they lost some big votes in Congress.

Giving up narcissism for collectivism isn’t easy, and it probably can’t last, given the sore temptations of the flesh, gratuitous violence, and the Golden Calf. But times when a critical majority of Americans have preferred the greatest good for the greatest number over “me,me, me,” are times we associate with our greatest breakthroughs that stun the world, not least of them the election of an African-American as President on November 4, 2008.

Learning to love - or simply tolerate - your neighbors, after generations of being taught to hate them, is a very, very scary thing. But when we have the courage to do this, we learn that true freedom, true self interest, comes when we work together, either against a common enemy, for a common goal, or, in the case of health care reform, for both.

Parts reprinted with permission of the Prairie Independent, Bismarck, N.D.

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