On the Square Today

First Things editor Joseph Bottum considers the recent health care legislation :

Instead of falling—or rising, if the left proves correct—on the great wave of Armageddon, we must wait, in this trough of exhaustion, to learn what happens next. Our apocalypse is a slow one; it smothers us in whimpers. And here on Monday morning, all that remains is a sense of the impending. Something is slowly coming, something is slouching toward us.

I don’t know exactly what that something is. Neither do you. Neither does the president or the Congress or the Senate, or anyone else who forced this change upon us. Change they wanted, and change they got—but change to what? The actual text of the bill makes little sense, as nearly everyone admits, but, then, as House Speaker Nancy Pelosi explained, the point wasn’t really to get an intelligible bill. The point was to get any bill. To get the nationalization of health care rolling. To start the socialization process. To turn the corner. The point was to change the American system—in the belief that, once changed, the system can never change back.