The furthest left button on my car radio is tuned to C-SPAN radio. It could easily be tuned to National Public Radio if I lived elsewhere.

As I have long been curious about public policy issues, it is a matter of course for me to see what is playing when I start my car engine.

On Wednesday July 24, I heard an interview with Jim McDermott on the implementation of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA) or Obamacare.

Jim McDermott is a partisan Democrat, who has represented the Seventh District of Washington since 1989. He mixes it up with the Republicans on numerous occasions, actively participating in the partisan back and forth that is national politics in the US. Part of his presentation that day were partisan talking points that we are accustomed to hearing from public office holders of both major parties.

Something else caught my attention. McDermott pointed to a change in our view of the obligations of citizens to the Republic and to our society. Since the end of the military draft, wars have been fought with minimal inconvenience to the civilian population, engendering an atomistic individualism, all of us isolated and alone sharing a space and looking out for ourselves.

Here is how he put it at the 8:48 minute mark of C-Span’s National Journal on July 24,2013:

It’s a much larger problem than just healthcare. When we ended the draft in 1975, we said to all young people in this country you have no responsibility for your country. You are an individual. You can live in any way you want. You don’t owe anything to your country. So we raised a whole generation, actually two generations of people who do not see themselves as responsible for their neighbor. We have young people who figure if I get hurt, if I am on my motorcycle and get into an accident, they will take me down to the emergency room, they’ll patch me up. I will not have money to pay for it, but somebody will pay for it and everybody in society who has health insurance is paying an extra $1000 a year for these kids who refuse to anticipate that something might happen to them. Young people get cancer, young people have skiing accidents, young people have all kinds of problems and they just act as though somebody else will take care of it. That’s not right. Part of the bill says you have the responsibility to pay for the possibility that you may be . . . “We require them with automobiles. We do not let people drive without auto insurance. It’s not your problem because someone else will pay for it. We say you have to have auto insurance.

Were it not for the partisan wrangling on Capitol Hill, are these not conservative values of individual responsibility and citizenship that all but the most ideological acolyte of Ayn Rand could agree to?

Plato addressed similar questions in his dialogue: Crito. Socrates had been condemned to death. His friend Crito attempted to convince him to flee into exile rather than accept that penalty. As part of a lengthy discourse about law and society, Socrates responded by imagining an argument with laws of the society:

Then the laws will say: ‘Consider, Socrates, if we are speaking truly that in your present attempt you are going to do us an injury. For, having brought you into the world, and nurtured and educated you, and given you and every other citizen a share in every good which we had to give, we further proclaim to any Athenian by the liberty which we allow him, that if he does not like us when he has become of age and has seen the ways of the city, and made our acquaintance, he may go where he pleases and take his goods with him. None of us laws will forbid him or interfere with him. Any one who does not like us and the city, and who wants to emigrate to a colony or to any other city, may go where he likes, retaining his property. But he who has experience of the manner in which we order justice and administer the state, and still remains, has entered into an implied contract that he will do as we command him. And he who disobeys us is, as we maintain, thrice wrong: first, because in disobeying us he is disobeying his parents; secondly, because we are the authors of his education; thirdly, because he has made an agreement with us that he will duly obey our commands; and he neither obeys them nor convinces us that our commands are unjust; and we do not rudely impose them, but give him the alternative of obeying or convincing us;–that is what we offer, and he does neither.

In order to uphold his agreement with his society, Socrates chose to accept its death sentence rather than flee. We are not faced with such stark choices in 21st Century America. We have on occasion leaders and laws preferred by others, but we agree in our democratic contract to accept them, so long as we retain the right to speak out against them and to elect different representatives on a regular basis. Such is our obligation to respect Obamacare, which is the law of the land.

We do not have to go out on a battlefield shouldering a weapon to be patriotic. We do not even need a war or an enemy or an adversary to be patriotic. It can be sufficiently patriotic to respect the laws, particularly those that assign us social responsibility, for like Socrates, we have accepted all the bounty of this society, and it would demean us not to accept the accompanying responsibilities.