Update to the Update: Not an article per se but a Schadenfreude-licious song lyric in honor of Roger's arrest: Stone In Jail (sung to the tune of "Stone In Love")
There are times when I come across an article that just needs to be shared and read in full.
Today I came across EJ Dionne's article at The Moderate Voice called "The Shutdown Trap" that is a required read:
Our core problem is a dogmatic anti-government attitude... that arose in the 1970s and ’80s. This makes it impossible for us to have a constructive debate about what government is for, what tasks it should take on, and what good it actually does.
In truth, the whole anti-government thing is fundamentally fraudulent. So is the conservative claim to believe passionately in states’ rights and local authority.
In practice, conservatives regularly vote for lots of government — so long as it serves the interests they represent. Start with farm subsidies, massive defense spending, regulations that disempower unions, and measures that sharply tilt the tax code in favor of corporate interests and the wealthy...
The shutdown reminds us that government is not the problem but the solution, or at least part of it, when it comes to many aspects of our common life.
We can see the damage done to the air transportation system, bureaus that gather useful economic statistics, the Internal Revenue Service, the FBI, the Drug Enforcement Administration and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. Add in the Coast Guard, Customs and Border Protection, the Forest Service and the Weather Service. And this is a very partial list.
The glee with which President Trump has talked about a shutdown for months reflects an old conservative trope: Government is so bad, plodding and, well, useless, that people won’t mind if it disappears for a while. This faith explains why Republicans were equally cheerful when they shut down the government in the mid-1990s during a budget fight with Bill Clinton’s administration...
Unspoken in Dionne's article is the animus/anger behind the anti-government outrage of the Far Right.
The Far Right hates and fears the New Deal/Great Society elements of modern government not because of its bureaucratic burdens but because those government policies fight against racial/gender discrimination and segregation. It's not that Social Security or Medicare or Federal Aid to Schools are expensive - and are they, compared to the corporate welfare and massive tax cuts we give to the rich? - it's that those things have to be equally applied to everyone, in order to help all the poor - minorities included - break the cycle of poverty that the conservative rich rely on to retain wealth and control.
They won't admit it, but the real reason why the Republican Far Right hates federal social aid is because it's color blind. You will notice from Dionne's article that the conservative animus against government arose in the 1970s, when the post-FDR and LBJ era saw a lot of the civil rights requirements from the 1960s laws kicked in. The more federal aid went to non-White communities and services, the more the Far Right freaked out about it.
It's not about What the federal bureaucracy does (there's still bloated spending and mismanagement in the Dept. of Defense for God's sake but the Republicans don't rail against that), it's Who the federal bureaucracy serves (everyone). If the federal government suddenly dropped all civil rights protections and aid for Blacks/Latinos/Muslims/Asians/Women/Gays/Trans I guarantee you the Republicans would have no problem re-opening government because then all the money and support will go to White Men as their God intends.
Right now, trump's Shutdown is hurting families dependent on food stamps - and while poor whites are in the mix, there's a disproportionate number of Blacks and Latinos - and not through slowdown on payments but from stopping stores from accepting SNAP money. trump's immigration stances - not just the Goddamn Wall but everything else - would punish Latino families, and we're still seeing trump's ICE rounding up honest American citizens (military veterans!) for deportation.
It's something deserving of a separate blog article, but Adam Serwer's Atlantic article is a must-read as well: for modern Republicans, Cruelty is the Point.
And that cruelty - fueled by racism and sexism and sheer hate - is why the trump Shutdown will not end on a happy note. The Far Right is going to keep pushing it until everyone they hate suffers.
And by then everything will be broken.
5 comments:
Lee Atwater let that cat out of the bag long ago.
-Doug in Oakland
If I did business in the same manner as government does, and forced strangers to give me money, would you consider me a criminal?
Ed gets first prize for bad analogy of the week.
It should be an impeachable offense for the President to shut down OUR government. This 45thoccupantofthewhitehouse was elected to run the government 365 days a year for four years, not to shut it down.
I'm not sure where Ed is coming from, his complaint is a bit vague. Is he complaining about paying taxes for government services? If so, tell him have fun paying private corporations even more for the same services (especially in this day and age of monopolistic practices). He should also note most Americans don't complain about paying taxes: they know it's a civic duty to pay in. http://noticeatrend.blogspot.com/2015/04/just-needs-to-be-said-almost-every.html
Is he complaining about bad or ineffective bureaucracies? The government is only as well-managed as the people overseeing it (which is why having Republicans in charge over most of the last 40 years has been a bad idea).
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