Diatribes of Jay: How the Shutdown Helps Dems

[For a discussion of how our national openness hurts us and what we really need from China, click here. For a brief explanation of how badly both Trump and his opposition are failing at “the art of the deal,” click here. For a deep dive into how Apple tries to thwart Google’s capture of the web-browser market, click here. For a review of Speaker Pelosi’s superb qualifications to lead the Democratic Party, click here. For reasons why natural-gas and electric cars are essential to national security, click here. For additional reasons, click here. For the source of Facebook’s discontents and how to save democracy from it, click here. For Democrats’ core values, click here. The Last Adult is Leaving the White House. Who will Shut Off the Lights? For how our two parties lost their souls, click here. For the dire portent of Putin’s high-fiving the Saudi Crown Prince, click here. For updated advice on how to drive on the Sun’s power alone, or without fossil fuels, click here. For a 2018 Thanksgiving Message, click here. For a list of links to recent posts in reverse chronological order, click here.]

Count me as someone who wants to see our “partial” government shutdown continue as long as possible. Why? Let me count the reasons.

The longer it goes on, the more it highlights our president’s intransigence, childishness and selfishness. Not only must he, like a two-year-old throwing a temper tantrum, get exactly his way. He even wants to get credit for throwing his tantrum and gumming up the works.

Every intelligent life form knows that we need some sort of physical barrier for border security. We already have barriers over large parts of our southern border, extending out into the Pacific Ocean. Undoubtedly there are places where we could improve or extend them.

Democratic leaders have admitted as much. Again and again, they have tried to make deals that would provide significant new money for border security, including enhanced and extended barriers. But Trump has shut down much of our government just to make it seem as if he alone “discovered” the Great Wall of China, as if we can secure our Southern border only by doing things exactly his way. Why not claim he invented the wheel, too?

The shutdown highlights the real motives of Trump and his sidekick McConnell. They don’t give a damn about all the suffering that the shutdown is causing every day, to people who aren’t working, who are working without pay, or who are hurt by the sudden absence of normal government services. They don’t really give a damn about people coming across the border without documents. If they did, they would make a deal as soon as possible, so we could begin strengthening border security as soon as possible.

Instead, they are delaying the whole process just to show their “base” who is boss. They want to be seen as strongmen on horseback driving away a clear and present threat, even though every day their intransigence delays a solution and makes the threat worse—not to mention the suffering of innocent asylum seekers.

McConnell covers his lust for power with a studiously anodyne public personality, as if Valium were his personal drug of choice. He wants to shift blame to the President, not just to avoid responsibility for all the pain he is helping to cause, but also to show who’s boss in the Senate. That way he can kow-tow to Trump’s base, which he fears politically, while presenting himself as a strongman on horseback, albeit one on Valium.

By itself, all this would be very good for Dems: a Republican president and Senate majority leader putting not just their personal power, but public perception of it, ahead of the people’s welfare.

Trump and McConnell make the United States look, sound and feel like the banana republic we are rapidly becoming. McConnell’s bossism—not to mention his support for vote suppression and (until he recently repudiated Steve King) his consistent accommodation of racists and white supremacists—clearly identifies him as an avatar of the Old South. It’s not hard to imagine him having a Confederate Flag stamped on his brain, if not hidden in a dark corner of his living room.

But all this doesn’t even touch the surface of why the shutdown is good for Dems. In and of itself, the shutdown refutes a Big Lie—a gigantic political scam—by which the GOP has deluded the American public for two generations.

Ever since Ronald Reagan told us “It’s your money!” and “Government is the problem, not the solution!”, Republicans have made the rich richer and the powerful more powerful by leading working Americans to believe that the taxes they pay are pure waste.

All government does (their lie goes) is control you (by regulation), enmesh you in red tape, and take your tax money, giving you little or nothing in return. It doesn’t do anything that business can’t do cheaper, faster and better.

Never mind that this lie contradicts the daily experience of most Americans. With this scam, the GOP has convinced many to downsize their government and cut taxes, again and again. The high-water-mark so far was last year’s Trump Tax Scam, which put the lion’s share of 1.5 trillion dollars worth of tax relief in the pockets of the rich and big corporations, at the cost of drastically inflating the national debt.

But here’s the thing. Government is like a good spouse that the other spouse takes for granted. Much, if not most, of what it does is hidden, invisible or ignored in the hurly burly of daily life. But let the good spouse get sick or (worse yet) die, or just get fed up and walk out the door, and all she or he once did but no longer does becomes painfully apparent. That’s precisely what the shutdown is teaching Americans about their government.

Not long ago, “experiential learning” was all the rage among educators. Now Americans are learning, from hard experience of deprivation, exactly how much their government does for them and what they get for their taxes. Among many other things, government:

(1) keeps aircraft safe by inspecting and certifying them, and by managing their routine, daily maintenance and repair (the FAA); (2) keeps us safe from terrorism in the air by preventing travelers from bringing weapons or bombs aboard aircraft (the TSA); (3) keeps air travel safe, fast, orderly and efficient by training air traffic controllers and maintaining a huge national infrastructure of radio beacons, ground-to-air radio, and radar installations to control and manage air traffic (the FAA); (4) keeps capital markets safe and efficient—and investors from being fleeced—by formalizing rules of disclosure and managing capital markets (the SEC); (5) keeps Americans informed about the science of disease and health conditions, through an encyclopedic, comprehensive website that organizes all of medical science and epidemiology and keeps it up to date (the CDC); (6) jumps on any new outbreak of disease, especially one that might threaten a pandemic, with rapid investigation, instant science, and countermeasures, even if it starts in Africa (the CDC and NIH); (7) keeps Americans safe from preventable diseases by managing and certifying vaccinations to foster individual immunity and maintain “herd immunity,” (the FDA); (8) insures Americans that the medicines they take and the medical devices they pay for and use are safe and effective (the FDA); (9) insures the safety and wholesomeness of our food supply, and investigates and ameliorates outbreaks of foodborne illness (the USDA); (10) investigates accidents and mishaps in auto, rail, sea and air transportation, using all the power of modern science, so that they are less likely tohappen again (the NTSB); (11) oversees and makes Social Security and Medicare payments to tens of millions of Americans, so that they can enjoy their retirements free from want and sickness; (12) oversees “food stamps,” related payments and unemployment insurance to tens of millions of Americans, so that poverty, unemployment or disability don’t leave them sick and dying in the streets (SNAP); (13) oversees business generally to control bullying, cheating and scamming by bosses and their business empires (the FTC and CFPB); (14) maintains and preserves our national forests, national parks and national monuments so that all Americans, including those who don’t belong to country clubs, have access to our pristine natural heritage and places to enjoy it (the Department of the Interior); (15) constructs and maintains the Interstate Highway System and grants money to the states to build and maintain their own highways, (16) maintains diplomatic relations and embassies and consulates in numerous foreign countries, so that Americans have passports when they travel abroad and resources they can tap when foreign governments oppress them or they get in trouble (Department of State), (17) studies chemicals used and effluent produced by our industries and makes rules to keep them from poisoning us as workers and our air, water, and land (EPA), and (18) satisfies our species-wide curiosity and desire to explore by leading-edge exploration of our celestial environment and (lately) by supporting private enterprise in doing the same (NASA).

There is of course much, much more. Not all of government is now shut down. We haven’t even touched on anything the Department of Defense does, both to protect us from our enemies in cyberspace and real space and to fund basic scientific research that private investors won’t support (DARPA). Bad as it is, what we have now is more like a spousal “slowdown,” rather than a taken-for-granted spouse walking out the door forever.

Even though the shutdown is only partial and largely hidden, it already has been hugely instructive. The longer it goes on, the more it shows the average working American—by experience, not argument—how much our government does for us and how much our taxes buy.

But make no mistake about it. The con that Republicans have run for two generations has been extraordinarily successful. Even in the midst of the shutdown, with all its pain and suffering, many ordinary Americans still believe that they, like Ayn Rand’s über-fictional character John Galt, can live well without government, and without paying taxes, as if they were all billionaires.

Human beings have a near-infinite capacity to believe false abstractions that contradict their own personal experience and common sense. That capacity becomes literally unbounded when reinforced, day after day, by the entertaining propaganda of media like Fox and Sinclair.

That has been the GOP playbook for two generations. Already it has reduced this nation from a paragon of expertise, competence, science and realism to a nascent banana republic run by Keystone Kops.

So let the shutdown continue. Let the pain roll on. As the ancient Greek proverb tells us, “the suffered is the learned.” The longer the shutdown lingers, the closer every American will come to understanding how much our taxes buy, what a bargain our American government is, and how the GOP’s two-generational scam has led us by our noses to both national and personal perdition.

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Diatribes of Jay

18 January 2019

How the Shutdown Helps Dems

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