Into The Streets

The Democrats "Fight" Frantically, Futilely, Foolishly

In memory of the veterans I’ve known, embedded with and written about, those who actually knew what it meant to fight—and how fruitless fighting usually is.

I hate writing about government shutdowns, so I didn’t write about this one very much—but I thought democrats were wrong to be complicit in the latest Congressional constipation. And I thought they made the worst of a bad situation by being complicit in the reopening of the government this week. But at least the government will be open again. There is never any excuse for the government to close.

Let’s keep this simple: shutdown politics is sandbox politics. For much of the public—those who live heavy lives and have more to think about than the tactical gullies rutted in the rules of Congressional procedure--shutdown politics is about politicians being stubborn, petty and stupid to little effect except human suffering. It is confirmation of the worst caricatures of right-wing populist democracy. It only works for nihilists like Steve Bannon and Stephen Miller and would-be authoritarians like Donald Trump. Democrats used to know this: If they are to be taken seriously, they must be the party that believes in the hard pull of governance, which is why their old symbol, now foolishly abandoned—the donkey, that working-class animal, the embodiment of stubborn effort—was so apt (the Republicans who, in their current incarnation, give elephants a bad name, do not seem to believe in much of anything except vamping on illegal immigrants). Sweat, compromise and earnest effort to make lives better is the essential card Democrats have to play. Indeed, calling it a “card” is feckless: we are talking about the fundamentals of society, the maintenance of order through strength and carefully considered acts of empathy. If something so fragile as a democracy is to survive, you don’t mess with those things.

But they messed with it, for the worst of reasons: Chuck Schumer felt the Bern. Democrats had to fight, it was said. It is what always is said, even if “fighting for the people” often means fighting for democratic interest groups…or listening to the most extreme and deluded leftists in the party. It is understandable that Democrats are extremely angry; they should not, however, be extremist angry.

Here is what the donkey party has to be about: it has to govern, it has to be responsible, even when it is out of power. It has to make sure that the distribution of programs like food stamps, and social security disability payments, and Medicaid, continues unimpeded—but also that they are run carefully and frugally. It has to provide better policy alternatives than the nihilists currently in charge of the Republicans. It has to keep flight controllers paid and happy; it has to keep the military paid; it has to keep the weather service open and operating—and agencies like the FDA, CDC, EPA and the NIH safe from the fetishes of perverse wackos. These are not acts that appeal the dramatists of the left or the anarchists of the right. They are not entertainment. They are not reality TV.

Now, forests will be sacrificed in the slicing-and-dicing of aspects of this debacle. There will be those who argue that the Democrats actually, sort of, kind of, won. Polls show the public blames Trump and his trumpettes. (I suspect those polls will reverse themselves now.) Analysts will argue that the high cost of health care was successfully raised as a national issue by the Democrats. Others will argue that the Dems had back-footed Trump, that he was floundering. That he would have caved eventually. (Like when? He still hasn’t caved on the 2020 election.) There may be germs of truth to some of these arguments. But germs are not enough.

I’ve had a lifelong dispute with those who actually believe things will have to get worse if they are to get better—those who root for prices to rise, the stock market to crash, measles to run rampant, cops to be shown as brutal, the CIA to screw things up, the military to fail. If things go bad for the bad guys, they believe, opportunities will open for the good guys. This is the idiot pretense of shutdown politics. If democracy is “proven” to be ineffective or unfair, more crass alternatives will be enabled. If capitalism doesn’t have guard-rails or is strangled by regulation, it will not work. The strong will trounce the weak (and, in the end, destroy their own prosperity). Good people should never root for bad results, for people to suffer (even a little bit); it is, plainly, wrong.

Games are for gamblers. Because Democrats are, at bottom, earnest believers in the work of democracy, they cannot afford to play them. They should not open themselves to be toyed with by a master trickster like Trump; they are just not good enough at cynicism to win those battles. They should be strong and donkey-stubborn in pursuit of good government—an ultra-dependable FDA and CDC and yes, a proportionate AID. They needn’t be wimps: they should take tough, noisy donkey stands on issues of moral importance. They should be screaming about the catastrophic immorality of Trump’s immigration pogrom, even if it tolerated by a numb public. They should try to recruit a handful of Republicans—it’s not impossible—for a new immigration bill that shuts the border but allows our law-abiding neighbors who came here illegally a path to stay. (The polls seem to indicate that’s what most people would favor.)

The next time Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem sits before a Congressional Committee, she should be asked: Do you have an estimate of how many non-criminals, how many legal American citizens, how many people with legal work papers but brown skins, have been detained by ICE? How many families have been separated? How many deported to that prison in Salvador were raped and brutalized? (She won’t.) How do you justify the detention of the father of three US Marines in Los Angeles? How do you justify the separation of an American citizen from his one-year-old by ice agents? Or the tear-gassing of a minister, peacefully protesting? Would Jesus have been one of the masked deporters or one of the deportees?Republicans flaunt their belief in the flag and God, and all that…and they are allowed to get away with their distortions of freedom’s meaning and the true spirit of grace by too many Democrats who refuse to acknowledge the importance of those things.

Democrats want to fight? They should. They should be protesting—putting their bodies peacefully on the line—against the outrages taking place in the streets, the lives broken by this government of vandals. They should not waste energy on congressional parlor games and points of procedure. The lost the government shutdown. Worse, they have lost their way.