The Shutdown's Tipping Point

Racism and Republicanism been bedfellows for generations now, and advocates of both ideals have had their reasons for seeing the government fail. Few things have helped spark racial and economic progress, such that it is, like the bedrock legislation of the 1960s. Court decisions and federal programs have helped inch us closer to eradicating various racial and economic imbalances. In the decades since, either in retribution or in the interest of survival, the conservative movement has only grown whiter and wealthier while seeking to shrink the federal apparatus. They tried to drown government in a bathtub, perhaps, because they felt that they didn’t need it — or because others did. Is it any coincidence that so many wealthy members of the Trump family and administration, including the president himself, have been incapable of exhibiting empathy with 800,000 federal workers furloughed now for more than a month without pay?

The failure of that philosophy may have reached its culmination in the current government shutdown, now in its second month. Spreading racism and eliminating government have similarly harmful, and universal, effects. A Republican-led War on Drugs that was all too happy to incarcerate black people for crack offenses, for instance, left lawmakers scrambling for solutions in recent years as opioids have taken over poor white communities. We all feel the pain eventually.

That is what is happening now. The shutdown is allowing the country to experience a systemic breakdown that feels much like a microcosm of what we see with racism in America. And as with this system that impoverishes and imperils people as if by design, the shutdown will not stop even if someone gets killed. What brought it about certainly will continue. Does the train stop when it runs over the victim who the villain ties to the tracks?

It is not coincidental that this is all in pursuit of a white-supremacist fantasy conjured by the president’s advisers to remind him to slam immigrants in campaign speeches. Now entering his third year in office, Trump has never been more obstinate, refusing to budge from his demand for $5.7 billion in border wall funding. It is a ransom that Democrats steadfastly refuse to pay, not merely because they have all the leverage but because it is morally repellent. The wall, which experts have said will not deter undocumented immigration and will likely cause more migrant deaths, would also be “a modern-day Confederate monument” should it be erected, as Jamelle Bouie wrote in the New York Times. This is the prize for which Trump, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and many of their fellow party members have shut down the government and allowed it to atrophy.

https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/trump-shutdown-airports-784247/