That Old Weimar Feeling

David Leonhardt of the New York Times is at it again.

Barely a few hours into the government shutdown, and he already wants the Democrats to settle with the Republicans for the good of the party:

A culture war over immigration replays the racialized debate that dominated the 2016 presidential campaign. As much as it saddens me to say it, the evidence is pretty clear that a racialized debate helps Trump. It’s the kind of debate that will make it harder for Democrats to retake the Senate and House this year....

Democratic leaders are certainly right to insist on protection for the Dreamers. The question is whether the best way to protect them, and the best way to elect politicians who will help them in the long term involves keeping immigration policy in the political spotlight for weeks on end.

The smart move now for Democrats is to accept a short-term funding bill that ends the shutdown and diffuses the tension. Republican leaders are open to that solution, because they have their own vulnerabilities. Their party is the majority party, which is often blamed for dysfunction.

That solution feels a bit unsatisfying, I know. But tactical retreats can lead to big victories in the future.

My published response:

 Last week this author suggested that Democrats stop the "race-talk" for fear that it would turn off the white voters the Big Tent party needs to win come November. Better to get people worrying about their own economic interests than Trump's racism, as if the two haven't been inextricably linked throughout the history of this "democratic" republic of ours.

This week Leonhardt is essentially suggesting that the Dreamers should be deferred lest the Democrats end up taking the blame for the government shutdown. At least they'll have the satisfaction of having pretended to care before doing what they traditionally do best: cave to the Republicans while pleading "we must not let the perfect be the enemy of the good."

This is beginning to sound a bit too ominously like 1930s Germany and all that pragmatic appeasement that led to one of the worst exterminations in recorded history.

You either have principles, or you don't.

The Democrats shouldn't "settle" with fascists. If they do now, they'll do it again... and again... and again. And everybody will lose and more people will die - except, of course, the de facto oligarchy running the place.

Do the Democrats want to remembered as quislings and appeasers, or they do they want to be lauded as people who put their principles above winning a few more seats in a deeply corrupted political system?

Hannah Arendt wrote that all of the world's major religions have rightly condemned "lesser evil" arguments such as those the influential Leonhardt is espousing in the Paper of Record. Conniving with evil in the hope that some good might come out of it someday is at best cowardly and at worst complicit. The Democratic Party has already veered so far to the right that the latter is probably the more accurate theory, given that in exchange for protections for Dreamers, Democrats had already enthusiastically agreed to a border wall costing billions of dollars and even more draconian crackdowns on border-crossers. DACA itself was always the lesser evil, because it arbitrarily granted amnesty to a select few based upon their (healthy) youth, military service, "working hard," or enrollment in school.

"Politically, the weakness of the argument has always been that those who choose the lesser evil forget very quickly that they chose evil,"wrote Arendt. " If we look at the techniques of totalitarian government, it is obvious that the argument of 'the lesser evil' -- far from being raised only from the outside by those who do not belong to the ruling elite -- is one of the mechanisms built into the machinery of terror and criminality. Acceptance of lesser evils is consciously used in conditioning the government officials as well as the population at large to the acceptance of evil as such."

"The extermination of Jews," she continued, "was preceded by a very gradual sequence of anti-Jewish measures, each of which was accepted with the argument that refusal to cooperate would make things worse -- until a stage was reached where nothing worse could have possibly happened."

You know we're in trouble when the existential plight of millions of human beings and basic social justice issues have been demoted, by our leading newspaper, down to a "culture war" over "identity politics" between two bickering factions who just can't seem to get along with each other. Leonhardt and other neoliberal operatives choose to ignore the fact that without racism and human enslavement and oppression, predatory capitalism would not and could not exist

Paraphrasing Machiavelli, they sow hemlock seed and tell us to expect lush fields of ripening corn.