Trump Ruins Xenophobia For Everybody

That's the gist of a New York Times "news analysis" published on Saturday.

In the good old Bipartisan Days, reporter Michael Shear laments, Both Sides had no trouble agreeing that migrants and refugees entering the US had to be dealt with, and dealt with sternly. But now Donald Trump's Wall is diverting the desired official discourse away from all those other harsh methods of keeping people out and disposing of them.

Back in the good old polite days, officials knew how to keep their racism and xenophobia carefully hidden from public view as they crafted their racist, xenophobic policies.

By conjuring images of a towering stone edifice around a medieval fortress — and branding those on the outside as invaders threatening to bring crime, drugs and disease to the United States — Mr. Trump has transformed what used to be a complicated, nuanced negotiation into a take-it-or-leave-it demand, laced with xenophobia, that has shuttered nearly a quarter of the government for weeks.

Only "laced with" xenophobia? Shear must be so used to reporting the legendary nuanced collegiality among the politicians of the Uniparty that he can only complain that Trump's demands and rhetoric are a tad on the bigoted side. He dare not state the obvious: that this president is a human-shaped brick of pure cocaine, or maybe it's a boulder-sized rock of crystal meth with a chaser of heroin. Those drugs that Trump claims are "flooding" over the border are unfairly competing with him. And he won't rest until he poisons a lot more people than the current third of the population that is currently hooked on him.

But back to the good old sober days. The Uniparty racketeers would often collegially stuff their faces with pizza as they politely debated how many tens of thousands of extra border security agents should be hired to confiscate the clandestine jugs of water left by sympathetic citizens for the migrants making the deadly trek through some of the most brutal climate conditions on the planet.

It was so reasonable back then that Democrats even agreed to double the border security patrols, a good faith gesture of overkill designed to placate the more openly racist Republicans.

They were such ardent sticklers for xenophobic decency, in fact, that

Senators from both parties also agreed on money for technological improvements along the border. The bill allocated $3.2 billion for drones, infrared ground sensors and long-range thermal imaging cameras to give Border Patrol agents advance notice when migrants cross illegally, especially at night. It also included money for an electronic employment verification system for all employers and upgrades at airports to catch immigrants who overstay their visas.
And the consensus included some physical barriers — what Mr. Trump might call walls and others would call fencing. Years earlier, the Secure Fence Act of 2006 allocated money to build about 650 miles of barriers along the border. The 2013 bill, had it been signed into law, would have increased that total to almost 700 miles, mostly along the eastern half of the border with Mexico.

The polite xenophobes at least had the good taste to call their barriers "fencing" while pretending that Reaper drones are totally benign. In the good old pre-Trumpian days, the profiteers of the military-industrial complex could mask their greed and inhumanity behind all that overpriced surveillance and weaponry. And now Trump has to ruin the whole enterprise with his unrefined, retrograde, low-tech gibberish. He has brought such uncomfortable and unwanted attention to the heretofore ignored border. It used to be that Homeland Security cops firing tear gas across the border into another sovereign nation (Mexico), and the imprisonment of mothers and children in "family detention" prisons were perfectly acceptable to most American liberals. The previous Democratic administration practiced their inhumanity so discreetly, you see.

No more. Thanks a lot, Trump, for ripping the mask off the all-American cruelty.

Oh, and the word salad that keeps spinning out of that pursed little mouth! Michael Shear quotes The Donald:

In remarks to reporters after a meeting with Democrats at the White House earlier this month, Mr. Trump insisted that the only way to prevent immigrants from crossing between the 25 official ports of entry is to erect fences everywhere else.
“We can’t let gaps. Because if you have gaps, those people are going to turn their vehicles, or the gangs — they’re going to coming in through those gaps,” the president said. “And we cannot let that happen.”

Still, faithful establishment scribe that he is, Shear soon reverts back to Both Siderism, decrying the dreaded Tone that all too often gets in way of proper racketeering discourse:  

In recent days, the rhetoric between the two sides has become more strident than ever. Mr. Trump and his Republican allies have pointed out that Democrats supported fencing in the past, though they purposefully ignore the context of those votes and the difference between the fencing that Democrats supported and the all-or-nothing wall that the president has demanded.
Speaker Nancy Pelosi of California has called the wall “immoral,” cementing her position against it.

And she was no doubt also very steely while she was at it.

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.