{"id":3432,"date":"2019-02-01T00:01:24","date_gmt":"2019-02-01T00:01:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/cassandravoices.com\/?p=3432"},"modified":"2019-02-01T00:01:24","modified_gmt":"2019-02-01T00:01:24","slug":"explaining-the-shutdown-with-trumps-magic-eight-ball","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/casswp.eutonom.eu\/index.php\/2019\/02\/01\/explaining-the-shutdown-with-trumps-magic-eight-ball\/","title":{"rendered":"Explaining the Shutdown with Trump’s Magic Eightball"},"content":{"rendered":"

Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce. Caussidi\u00e8re for Danton, Louis Blanc for Robespierre, the Montagne of 1848 to 1851 for the Montagne of 1793 to 1795, the nephew for the uncle.<\/em>
\n(\u2018The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte<\/a>\u2019, Karl Marx, 1852)<\/p>\n

One might add a third instance to Hegel\u2019s comment via Marx\u2014a phase where it all devolves into a lesser sequel to Dumb and Dumber<\/em>. On a fundamental level, the\u00a0Fox and Friends<\/em>-fueled \u2018crisis\u2019 over what is clearly a profoundly bad and ruinously expensive idea \u2014 a massive wall (or steel palisade, or whatever) across a massive and often inhospitable border is gratuitously unnecessary, the product of dimwitted hubris and incipient dementia coupled with an antiquated political system.<\/p>\n

But this is America, and unlike a shitty sequel, we cannot simply decide to give the film a miss and\u2026 ride a bike or binge-watch on PornHub or something. Or maybe enjoy that glass of Kendall Jackson Chardonnay in peace without having to wonder how the dolt of a president will force you to pay attention to politics (or even that AOC retweet from one\u2019s Bernie Bro nephew).<\/p>\n

\"\"
Image (c) Contantino Idini<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Aside from the hardcore Trump supporter, and angry racist Fox News Grandpa, it isn\u2019t as if anyone thought it was a good idea. Okay, by the most generous polls, 43% of the population believe the wall might be a good idea, which is to say that the country may be slightly less racist than one was afraid it was.<\/p>\n

Still, though, this is the opposite of overwhelming support, and while the approval for the shutdown hovered at around 22%, we had a president from the less popular of the two major parties who lost the popular vote causing and overwhelmingly unpopular shutdown over an in-your-face-racist wall that most people don\u2019t want, and he can get away with it due to this country\u2019s antiquated political system \u2014 and because while the wall is unpopular, it\u2019s still polling at 87% among Republicans, and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell doesn\u2019t want to get primaried by a more drooling-prone version of himself. And this is democracy. Apparently.<\/p>\n

So how can this kind of situation be avoided? Within the framework of the U.S. Constitution the repeated House votes under Democratic control have about as much effect as all those votes to repeal Obamacare did when Republicans controlled the House and the Democrats held the presidency.<\/p>\n

Grassroots? Again, the population as a whole isn\u2019t the demographic Mitch McConnell (or Rush Limbaugh or Ann Coulter) serves \u2014 it\u2019s the elderly white suburbanites who\u2019ve never actually been on the receiving end of a crime by a person of color, but who saw a meme on Facebook that was really scary, and whose notion of God is, if Protestant, informed by megachurch Prosperity Gospel and if Catholic, same as the Protestants, but with an Ave Maria and child-buggery chucked in.<\/p>\n

A considerable if not commanding majority rightly views such people with suspicion and contempt and tells such members of said demographic who are blood relatives to shut the fuck up when they opine that \u2018black people didn\u2019t used to mind being called the n-word\u2019 at the Thanksgiving dinner table. But these people vote, and they are the make-or-break demographic in the Republican primaries.<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, on the \u2018left,\u2019 aside from the welcome continued growth of the socialist-and anarchist Real Deal, the #Resistance spent the shutdown tearing itself up over whether it was better for the Women\u2019s March to cheer for Louis Farrakhan or an Israeli strafe run on a Palestinian village, while continuing to take no real steps to open up the movement into something where marchers can do anything other than make up the numbers.<\/p>\n

Cries of \u2018Russiarussiarussia\u2019 continue to abound, particularly at those who have the temerity to criticize the media-favored Democratic Party candidate du jour<\/em> (at the moment of this writing, former prosecutor Kamala Harris, whose website has no policies laid out but does have merch. for sale).<\/p>\n

We\u2019re almost two years away from the 2020 general election, yet the rancor and brain rot of the American presidential campaign season has set in. And being Americans in a neo-liberal hellscape of a job market, the overwhelming majority of federal employees didn\u2019t quit despite not being paid for a month.<\/p>\n

However, the mere threat of airport and airline workers actually walking off the job was what actually broke the shutdown (contra<\/i>\u00a0#Resistance Twitter, which has begun to operate on the mistaken assumption that Nancy Pelosi is a brain-genius), indicating that the potential power of the working class in strategic industries shouldn’t be dismissed as something for the second verse of a Pete Seeger song.<\/p>\n

\"\"
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez calls for the electoral college to be abolished.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was absolutely right to call for the abolition of the antiquated Electoral College system that keeps giving us presidents who decisively lost the popular vote, but it\u2019s not enough. As a whole mass of American historiography has amply demonstrated, the American Constitutional system was designed to limit the power of what Alexander Hamilton called \u2018the great beast,\u2019 by which he meant the voting public.<\/p>\n

Many of the problems in American politics are not reducible to governmental structures \u2014 the dictatorship of capital and associated rampant inequality and looming ecological catastrophe have no obvious technocratic solution (sorry, Elizabeth Warren) \u2014 but the Constitutional fetishism of both major American parties makes serious discussions about significantly changing an effectively anti-democratic and deliberately unwieldy basic structure of government radically difficult.<\/p>\n

So, apparently, Trump\u2019s magic eight-ball told him to change course, and we\u2019re no longer stuck with the stupid fucking shutdown and uninspected meat and vegetables and vandalism in the national parks, but we still have the MAGA-hatted Republicans and #Resistance Democrats\u2026 and more of this. And very little impetus to force our rulers to change the system that makes things like this happen again and again<\/p>\n

We rely on contributions to keep Cassandra Voices going<\/a>.<\/h4>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce. Caussidi\u00e8re for Danton, Louis Blanc for Robespierre, the Montagne of 1848 to 1851 for the Montagne of 1793 to 1795, the nephew for the uncle. (\u2018The […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":61,"featured_media":3434,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23,1],"tags":[203],"class_list":["post-3432","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-comment","category-uncategorized","tag-2019february"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/casswp.eutonom.eu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3432","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/casswp.eutonom.eu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/casswp.eutonom.eu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/casswp.eutonom.eu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/61"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/casswp.eutonom.eu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3432"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/casswp.eutonom.eu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3432\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/casswp.eutonom.eu\/index.php\/wp-json\/"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/casswp.eutonom.eu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3432"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/casswp.eutonom.eu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3432"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/casswp.eutonom.eu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3432"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}