A Word on Tactics
As you are reading this, you know that we have somehow avoided a shutdown until November. We know how this will go. The jackasses in Congress will do nothing for 40 or 41 days and then will make up a new crisis to explain why they are holding a gun to the country’s head. It’s as infuriating as it is predictable. I get the fatigue. I really do.
I’ve been called a number of things here. Neville Chamberlain is one of them. You can call me whatever name you want. I really don’t care all that much. The pushback is not on that level. People have been calling me names since I was in first grade. It really is nothing new and the intellectual level of namecalling is not really much beyond that of the first grader.
The question at hand was essentially how we should handle these brinkmanship moments we always seem to find ourselves in. It has been suggested that we play matador and let them win a round. Then, the people would see what a shutdown or default would do to the economy and those folks would never win another election again. If it only it were that easy.
This is very simple. There are three reasons why I disagree with this tactic. First, I know people that would be affected by furloughs. Sure, they end up getting paid following a shutdown, but that doesn’t ease their pain during the furlough. They are often scared and depending on how long they’ve been a civil servant they may not have enough of a nest egg to keep them afloat if a shutdown lasts more than a few weeks.
Real people will get hurt. This point can’t be repeated often enough. Of course, none of us are literally in position to prevent that or not, but from a collective point of view I don’t want to have that on my conscience. I don’t want to watch people suffer and think, “I could have prevented that, but chose not to.” To me that’s not really a choice at all.
We could call that two different reasons. There are the people you know that will suffer and also the people you don’t know. However, that may not be the biggest problem. The biggest problem is that the whole strategy rests on the belief that people will see who did this and remember on election day. Yet, the same assholes that did this back in 2018 are still there. They are the ones doing it again and they are the ones that conservative voters are cheering for.
Again, this can be one or two reasons based on how you interpret it. There are people now that simply will not see who is responsible even when it is plain in front of their face. There are others that will be angry in the moment and still somehow still vote for those sons of bitches anyway. So, in effect you are letting them burn it down for nothing. Some of these irrational voters will vote for the irrational actors that lie the match. These irrational voters will watch them throw gasoline on the fire and still think it is the fire fighter’s fault. In that world you have to keep fighting. You hope you sway just enough voters to keep fighting. It’s incredibly depressing. It’s incredibly exhausting. It’s incredibly frustrating. Unfortunately, the alternative is really no alternative at all.