Tourists walk
past trash laying on the ground of the National Mall as the partial
shutdown of the US government goes into the 12th day, on January 2,
2019, in Washington, D. C. Mark Wilson / Getty Images
The era of divided government began with the continuation of a
ridiculous and destructive government shutdown caused by a president who
seemingly cares only about impressing a hateful right-wing minority
obsessed with the symbolism of building a literal wall on the southern
border to keep out brown-skinned immigrants.
Happy New Year.
To this point, Democrats have been flexing their new leverage as
holders of the House majority by refusing to agree to Trump’s wall. It
feels a little better that at least one part of one branch of government
is controlled by someone other than the gutless Republicans who have
catered to Trump’s every destructive whim.
But what hasn’t changed is that, with the exception of a few
left-wing Democrats, the Democratic Party as a whole continues to stand
for nothing beyond opposing Trump — certainly not for the refugee
families in Tijuana who were teargassed on New Year’s Day as they approached a border wall that very much already exists.
Regardless of who ends up blinking first in this latest Trumpian
theater of the absurd, the shutdown has revealed some of the key
political dynamics that socialists can expect over the coming two years.
Number One: Trump Will Be Even More Off the Rails
It can’t be stated often enough: The most powerful office in the
world is occupied by a myopic egomaniac who wouldn’t be trusted by
anyone who knows him to take care of a pet or a houseplant.
Trump led an erratic and dysfunctional government when his party
controlled all parts of the federal government. When the Democrats won
control of the House in the midterm elections, Trump dialed his
instability up to 11.
Mattis and Kelly gone; tweets announcing a full withdrawal from Syria; threats to dismiss the Federal Reserve chair —
all these moves will rattle the billionaires and power brokers who
either supported or at least tolerated Trump, even when he pandered to
Charlottesville Nazis and built border concentration camps for refugee
children.
Now, House Democrats have the power to vote down legislation and
launch long-delayed investigations into the White House’s tangled web of
corruption. And with the Mueller investigation moving closer to Trump and his inner circle, the Republican rats have to start thinking about when to jump ship.
Trump’s last-minute decision to reject a spending bill if it didn’t
contain funding for his racist border wall, thus leading to a government
shutdown, surprised and frustrated most Senate Republicans, who don’t
see the logic to an unpopular government shutdown because of an
unpopular border wall.
But Trump governs not by logic but by crisis. The shutdown shows that
the more obstacles he faces in the coming months — whether it be from
Mueller, Democratic hearings or a sinking economy — the more destructive
he is going to be.
Number Two: It’s the People Who End Up Paying for Trump’s “Populist” Stunts
Some 800,000 federal workers have been impacted by the shutdown — half of them “nonessential” workers furloughed for the duration and half of them forced to work without pay.
In other words, the president who boasted (falsely) about saving 1,000 jobs at
an Indiana manufacturing plant on the campaign trail is now boasting
that he’s proud to steal paychecks from 800 times that number of people,
in the name of his racist campaign against migrants.
Then there’s the impact on the services those workers provide, and
not just at national parks and museums, as the media like to point out.
Case in point: food and drug inspections. That’s right, just weeks
after a horrific outbreak of E. Coli in lettuce — capping a year
considered the worst for food safety in recent memory — we’re all now in even greater danger of another deadly outbreak, all because Trump claims he’s keeping us safe from mythical diseases carried by immigrants.
But the most outrageous impact of the shutdown is probably the cutoff
of funds for Indigenous nations whose treaties called for federal money
for education, health care and other services, in exchange for vast
territorial concessions.
“We prepaid [for the services] with millions of acres of land,” said Chippewa leader Aaron Payment told the New York Times.
“We don’t have the right to take back that land, so we expect the
federal government to fulfill its treaty and trust responsibility.”
Among the many services considered “nonessential” by the government
is snow removal in rural areas. As a result, Navajo Nation president
Russell Begaye told the Times that many people
on the reservation are trapped in their homes, unable to drive the
dozens of miles to the nearest grocery store or pharmacy.
Number Three: The Democrats Remain the Party of the Status Quo
Last year, polls showed that two-thirds of Americans oppose Trump’s family separation policy at the border, and a full 75 percent think immigration is “a good thing” for the country — the highest number since 2001.
But Democrats aren’t using this national spotlight on immigration
policy to do anything other than scold Trump for shutting down the
government and continuing with the status quo.
House Democrats led by new Speaker Nancy Pelosi want to position
themselves as the party trying first and foremost to end the shutdown.
But that doesn’t mean they couldn’t also use this moment of national
crisis to expose ICE raids, for-profit prisons, family separation and
the other horrors of U.S. immigration policy.
Instead here’s the new head of the House Democratic Caucus, Rep.
Hakeem Jeffries: “We do have a broken immigration system that needs to
be fixed in a sustainable and bipartisan way. However, it’s impossible
to have a mature conversation about comprehensive immigration reform in
the midst of a reckless Trump shutdown sparked by his desire to build a
medieval border wall.”
By countering Trump with proposals to maintain “border security”
funding at current levels, Pelosi engaged in the classic Democratic
strategy of starting negotiations with a concession that can only lead
to further retreats toward the Republicans’ maximalist position.
Her proposal also captures exactly what her party stands for: continuing the status quo, which in this case includes children dying in detention centers and being teargassed by Border Patrol thugs.
But Pelosi didn’t just “play it safe” when it comes to border
politics. She also included in her proposal to reopen the government a “pay-as-you-go” provision
that requires new spending to be offset with equivalent savings. This
austerity measure beloved of conservatives would make it virtually
impossible to pass ambitious reforms like Medicare for All or Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s proposal for Green New Deal.
Pelosi’s stance during the shutdown follows the conservative agenda
that she and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer have already laid out
for the coming two years.
Though rejection by the Senate or a Trump veto is probably assured,
the Democrats could push measures that lay out an agenda of bold popular
redistributive reforms, like taxing the rich to pay for universal
medical care and college tuition.
Instead, Democrats plan to think small — for example, proposals to
tinker with the Affordable Care Act or enact campaign finance reform
measures that are unobjectionable to their billionaire funders.
Party leaders are hoping they can reap the benefits of the “energy”
brought in by left-wing newcomers like Ocasio-Cortez — even as they bury
her proposal in a neutered climate change committee that won’t get behind the New Green Deal.
Number Four: Immigration Politics Needs a “Medicare for All”
On New Year’s Day, White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said that Trump would reject Pelosi’s proposal to end the shutdown because it “fails to secure the border and puts the needs of other countries above the needs of our own citizens.”
As always, jingoistic nationalism is the last refuge of scoundrels.
Trump’s wall may not be popular, but this underlying “America First”
argument has a broader appeal — made relevant by the fact that neither
party has lifted a finger in many decades to help the majority on the
wrong end of increasing inequality.
That’s why immigrant-bashing is Trump’s go-to issue when he needs to
whip up his base — and it’s why the longer Democrats counter it with
nothing more than procedural scolding, the more of a chance it has to
take root.
The emergence of a new left both inside and outside the Democratic
Party has been marked by demands like Medicare for All, free college and
now the Green New Deal that have articulated the politics of working
class solidarity.
The emergence of the demand to #AbolishICE last summer was an important step toward breaking the left from the exploitative corporate scheme of “comprehensive immigration reform.” But
we have yet develop a concrete set of demands that tie the fight
against migrant oppression to labor demands that will benefit workers,
regardless of legal status and nationality.
With Republican Sen. Lindsay Graham floating ideas for ending the standoff with an even weaker version of comprehensive immigration reform, this is an urgent task.
Number Five: The Key Question for the Left Will be Unity vs. Independence
We now have two political parties, but three identifiable broad
political bases: right-wing nationalists, neoliberal centrists and
social democrats crossed with New Deal Democrats.
It’s a trend that’s been developing for years, but it accelerated as
Trump brought the Republican Party under the control of its extreme
right wing, boosting the longtime Democratic strategy of becoming the
party of choice for U.S. capital and well-off suburban voters.
Schumer was widely mocked for
his 2016 prediction that Democrats would pick up two suburban moderate
votes for every blue-collar worker they lost, but in the midterms, the
strategy worked pretty well. The House majority contains democratic
socialists like Ocasio-Cortez and Rashida Tlaib, but also a lot of
incoming moderates.
But this isn’t just a question of math. For decades, the project of
the Democratic Party has been to subordinate its left flank behind a
centrist project. Schumer’s formula isn’t mathematical, but political:
There are far more workers than well-heeled suburbanites, but the latter
correspond more to the interests of capital that the Democrats are
actually interested in serving.
One key debate in the coming period will be whether left should work
toward independence from the Democratic Party — or make a priority out
of “unity” with the centrists to keep right-wing nationalists out of
power.
The question won’t be mainly about elections in the short term, but
about demands like Medicare for All and the Green New Deal — and it’s
important for everyone to understand that fear of independence is behind
the Democratic complaints that they are “too radical” or jeopardize
pushing the right wing out of power.
If movements reject the Democrats’ limitations, these political
battles can contribute to establishing the left practically in
organization and in struggle on the scale that the new socialist
movement has projected itself ideologically.
Some of the new left-wing Democrats in the House are off to a
promising start, from the Green New Deal, to Rashida Tlaib’s rejection
of the traditional Israel junket for new members of Congress, to the
rejection by Ocasio-Cortez and others of Pelosi’s pay-as-you-go
provision.
But just as it was telling that the challenge to Pelosi’s speakership
came not from the party’s left wing, but from its right, it’s also
telling how few Democrats joined the challenge to her austerity plan —
much less did other things like encouraging federal workers to take job
action against the shutdown or bringing delegations of Indigenous
leaders to the Capitol to protest.
That’s a reflection of the pressure on party members to stay united
in the shutdown fight. The shutdown will end eventually, but this
Trump-created crisis and the standoff that ensued give us an early
indication of how little the Democratic Party as a whole has changed.
