The problem with true idealists in politics is that few true idealists are able to compromise, and no government, particularly a democratically-based government, works without compromise. 

The problem with most professional politicians is that their ideals are subservient to their desire to retain office, and to remain in office they will vote for popular but unwise policies and legislation. While popular opinion can be fickle, most widely held popular beliefs are simplistic ideals, all too often at variance with reality.

Thus, the combination of idealists and professional politicians mitigates against compromise and practicality, and the less that government accomplishes the stronger people’s beliefs become, in turn reinforcing the problem of polarization, largely because those beliefs are rooted in images only loosely connected to physical reality.

We see that today in the debate over immigration, where one side is convinced that the situation is urgent and the most important problem facing Congress, while the other side minimizes a non-functional bureaucracy that needs overhaul and more funding.  Yet the one side ignores the fact  that the immigration problem is in fact far less severe than it was a decade ago and that, while the immigration system needs funding and fundamental reform, building more walls won’t solve anything and would be a waste of money, while the other side wants what amounts to more open immigration without coming up with a coherent program for dealing with immigration. 

To top it off, neither side in Congress wants to really deal with the problems in Latin American countries that have led to the current flow of immigrants.  And because Congress can’t come up with a unified solution with enough votes to override a Presidential veto, Trump will continue his posturing and fear-mongering  until Congress smartens up… or caves in.

I’m wagering on a cave-in.

As usual, most of the media and most Americans have missed, overlooked, or minimized the most important aspect of the current partial government shutdown, a shutdown ostensibly over the amount of funding for border security, and, in particular because Congress is paralyzed over the amount the Democrats will accept — $1.6 billion—and Trump’s demand for $5 billion, mostly for “his wall.”

Except that’s not the real story, or not the entire story.  The Senate leadership had earlier gone to the President with the $1.6 billion in funding for the remainder of the fiscal year, and according to Congressional parties, the President had agreed to the $1.6 billion number.  When he received the final bill, however, he rejected it and demanded that the Congress send him legislation with $5 billion for border security, despite the fact that the administration hasn’t even spent all the funding it already has for border security.

Now, after having gone back on his word, Trump is demanding a “counter-offer” from Congress for more wall and border security funding.

Needless to say, the Democrats are furious at the President, and the Republicans are blaming the shut-down on the Democrats’ failure to negotiate, willfully ignoring the fact that the Democrats already negotiated in good faith and that the President went back on his word.  And, of course, there’s also the problem that, over time, walls have never worked, and that despite the President’s rhetoric, illegal border crossings from Mexico have dropped 90% since 2000, and that the majority of illegal immigrants today actually arrived legally, as students, tourists, or visitors.

Meanwhile, the Washington Post just published a story noting that the President averaged over 15 verifiable falsehoods a day in 2018, up from 5 per day in 2017 and describing 2018 as a year of “unprecedented deception” by the President.

Exactly why should the Democrats give in to a lying and untrustworthy President?  And why do Republican politicians continue to support him?

The Republicans have had full control of all three branches of the federal government for the past two years and so far as I can determine, they managed only five things: (1) To keep the government staggering along (until the past few days); (2) to pass a massive tax cut largely benefitting the wealthiest Americans; (3) to pass a criminal justice reform bill; (4) to alienate to some degree almost every other nation on earth except Russia; and (5) to attempt to dismantle as much environmental protection as possible. 

Out of that more than mixed bag, only the criminal justice reform could be considered as positive for most Americans. And now, over the issue of building a wall, they’ve shut down a significant fraction of the federal government.

So why didn’t the Republicans accomplish more?  Because their agenda is almost entirely negative.  Democrats largely want to grant women more control over their bodies; Republicans say no to that, and want to take away the existing control that women have over their bodies. Democrats want to use laws and regulations to improve the environment; Republicans not only say no to that, but also want to remove existing environmental protections.  Democrats want to make it easier for all eligible citizens to register and to vote; Republicans want to restrict the right to vote and have taken active steps to make it harder for minorities and young people to vote.  Democrats are for a single-payer national health care program;  Republicans oppose that and have worked to weaken the existing system, while passing legislation that prohibits Medicare or Medicaid from negotiating lower drug prices, a key factor in making U.S. prescription drug prices the highest of all fully developed nations.

And what changes Republicans do push for are not beneficial for the majority of Americans, because they appear to be for, by their actions:  (1) unlimited rights to bear arms, regardless of the dangers to others;  (2) government control of women’s reproductive rights: (3) incorporating their religious beliefs in law; (4) greatly restricting immigration except to Caucasians and wealthy or highly educated minorities; (5) tax benefits for the wealthy and corporations;  and (6)  reduction of federal benefits to the poor and minorities.

Not only do Republicans fail to have a positive agenda for the country, but they can’t even agree on much of anything, except one thing – to oppose whatever the Democrats propose.

Regardless of the rhetoric, the tax cuts didn’t bring back manufacturing jobs, because many of those jobs didn’t migrate overseas;  instead the jobs were automated/computerized, and the others were so labor-intensive that no U.S. company could remain competitive paying U.S. wages. Since most U.S. consumers won’t pay more for U.S.- produced goods, especially if foreign goods are considerably cheaper, increasing tariffs to stop such imports would choke the U.S. economy as well as increasing the prices Americans would have to pay.

Regardless of Trump’s rhetoric, a wall won’t stop immigration.  The U.S. Gulf Coast alone stretches almost 1,700 miles, and for technical, economic, and practical reasons, that can’t be walled off.

So the Republicans have become the party of “no,” except when they most should say no, and that’s to their own President.

According to various accounts, one of the basic principles of the legendary Greek physician Hippocrates was, first, to do no harm.  From what I’ve seen in my life, that prescription is valid as a first precept in just about everything.

That said, I suspect we all know people who feel that you’ve harmed them if you don’t do what they want.  If you fail to cook a favorite food for a partner or guests, but you’re still feeding them, that’s not harm. If you refuse to go to bed with someone, it’s not harm.  Both may occasion disappointment, but they’re not harm. Now… some people are so violent that your failure to meet their expectations can result in harm to you, and that’s another aspect of the “harm” issue, and one with which society has great difficulty handling.

And sometimes, failing to do something is harm.  If you don’t throw a rope to someone drowning, that’s harm. If you fail to feed a starving child, that’s harm.  And, equally, there are times when we don’t know honestly know whether not doing what someone wants will cause harm.

But, for all those possible exceptions and ambiguities, I suspect that most of us have a clear idea of what acts, or failures to act, will cause harm.  So why do we often act in ways that harm others?

One big reason is that, in today’s complex world, we don’t recognize [or sometimes just refuse to acknowledge] acts, or failures to act, as harmful.  As just one example, allowing coal-burning power plants and other fossil fuel burning industrial enterprises to emit high levels of pollutants does in fact harm millions of people.  And yes, requiring present emissions controls will cause certain facilities to be less profitable or others to close.  But the lost profits and jobs, especially in the United States, are small compared to the health impacts.  Yet something like 30% of Americans are in favor of relaxing such controls.  Why?  Because a lost job is seen as far more important than a vague concern about health.  Except, especially in areas like Salt Lake or the Denver Front Range corridor, those health concerns aren’t vague, not if you’re young or old or asthmatic, struggling to breathe.  Although U.S. deaths from air pollution have decreased, something like 71,000 Americans died last year from the effects of air pollution.  By comparison, there are only some 55,000 coal industry workers.  Unhappily, a great number of them will likely also die young because of black lung disease.  So, why, exactly, are so many people backing Trump’s harmful proposals to weaken air pollution standards in order to save the coal industry?  At present, the employed U.S. workforce is around 130 million people.  55,000 coal workers are slightly more than four one-hundredths of one percent [.0004] of the workforce. Not only that, but in many areas, burning natural gas, while not ideal, emits far fewer pollutants and is less expensive.

Another reason for allowing harmful practices to continue us because those practices don’t harm us personally (or we don’t seem to think they do) and we believe they result in more material gain for us, and at least some of us assume that others also benefit, and, all too often, those who are harmed have neither the voice nor the power to stop the harm.

But all the rationalization and justification doesn’t mean that such harms don’t exist, only that we as a society have chosen to do nothing about them.

These days, it seems like the Trump-Republican “party-line” answers to everything are: (1) economic growth will solve all our problems; (2) global warming either really doesn’t exist or, if it does, it’s an insignificant problem that can be solved by economic growth; and (3) secure borders are vital to keep out immigrants who will take jobs and who cause all our crime.

Logic and facts indicate that economic growth fired by coal-burning power plants and petroleum feedstocks and fuels not only increases the rate of global warming, but also creates much higher levels of air pollution that kill more people. In turn, excessive fertilizer [made from petrochemicals] runoff is increasing ocean algae blooms that are creating larger and larger oceanic “dead zones” where nothing can live, which, combined with overfishing, contribute to fewer and fewer kinds of fish that can be caught. And one of the products of this petrochemical fueled growth is the proliferation of plastic everywhere, which, in the oceans, also poisons scores of types of fish and sea mammals such as whales. Interestingly enough and totally ignored by Trump and his minions is the fact that in the vast majority of cases, coal power isn’t competitive with much cleaner burning natural gas… and won’t be, unless all environmental rules are eased. And do we really want air that’s totally unbreathable, the way it often is in China?

Recent study after recent study shows that global warming not only exists, but that the rate of warming is increasing. In the last month, new studies show that the massive Greenland ice cap is melting something like three times faster than previously measured. Similar melting is also occurring in Antarctica. How much “economic growth” will it take to compensate for flooding half of New York City, Sacramento, the naval facilities in Norfolk, most of Miami and Miami beach, New Orleans, Houston, just to name a very few heavily urbanized areas that are already being affected, and where the effects will just increase?

As for secure borders… as I and others have noted for years, walls have never worked over any length of time in stopping migrations, and in the short times that they have worked, the only way that they have is by killing the people who’ve tried to cross them. The U.S. was all for East Germans and others who fled the Soviet Union, because Americans believed that the USSR was a horrible place to live. Was the USSR any worse than current Central American countries barely governed by corrupt rulers where law and order seldom exist and where gangs murder people on a huge scale? And yes, there are some potential criminals among the immigrants, but the crime rate for undocumented immigrants in the U.S. is well below the rate for U.S. citizens. And by the way, the ancestors of a great many Americans were deported from English lands to North America, particularly to Georgia, which was originally founded as a penal colony. So… do we want to spend billions for a wall that won’t work unless we shoot people… or spend even more billions tracking them down after they’ve gone over, under, or around the wall and then deporting them?

Then too, are the Republicans even looking at U.S. birth rates? The birth rate for whites in the U.S. is significantly below the replacement rate. Success in choking off “unwanted” immigration would drastically increase tax rates on younger Americans in years to come – unless, of course, politicians decide to cut Social Security and other benefits to older and disabled white Americans even more drastically.

But these are “only” facts, and until they manifest themselves so absolutely that they cannot be denied or ignored, Republicans will insist that economic growth, however achieved, is an overriding benefit, and that that the waves of immigration that built the U.S. were only good until their ancestors arrived.