It’s outrageous that this clown is shutting down the government over this nonsense. He says he can keep the government shut down for months, and I believe he is just nuts enough to do that. We should always oppose shutting down the government for any reason. The Democrats were threatening to shut down the government over the Dreamers and I opposed that too.
The main reason we should oppose shutting down the government is that it plays into the hands the conservative government-haters and small government crowd. America is probably the only county on Earth where most people hate the government.
Obviously this stems from radical individualism and the Frontier Ethic about which much has been written. The root causes of these two things were breaking away from the England. Canada stayed a colony for much longer and look what a better country it is. By remaining a colony they ended up being much more like the UK than we are.
The Revolution was not that great. George Washington was an elitist who thought only the rich should rule. Many of the Founding Fathers wanted to limit voting to landowning (more or less) White men. From the very start, Blacks, American Indians, and women of all races could not vote!
When you hear democracy-hating conservatives say, “We are a republic, not a democracy,” they are actually correct, though they should not be singing the praises of this travesty. Indeed the Founding Fathers were very worried about excessive democracy which they called mob rule, and a number of things were put into the Constitution in an attempt to make sure democracy didn’t go overboard. Of course you never have too much democracy, and there’s nothing wrong with mob rule. Mob rule is simply democracy.
The government-hating started right away with the Constitution. The Founders were very worried about the excesses of a strong central government because they thought this is what they were fighting in England. In particular, they wanted to prevent a monarchy in the US. Hence the devolving of a lot of government to the states which later played into conservatives small federal government and states’ rights stances.
Americans are also one of the few people on Earth who hate paying taxes. Even Fidel Castro joked about it, saying that Americans would love it in Cuba because Cuba has no income taxes, and you know how much Americans hate to pay taxes.
But you can see that the tax-hating goes all the way back to the Tea Partiers dumping boxes of English tea in the Atlantic. Any revolution that starts out with a damned tax revolt is never going to be all that progressive. It’s rightwing populism if it’s anything. That this was a rightwing populist revolution is shown by the rightwing populist Tea Party movement adopting the name of the original tax-revolters.
