These GOP tactics just show you can't deal with cheats and liars

I don’t know who is going to win the fight over the shutdown of the US government. I do know that it’s wrong for Donald Trump and the Republicans to do nothing while 24 million Americans enrolled in state exchanges watch their health insurance premiums spike by two, three or four times. I know it’s wrong for them to steal $1 trillion in Medicaid from 83 million people, who can’t live without it, and hand it over to people who are so rich they will never notice an extra $1 trillion.

I know you can’t make deals with liars and cheaters. Even if the president and his party agreed today to the Democrats’ terms, there’s no assurance they won’t turn around tomorrow and impound the money they said they would spend. Trump has already impounded — illegally — billions and billions, some with the Supreme Court’s blessing. This mistrust is deepened by the increasingly extortionist language coming out of the White House. The press secretary said this week that if the Democrats “don't want further harm on their constituents back home, then they need to reopen the government. It's very simple.”

That’s what criminals say when they’re blackmailing you.

There are two schools of thought in American politics, specifically among liberals and within the Democratic Party — between those who want to game things out in terms of “good” and “bad” strategy and those who are sick of gaming things out and want to focus on the good and the bad. Who is going to win the shutdown fight? I don’t know and to a degree, I don’t care. The Trump cartel is evil. It must be fought. It must be forced to face the truth about itself and what it has done. That’s what I care about. If saying so puts me in the minority, so be it.

On Tuesday, Jake Grumbach brought my attention to a superb illustration of this conflict between strategy and truth. An economist at UC Berkeley, Grumbach commented on a conversation between Ezra Klein, the New York Times columnist and podcaster, and Ta-Nehisi Coates, perhaps best known as the author of Between the World and Me.

Their chat touched on many things, but the standout topic was Charlie Kirk.

In the aftermath of Kirk’s murder last month, Klein wrote that Kirk “was practicing politics in exactly the right way. He was showing up to campuses and talking with anyone who would talk to him. He was one of the era’s most effective practitioners of persuasion.”

This might be true if you squint hard and tilt your head, but Klein’s goal wasn’t to represent reality accurately. It was to bridge political divisions that he believes triggered the spasm of violence that ultimately killed Kirk.

In contrast, here’s what Coates said about Kirk:

“I don’t take any joy in saying this, but we sometimes soothe ourselves by pointing out that love, acceptance, warmth — that these are powerful forces. I believe they are. I also believe hate is a powerful force. I believe it’s powerful, a powerful unifying force, and I think Charlie Kirk was a hate-monger. I really need to say this over and over again that I have a politic that rejects violence, that rejects political violence. I take no joy in the killing of anyone, no matter what they say. But if you ask me what the truth of his life was, the truth of his public life, I would have to tell you it’s hate. I would have to tell you it was the usage of hate, and the harnessing of hate towards political ends.”

On the one hand is a liberal who is willing to say nice things about a hateful dead man, even though those nice things are not grounded in reality, for the purpose of easing tensions with hateful living people. Tell them some sweet little lies and just maybe things will get better.

On the other hand is a liberal who is unwilling to say nice things about a hateful dead man, because those nice things are false, and because he knows that no amount of nice is going to stop hateful living people from hating him. Bargaining with evil obscures evil outcomes. While those sweet little lies might feel good, the devil always gets his due.

“The main point I think most are missing [about Klein’s interview with Coates],” Grumbach said, “is that Klein is saying the role of the journalist-intellectual is to do strategic politics, whereas Coates [is saying] the role of the journalist-intellectual is to tell the truth.”

And truth is, demagoguery is not debate. Calling Kirk a debater obscures the fact that he was a demagogue. Propaganda is not persuasion. Kirk didn’t try to persuade college students so much as humiliate, or demonize, them into submissive silence. Lying is not the same as free speech, but Kirk attacked those who tried “censoring” his lies. It may seem strategic to accept certain falsehoods as if they were true in order to avoid conflict, but that’s if the other side wants unity. Kirk, Trump and the rest never saw a point in that. Indeed, gestures of peace, no matter how mutually beneficial, are provocations of war.

On Tuesday, Trump told admirals and generals “we should use some of these dangerous cities as training grounds for our military.” He also suggested military leaders “could be tasked with assisting federal law enforcement interventions against an ‘invasion from within’ Democratic-led cities, such as Chicago and New York City,” the Military Timesreported.

As usual, Times columnist Jamelle Bouie was blunter and clearer: “The president of the United States wants to use the American military to kill American citizens on American soil. That's the whole story!”

There was a time for strategic politics with Republicans, back in the day when they recognized the basic humanity of Democrats, but that time is gone. Trump and his party will not be constrained by morality, the Constitution or the law. So the more liberals (like Klein but not only Klein) pursue strategic politics, in the hopes of “turning down the temperature,” the more it looks like complicity or worse.

If the Democrats choose to bargain with Trump over the shutdown, knowing that he will betray them once their backs are turned, they would not only enable his crimes, but protect him from their consequences. They would permit him to avoid facing the truth.

“We have to understand that standing up matters, that our voice matters, to not give into the cynicism, because that is what they rely on in order to perpetuate this idea that they have total immunity from consequences,” New York Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez told MSNBC’s Chris Hayes on the night the government shut down. “They will experience the consequence of this, but [the Democrats] have to be the consequence.”

You cannot make a deal with a criminal for whom you must be the consequence. If he faces the truth, maybe. But not until then.