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[Tyrone Slothrop]

Originally Posted by sebastian_dangerfield

I think you're crediting the GOP's rabid base with more rational thinking than it deserves. The base is more emotional, more lizard brain, than that. Particularly on this issue. It knows the wall is a bullshit policy that infuriates both moderate Rs and Ds. It wants to flex its muscles against both groups.

I just watched Brexit on HBO. It's highly entertaining and explains a lot of what's happening with the wall. The rabid GOP base wants respect (areas of the country in which it is strongest tend to still have "honor culture"). It wants to be heard and have an ongoing voice. Like the blue collar Brexit voters (as opposed to the well-off conservative ones which formed the other half of Brexit voters), its chief message is: We're Here, and You'll be Dealing With Us.

I think you're seeing rational thought with a policy goal where the reality is more emotional outburst and demand to be heard and made part of policy negotiation.

Sure. The whole idea of building a wall is a marketing ploy. The fact remains, it is something that a minority of the country wants. If there were majority support for it, a shutdown wouldn't be necessary.

ETA: For the last near thirty or so years, if you'd paid attention to the news and data, you could see that the middle and lower classes were increasingly falling behind. Occasionally, it'd lead one to this thought: Where do these people go? I'd normally answer that internal question with, Oh, they'll just soak into the economic/social fabric in some way I can't imagine... a bunch of them will die. But apparently, that blase attitude, one I think many of us shared and perhaps still share, was way off. A lot of these people went into a form of hibernation. They survived somehow and social media provided a means to spark them to action. And I think, and the movie highlights this, their chief grievance is having been ignored. The neat takeaway from the Brexit movie, its sole revelatory message, is that these "deplorables" can be neutralized, and all it takes is letting them have a voice. They probably can't and won't win on any policy issues, but if you know who they are, if they feel they have representation, you can better understand, counter, and control them. Ignoring them and thinking they'd go away, OTOH, was a really lazy and foolish approach.

I don't buy that your hibernating lizards are the key here. In the US and in the UK, nationalist conservatives have taken over one of the main political parties. Brexit is different from the wall because it gets Labour support too, and in particular Labour is led by someone who is more interested in using a Brexit train wreck to become PM than in stopping it.