It’s Imperative

Democrats must stop shooting themselves in the foot

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has suggested that states struggling to cope with coronavirus should file for bankruptcy rather than seek federal aid. Governor Andrew Cuomo called that notion “one of the really dumb ideas of all time.”

It’s no secret why McConnell doesn’t want to help states hit hardest by Covid-19. They’re blue states and no way is the federal government going to bail those losers out — as if rather than finding themselves at the epicenter of a global pandemic through no fault of their own, New York and California and all their bros went out past curfew, had too many Bud Lights, got picked up by the cops, and now need to spend some time in the clink to learn what happens when you engage in reckless behavior.

Cuomo ripped McConnell for driving an already divided nation further apart. “It’s we and it’s them,” Cuomo said. “That’s not right. Who is we and who is them?… You have human suffering. You have people dying. You can’t stop the politics? Even in this moment?… The American instinct is to help each other in crisis.”

That word “instinct” stuck in my head. Darwin declined to define it. But dictionaries do in various ways, using a lot of “I” words: inborn, inherent, involuntary, intrinsic. They also use the terms “fixed behavior”, “hard-wired”, and “automatic response”. For the purposes of this discussion, I’ll go with: an innate drive that urges the individual toward a particular goal.