Opinion The US is closed

This time, the Democrats are refusing to get behind Donald Trump’s agenda, particularly his plan to deport illegal immigrants and build the infamous “wall” along the US’s Mexican border.

Hobbes, Locke and Rousseau, students of political science are taught, had nothing but thought experiments and conjecture to ascertain the “nature of the state”, and the social contract between citizens and government, from the “state of nature” — how human beings would be outside the bonds and bounds of government. Now, thanks to the polarised politics of the US, we may no longer have to rely on the phantasmagorias of men long dead to figure out how important a government is to people’s lives.

On Monday, the US government shut down. Partisan brinkmanship around the budget is not a novel event in the country’s politics. The most recent shutdown was in 2013, when a Republican-majority legislature refused to fund Obamacare. A shutdown starves the federal government of funds — it cannot pay many of its employees and only the bare essentials of bureaucracy are kept running. This time, the Democrats are refusing to get behind Donald Trump’s agenda, particularly his plan to deport illegal immigrants and build the infamous “wall” along the US’s Mexican border. So far, even a temporary appropriations bill, which would fund the executive till April, has not been passed. Hundreds of thousands of government employees have either been asked to stay home or will not be paid till the impasse ends. So, how does the lack of government affect people? Well, McDonald’s is still open, as is Disneyland and the local taverns near federal offices are likely to do brisk business. The people likely to be hurt are those on social security, officers of childcare departments and other people with jobs that are the invisible core of government service.

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Among the three social contract theorists, Thomas Hobbes had the most dire view of (hu)man in the “state of nature”. It was everyone for themselves and “might is right”. If the current state of the vituperative political discourse and callous political practice, in the US and elsewhere, is anything to go by, the “nature of the state” isn’t that much better.