Is anything worth a shutdown?

It's going to be a long weekend for Congress and the President as they face fresh rounds of negotiations after the partial government shutdown took effect at midnight. Today most likely will see a lot of posturing and recrimination. The President has already done his bit on Twitter, taking the predictable line that the Democrats, who denied the stopgap spending bill the necessary supermajority in the Senate, have put the interests of illegal immigrants before everything else by making their support conditional on funding for the DACA or "Dreamer" program. It certainly doesn't look good for one party to be willing to shut down the government over any pet issue, though the Democrats are also demanding more money for a child health insurance program. But for good or ill the Democrats cannot do otherwise, at least for today, since their vision of the nation is at stake. For them, the U.S. will always be, first and foremost, a refuge for the world's oppressed, with utilitarian considerations secondary at best. That's worked for them for nearly 200 years, even as each group they welcomed and integrated into American society over nativist objections eventually turned nativist from fear of the next newcomers. Today's calls for a more utilitarian or meritocratic immigration policy no doubt strike many Democrats as hypocritical as well as bigoted, but as a general observation wisdom acquired with age often seems hypocritical when someone seems to say "do as I say, not as I did." The hypocrisy argument can only go so far, and we'll probably see the limits of it today as Democrats preach to choirs gathered across the country to curse the anniversary of Trump's inauguration. For those audiences Democrats must appear intransigent, but I expect to hear them change once the marchers go home, sine whether they or the marchers like it or not, the optics of the shutdown do not appear favorable to their side. Today might actually be Democrats' best chance to make their position look at least sympathetic if not reasonable, but the temptation to pander to base voters convinced of the opposition's irredeemable bigotry will most likely cost them that chance. The shutdown most likely has already changed the character of today's demonstrations, whether the demonstrators understand that or not. They may expect vindication on the assumption that Republicans usually get blamed for these shutdown crises, but they should also expect yet another reminder that times have changed.