The sequester and the motives of the Right

When the sequester was first proposed and made law in 2011, it was supposed to be the Kobayashi Maru Test, the no-win scenario. The effects of implementing it were made to be so severe, that all parties would come to a compromise rather than see it come to pass.

Funny thing about that. Turns out, to many conservatives, the no-win scenario is exactly what they want to happen. Because they consider it a win. Consider this excerpt from an excellent article by George Lakoff.

But pointing out Republican-caused harms to millions of people -- many of them Republicans -- does not sway the ultra-right. Why? Democratic pundits say that Republicans want to hurt the president, to show government doesn't work by making it not work, and to protect "special interests" from higher taxes. All true. But there is an additional and deeper reason. Ultra-conservatives believe that the sequester is moral, that it is the right thing to do.

Progressives tend to believe that democracy is based on citizens caring for their fellow citizens through what the government provides for all citizens -- public infrastructure, public safety, public education, public health, publicly-sponsored research, public forms of recreation and culture, publicly-guaranteed safety nets for those who need them, and so on. In short, progressives believe that the private depends on the public, that without those public provisions Americans cannot be free to live reasonable lives and to thrive in private business. They believe that those who make more from public provisions should pay more to maintain them.

Ultra-conservatives don't believe this. They believe that Democracy gives them the liberty to seek their own self-interests by exercising personal responsibility, without having responsibility for anyone else or anyone else having responsibility for them. They take this as a matter of morality. They see the social responsibility to provide for the common good as an immoral imposition on their liberty.

Their moral sense requires that they do all they can to make the government fail in providing for the common good. Their idea of liberty is maximal personal responsibility, which they see as maximal privatization -- and profitization -- of all that we do for each other together, jointly as a unified nation.
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So for them the sequester is not a "self-inflicted wound." It is justice. The sequester is not merely about protecting "special interests." It is about the good people who pursued their self-interest successfully, got rich, and have acted "morally" in avoiding taxes that pay for public provisions by the government.

They are not merely trying to harm their own constituents just to hurt the president politically. Yes, they think hurting the president politically is moral, and they believe that any constituents they are hurting need to become more personally responsible. They see the sequester as serving that purpose.

I think this is exactly right and it defines what has become a cancer on the common good, something that holds all of us back, a questioning of the very concept of a nation collectively helping its own citizens. From the 18th to the early 20th century, we learned hard lessons in social unrest, poverty, disease, corruption and discrimination, when we don’t work together for the common good. These conservatives want to forget those lessons, if they ever understood them at all.