Burrito-Logic

 Meanwhile, as the left is converging on a new agenda defined by economic and affordability issues (to the chagrin of people like me who still think things like racism, refugee rights, trans rights, police violence, etc. are also important and need to be talked about)—the right seems to be trying to head in the opposite direction. 

To be sure, plenty of Republicans and even some "MAGA" bros keep urging Trump to focus on gas and food prices. Yet, pundits who support Trump's actual policies, like attacking Iran and imposing trade barriers on the rest of the world, have to argue that voters should just suck it up and tolerate a certain amount of economic pain for the sake of the administration's cultural and power politics goals. 

As Matt Yglesias explains in a recent post, one right-wing columnist recently tried to do exactly that. In response to a MAGA influencer pointing to a $20 price tag for a burrito, and arguing that Trump needs to "end the stupid foreign wars" and focus on affordability instead, this columnist replied: "cry me a river." 

Which, Yglesias points out, may be "politically toxic" as a slogan—but is also kind of the position you have to take, if you actually think Trump's decision to start another war in the Middle East was a good idea. 

Trump himself has listed out the casualty figures of various American foreign wars—in an apparent effort to suggest that what we've faced so far in Iran is no big deal, and Americans should just buckle down for a long period of sacrifice and suffering. It will all be worth it for a nuclear-free Iran. 

In the meantime, if you are upset about $20 burritos, the Trump-aligned message does indeed seem to be: "cry me a river." 

But even aside from the fact that the "sacrifice" being demanded here is for the sake of a totally needless, illegal, murderous, and unjustifiable war in the first place, it's also worth remembering Bertrand Russell's point from his World War I–era antiwar tract, Justice in War-time: 

"Passing by the anxiety and sorrow of those whose sons or husbands or brothers are at the front, the extent and consequences of the economic injury inflicted by war are much greater than is usually realised. It is common to speak of economic evils as merely material, and of desire for economic progress as grovelling  and uninspired. This view is perhaps natural in well-to-do people, to whom economic progress means  setting up a motor car or taking holidays abroad instead of at the seaside. But with regard to the poorer classes of society, economic progress is the first condition of many spiritual goods, and even often of life itself."

First grub, then morals, as Brecht would put it. "Malt does more than Milton can / To justify God's ways to man," to quote Housman.

This becomes even more obvious if we look outside the United States. America's attack on Iran, after all, is yielding consequences not only for us, but for the entire human population. Millions of people in impoverished countries in the Global South have been pushed into hunger and malnutrition by the rising costs of fuel, food, and fertilizer sparked by our war. 

Will we ever even begin to reckon with the magnitude of that crime that our country has inflicted upon the world's most vulnerable and innocent bystanders—most of them children? 

It's easy to mock college-educated Americans on social media for complaining about exorbitantly priced burritos from DoorDash. But what about people in Nigeria or Haiti who can't afford even a mouthful of rice in their bellies due to the same cause? There, those merely "economic" and "material" issues like buying food are a "first condition [...] of life itself," as Russell would put it.

The historian Georges Lefebvre once quoted an earlier writer on the subject of rising bread prices (in his book The Great Fear): "The people are like a man walking in a pond with water up to his mouth: the slightest dip in the ground, the slightest ripple, makes him lose his footing—he sinks and chokes." (Joan White trans.) 

In other words, a slight increase in food prices that might be a mere inconvenience or annoyance for us is a matter of life and death for those already living at the poverty line. 

There is indeed a time and place in this world for calling for material sacrifices. But not on behalf such a pointless and indefensible cause; and not "in times like these"—when to eat is to steal bread "that belongs to one who is starving," as Brecht once put it. 

Trump, and the boosters of his war among the right-wing commentariat, seem to think they can win over the American people with promises, exhortations, and finger-wagging. "Shame on you, look what our ancestors sacrificed!" "A $20 burrito? Well, cry me a river! Go on your college dorm meal plan!" (They are putting more emphasis on Milton than on malt in their economic messaging, so to speak.)

It doesn't appear to be working. People do not seem convinced, at least if Trump's recent approval ratings are any guide. 

Mere words and arguments and exordiums will not suffice to fill an empty belly, as Heinrich Heine once put it: only "soup-logic" and "dumpling-reason" will do the trick. 

Or perhaps we could tweak and update Heine's immortal phrase just slightly: it seems "burrito-logic" is what is most needed today.