This immigration thing is exactly what I was just talking about. Trump and Obama both have the same goals regarding immigration policy; the thing that makes Trump worse is simply that he’s a moron, which results in him doing a bad job of meeting those goals, which causes additional unnecessary human suffering.

The thing about DACA is that it’s actually just prosecutorial discretion, which is a normal thing that always exists. Prosecutors can’t do everything at once, so they have to pick the cases that they think are the most worth prosecuting. This applies most strongly to immigration, since in that case you’ve got a ton of people just hanging out and living here, so you have an extreme luxury of choice as to which ones you want to try to deport. What DACA is is just the acknowledgement that people who a) came to the country as children and therefore did not themselves make the decision to immigrate and b) have been living and working here their whole lives, just like everybody else, represent the absolute lowest priority for deportation.

But the thing about this is that you can only get DACA if you are already proceeding from the assumption that your goal is to deport as many people as possible as efficiently as possible. It’s entirely distinct from amnesty: “deferred action” is right there in the name. DACA is not the “left-wing” immigration policy, it’s just the least stupid version of the right-wing immigration policy. It’s an anti-immigrant policy, because it’s based on the assumption of deportation.

Of course, this doesn’t make it a bad thing by itself, and that’s exactly the problem that people have: they have to sort everything into “good thing” or “bad thing.” This is not, as defensive liberals would have it, a matter of “deflecting” from Trump by “blaming Obama,” or a “false equivalency.” It doesn’t matter whose “fault” it is or whether one thing is “just as bad” as another. Answering those questions doesn’t help anybody. What does help is figuring out how and why things are happening, and what can be done to change them. It’s a matter of the underlying logic of the situation: of how things happen. That’s what you have to know in order to stop it. It is precisely because child separation is such a vicious policy that we can’t understand it in isolation: without understanding the causal chain that created it, you can’t fix the thing that you’re claiming is so uniquely horrible that it has to be fixed right now.

In short, the myopic focus on individual media-friendly outrages is exactly how politics doesn’t happen. The most common example of this is the persistent focus on the Supreme Court. Everyone’s all atwitter about Roe v. Wade potentially being overturned, but the thing is that wouldn’t actually change the status quo on abortion all that much. Abortion is already practically inaccessible in areas that are hostile to it, so allowing states to formally outlaw it would simply change the situation from “almost unavailable” to “completely unavailable.” And areas that already have accessible abortion clinics would just stay that way.

This doesn’t mean that it wouldn’t matter, it just means that it’s one thing at the very end of a long chain of things that matter. Focusing solely on this one last piece of the puzzle means ignoring 99% of the issue. Furthermore, it means focusing on the one thing that we’re least able to affect. We don’t have any real control over what the Supreme Court does, and in fact that’s supposed to be the point. The reason the Supreme Court has no democratic accountability is that they’re not supposed to be setting policy. The constant liberal droning about how much the composition of the Supreme Court matters completely misses the point: it shouldn’t matter. The Court only matters when everything else has already gone wrong, such that it becomes the last resort. If abortion is already accessible everywhere, then not having formal constitutional protections for it doesn’t change much. Whereas if abortion isn’t practically available anywhere, it doesn’t really matter whether it’s theoretically “protected” or not.

This is also exactly what happened the other way around with Obergefell. A majority of states had already legalized gay marriage, and that trend would have continued either way. Indeed, the decision only became possible due to decades of hard political work advancing the proposition that gay people were not “sodomites” but were in fact people. There is no way in hell that mushhead Kennedy would have written that opinion had the tide not already decisively turned. And the cake thing shows that it in no way “resolved” the issue; this is still a site of active conflict. Again, this doesn’t make Obergefell meaningless. It’s still a good thing. And overturning Roe would be actually horrible, just like child separation is actually horrible. But these things are what they are at the same time that they are not deus ex machinae, that they are properly understood as the logical culmination of underlying dynamics.

Both things are true. Not everything is equally as bad as everything else, there are real worthwhile distinctions to be drawn among existing political alternatives, but the fact that these alternatives are distinct does not mean that they are actually opposed to one another. They function symbiotically. As long as we’re concerned about Roe being overturned, we’re not thinking about how to make abortion available to people who need it. As long as we’re horrifying ourselves with recordings of children crying, we’re not taking a real stance on immigration. If you only care about things when they get dramatic portrayals in the media, you aren’t actually a moral person. You’re a child, and you’re locking yourself in a cage.