drained-pool politics

Drained-pool politics — if “they” can also have it, then no one can — helps explain why America still doesn’t have a truly universal health care system, a child care system, a decent social safety net.

Opinion | What ‘Drained-Pool’ Politics Costs America (Published 2021) Produced by ‘The Ezra Klein Show’ 2021

In what McGhee has famously called “drained-pool politics” (she writes about how, in the late 1950s, communities refused to desegregate their New Deal-era public pools and instead simply drained them, depriving everyone of access), the country’s leaders have chosen to deprive all Americans of public goods rather than extend them to Black people.

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