The National Association of Railroad Passengers has a blog post that gets right to the point.
It is a perpetual wonder for many passenger advocates that Amtrak—which, it’s worth noting accounts for $1.4 billion of the U.S. government’s roughly $4 trillion budget, or 0.03 percent—should serve as such a reliable whipping boy for the nation’s deficit hawks. It’s become almost a rite of passage for Republican presidential candidates to establish their conservative bona fides by calling out Amtrak as an instance of government inhabiting spheres it just shouldn’t be. So it was no surprise when the usual suspects, sensing the railroad’s vulnerability, began to circle this past week.
It's a compelling read, and I recommend
Read The Whole Thing. There's one quote that sums up what is happening not just to Amtrak but this entire country.
No one did a better job of explaining the source of this curious apathy toward passenger rail last week than the New Yorker’s Adam Gopnik:
[T]he will to abandon the public way is not some failure of understanding, or some nearsighted omission by shortsighted politicians. It is part of a coherent ideological project. As I wrote a few years ago, in a piece on the literature of American declinism, “The reason we don’t have beautiful new airports and efficient bullet trains is not that we have inadvertently stumbled upon stumbling blocks; it’s that there are considerable numbers of Americans for whom these things are simply symbols of a feared central government, and who would, when they travel, rather sweat in squalor than surrender the money to build a better terminal.” The ideological rigor of this idea, as absolute in its way as the ancient Soviet conviction that any entering wedge of free enterprise would lead to the destruction of the Soviet state, is as instructive as it is astonishing. And it is part of the folly of American “centrism” not to recognize that the failure to run trains where we need them is made from conviction, not from ignorance.
emphasis added
If terrorism is the use of fear to change people's behavior for political ends, what we are seeing is a subtle form of terrorism that is having a corrosive effect on the country - and it is deliberate. As I wrote in a comment last week,
Deliberate disinvestment in the country leading to death, injury and loss of faith in the government because of preventable disasters is terrorism in slow motion. It has political effects and it is by calculated choice.
You don't have plant bombs to terrify people if you have them worrying what is going to go wrong next.
The Republican pushback against connecting the dots between their ideology and the body count racking up around the country - not to mention injury, economic damage, and worse - from lack of investment in the country and the public good is a sign that they know what they're doing. As the
NARP commentary notes:
... As the facts emerge, you begin to see the motivation behind these infrastructure deniers: they’ve deliberately starved our transportation system of federal funds, and with the cracks are starting to show, they want desperately to deny cause-and-effect to ensure that they’re not saddled with responsibility for the real-world consequences of their political philosophy.
emphasis added
It's not just trains either. They refuse to invest in the country. "The public be damned." (And yes that quote is more than a little ironic.) Anyone who thinks conservatives or conservatism has what the country needs to go forward is living in a fool's paradise.