As of 12:01 am ET, the US federal government has been shut down. Workers deemed “nonessential” are staying at home, meaning that many government functions (like national parks) will be closed because of a lack of staff. “Essential” workers, ranging from soldiers to air traffic controllers, will be working even after money for their paychecks runs out.
This is happening, in large part, because the Democratic Party wants a fight. The shutdown could have been avoided if Democrats had agreed to allow a vote on a “continuing resolution” to fund the government, as they did in March. But this time around, Senate Democrats decided to filibuster the CR and indefinitely block government funding that Republicans have the votes to approve.
The plan is to make this fight about health care. Obamacare subsidies for millions of Americans are set to expire at the end of the year, and Republicans have no interest in reauthorizing them. In an early morning statement, the party’s congressional leadership — Sen. Chuck Schumer and Rep. Hakeem Jeffries — confirmed that they are refusing to pass the budget unless some deal can be struck over the subsidies.
You can see the logic: Democrats poll well ahead of Republicans on health care; if they can refocus attention on the issue, they can drive Trump’s already-dismal numbers down further and maybe even extract concessions on health policy.
Except this logic is missing an absolutely critical, utterly obvious piece of context: that the Trump administration is in the midst of an authoritarian bid to destroy the constitutional order. This most fundamental fact about our political moment changes everything about the basic logic of political conflict. In shutting down the government over health care, the Democratic leadership reveals that they’ve failed to truly internalize this fact’s significance.
Now, they’re caught in a trap of their own making — one they can only escape by fundamentally changing the way they talk about the shutdown.
The worst of both worlds
Last month, I argued that there were basically two strategic perspectives on how Democrats should fight Trump’s authoritarianism: Team Normal and Team Abnormal.
Team Normal thinks the best way to fight Trump is by treating him like a regular president — that if you can make public debate about “cost of living” issues where he polls worst, you’ll be set up to win big in the next election and then wield the power of congressional majorities to frustrate his designs. Team Abnormal, by contrast, argues that acting like a regular opposition will cede too much ground to an authoritarian president — that you need to fight, frequently and perhaps in unprecedented ways, to prevent him from accruing too much power before it’s too late.
The Democrats’ shutdown strategy represents an attempted fusion between Team Normal and Team Abnormal. The idea is to use an extraordinary tactic of the sort favored by Team Abnormal toward a Team Normal end — refocusing public attention on an issue where Trump’s numbers are especially bad.
Except that this compromise ends up failing by either side’s lights.
For Team Normal, a shutdown for any reason is a pretty bad idea — for the simple reason that the track record of prior shutdown fights is abysmal for the party trying to extract policy concessions. A recent article by Matt Glassman, a professor at Georgetown who studies Congress, shows that all four recent shutdowns have failed to achieve their goals.
“The party trying to leverage the shutdown doesn’t get the other side to the bargaining table; instead, the other side simply demands an unconditional reopening of the government while pointing out all the ways the shutdown is hurting defense, federal workers, and people trying to go to Yellowstone. Public opinion turns against those trying to leverage the shutdown, and they eventually cut a face-saving deal,” he explains. “Every party seems to think they can win the public opinion battle. But as far as I can tell, no one has ever achieved it.”
Glassman’s logic is ironclad on Team Normal terms. But for Team Abnormal, the unique character of the Trump presidency changes the game.
To them, Trump’s abuses of power are so uniquely dangerous that you can’t just hand him a clean funding bill and hope for the best. You instead need to use the crisis of a shutdown to both obstruct Trump’s authoritarian designs and to rally the public against his attempted regime change. This shutdown is different, the logic goes, because this government is different.
But Democrats aren’t acting like this government is different! They’re making a demand that is purely the stuff of normal politics. There is no reason to believe that a shutdown tied to such a quotidian message can escape the problems that have doomed the past four failed attempts.
What a better strategy looks like
For all these reasons, I think Democrats can’t stay the course on their current strategy. They need to pick a lane, either Team Normal or Team Abnormal, and adjust strategy accordingly.
The Team Normal solution is to cave as quickly as possible: come up with some kind of face-saving minor concession that allows them to end the shutdown and hope voters forget about all of this by next November. Such a climbdown would be highly embarrassing, and could well precipitate a revolt from the Democratic grassroots — among which disapproval of the party is at historic levels, largely due to a sense that leadership isn’t doing enough to stop Trump.
Alternatively, the party could pivot to a Team Abnormal posture: that Democrats will only be satisfied with a funding bill that addresses this underlying issue of lawlessness. Trump isn’t negotiating on health care in good faith, because he has claimed various powers to cancel lawfully appropriated spending as he pleases. Democrats should insist on some specific provisions, like those in the proposed Congressional Power of the Purse Act, that would curtail Trump’s ability to usurp Congress’s constitutional powers.
I think this is the better strategy — and I’m not alone. Matt Yglesias, who co-founded Vox and whom I normally think of as one of Team Normal’s sharpest thinkers, suggested this morning that Democrats should begin more openly arguing along these lines. His view is that “I can’t agree to a deal the other side won’t honor” is an ironclad position for Democrats to defend in public appearances, one they can defend until Republicans become willing to end the shutdown by nuking the filibuster.
But I think the real reason to do this is deeper than just short-term politics, or even policy — as Democrats almost assuredly won’t be able to strongarm Republicans into reining in Trump via statute. Rather, it’s about taking the opportunity to build wider resistance to Trump’s authoritarianism.
In their recent book on how social change happens, philosophers Michael Brownstein, Alex Madva, and Daniel Kelly argue that people don’t necessarily join causes because they think they’re going to win in the short term. In fact, they find, people who join social movements can be downright pessimistic about their short-term prospects for victory. Yet in the long run, their decision to participate during a seemingly hopeless period creates the conditions for ultimate victory.
One way to recruit people, despite a lack of immediate prospects, is a tactic called “losing loudly”: making a spectacle of a battle they know they can’t win, one that motivates others to take action. As a recent example, they cite Texas Democrats’ decision earlier this year to flee the state to obstruct an attempted gerrymander. While these Democrats obviously couldn’t hold out forever, their stand helped inspire Democrats in other states — like California and Texas — to push counter-gerrymanders in response to the Texas move.
I recently spoke to Brownstein and Madva about the deeper roots of this theory. During our conversation, they cited a fascinating paper on what motivated anti-authoritarian protesters in Russia, Ukraine, Hong Kong, and Turkey. It found that these protesters did not, most of the time, believe that their demonstrations were going to bring down the government (though they did in Ukraine). Rather, they did it out of a sense of shared social obligation: a sense that others are acting, and that they owe it to those people to support them in a righteous cause.
Losing loudly helps build up this sense of shared identity. Even if the battle is doomed, the fact that you’re willing to fight it builds up a broader sense that resistance is something we can be doing together, which is what you need to win the political war more broadly.
I think that this insight is, in many ways, the missing piece in Democrats’ thinking on a shutdown — and, more broadly, how to fight Trump while in the political minority.
Too often, Democrats look at poll numbers that show voters caring more about cost-of-living than authoritarianism and conclude that they have to focus on the former — ignoring the fact that political actors can shape what voters care about. In a moment where Trump is taking unprecedented steps to reshape the government, there are unprecedented opportunities to alert the public to those abuses and build a sense of collective obligation to resist.
The current shutdown is one such opportunity. If Democrats are seen refusing to fund the government because the government no longer operates according to laws, they can show the public that this crisis is serious — and that their rhetoric about a teetering democracy isn’t just cynical partisan slop used to make normal political disputes over health care seem like something bigger.
This, then, should be the Democratic objective: not to extract policy concessions or win news cycles, which never works, but to begin building a larger social ethos of resistance to authoritarianism. Unless and until Democratic leadership recognizes this bigger picture, and adjusts their tactics accordingly, their shutdown strategy will almost certainly be doomed to failure.
The post The Democrats’ shutdown strategy is terrible. Here’s a better one. appeared first on Vox.
