Over the last week a few TPM Readers have written in with contrary arguments about how to deal with the “continuing resolution” that just passed the House and will soon be voted on in the Senate. These weren’t critical or acrimonious letters but frank constructive counters, which I appreciate. I wanted to discuss them because they line up pretty closely with the arguments that seem to have strong advocates in the Senate Democratic caucus.
Let me summarize them briefly.
XXX Democrats are in a tough messaging environment and they’ll get blamed for the shutdown. Trump might even get to blame a recession on them.
XXX The White House will get to control the pace of the shutdown. In other words, the executive gets flexibility in just how things get shut down, things that will get more or less helpful press attention. Thus he’ll be able to engineer lots of bad press cycles for the Democrats.
XXX Quite simply, the Trump’s presidency and the economy are imploding. Why rush in to make ourselves the story when every day is a bad day for Trump?
XXX It’s too soon. The public isn’t engaged enough yet. By the fall the economy will likely be in recession and it will be a debate on Medicare, Medicaid, etc., that’s the time to have the fight.
XXX Trump and Musk probably want a shutdown. After a shutdown goes on for 30 days the law opens up new legal avenues for layoffs. A shutdown is actually what they want and they will use it to accelerate the process, get people used to it. In other words, risking a shutdown is a trap because nothing would make them happier.
I’ve thought a lot about each of these arguments. On their own a number of them are compelling and point to very real risks. Indeed, last week I briefly started questioning my own position because Democrats had done nothing to lay any ground work for why they were choosing this confrontation. And that makes a fight much, much harder.
But I think each of these arguments is mistaken. Indeed, as a whole it’s a bit like sitting in the mess hall in Treblinka planning an escape when someone says, “But if we try to escape they’ll kill us all!”
First, I think Republicans are going to get wrecked in the midterms. I think that’s highly likely whatever happens. As a narrowly electoral calculus I think there’s a decent argument Democrats should just let everything happen, let Trump and Musk go wild. In this sense James Carville’s argument that Democrats should just do nothing is right, by a narrowly electoral calculus. But there’s more than just an electoral calculus. Trump and Musk are methodically dismantling the republic day by day. Absent some major change in the trajectory of events the government Democrats might half-inherit in a midterm sweep would be all but unrecognizable, a smoldering heap of faits accompli. Democrats need to take some real risks to at least slow the process of destruction and reshape the trajectory.
The same basic argument applies to the “it’s too soon, things aren’t ripe” argument. There’s a political logic. Trump is likely to be much less popular. Popular programs will be on the line in the fall. The public will have had a lot more time to internalize what Trump’s doing. I just don’t think the opposition has the luxury of time. Same argument as above.
On controlling the pace of a shutdown, that is an advantage. There will be a lot of game playing. But I don’t think that’s decisive.
Will Democrats get blamed? Maybe. It’s impossible to know how public opinion will evolve. But there are good reasons to doubt they will. First, Republicans almost always get blamed for a shutdown and not Democrats. And that’s for a simple reason: nobody buys the idea that the Democrats want to shut down the government. They’re the party of government. Everybody knows that. It’s basically the Trump Republicans whole argument!
Analysts come up with all sort of arcane and baroque arguments why one side gets blamed versus the other. But it almost always comes down to that. It’s the same reason Democrats never get much traction attacking Republicans on defense spending. No one buys the idea that Republicans aren’t super into guns and tanks.
It’s also very early. Maybe a lot of people will blame the Dems. Are they going to remember that in eighteen months? I really doubt it. At the rate things are going I’m not sure they’ll remember it by the summer. Another basic takeaway from the last 25 years is that the opposition can get really unpopular in the moment for opposition tactics but barely anyone remembers by election time and they pay no price.
Now let’s get to what seems to be the most alluring argument: that Musk and Trump really want a shutdown or at least will benefit from it and they’re essentially luring Democrats into a trap. It is true that I believe 30 days into a shutdown the executive branch gets more opportunities to lay people off. So in this specific sense slashing does get easier after a few weeks of a shutdown. The more macro argument would be: how does literally shutting the government down combat someone’s who’s trying to do exactly that? Sure it energetically speeds the process along in a sense. I’ve even heard it argued that this scenario allows Musk the optimal situation to figure out just the optimal level of cutting, how much is necessary for the most meager level of government function, where’s the sweat spot for some political backlash but not too much.
Does this make sense: It strikes me as so much whistling past the grave.
Musk is slicing through the federal bureaucracy like butter. It’s not at all clear to me how a shutdown makes his job any easier. He may get additional legal avenues after thirty days but right now he’s carving his own roads through the federal bureaucracy. Nothing is holding him back. Just today I heard about another major department of government that is about to shutter regional offices in blue states across the country. It seems absurd to imagine that laying low and providing a fully funded license for Musk to keep cutting for the next six months is a more destructive outcome than drawing a line in the sand now. Really, how exactly could he be any less restrained than removing all restraints from him in advance? How is that possible? As I said, it’s like planning your escape from Treblinka and you decide it’s too risky because they’ll kill you if you get caught.
There are other problems with this argument. Presumably a shutdown will be unpopular. After all that’s the whole premise of the argument for who will get the blame. It seems hard to imagine that anger over a shutdown will be a good political climate for pushing for a permanent shutdown. As I wrote a week ago, the current executive orders call for reducing the government to the size of what is left open during a shutdown. In other words, the end state goal here is a permanent government shutdown. It seems more likely that a shutdown will concentrate people’s minds on how and why they like having a functioning government and access to essential services. We’re already seeing that backlash in Republican town halls. Add to this the fact that Trump is acting erratically and throwing the economy into recession. Everybody sees that. I don’t buy that he’ll have much success saying everything was awesome and then Democrats did this.
The reality here is that this isn’t Democrats shutting down anything. Republicans intentionally crafted a bill that ignores literally every Democratic demand. They’re forcing Democrats to either say now or make an abject surrender.
Those are my thoughts on these different arguments. I thought it made sense to discuss them because these are the arguments being made in the corridors of power. The risks here are real. We’re already in a great crisis of the republic. There’s no riskless path.
What unites all these arguments, however, is a fundamental lack of understanding of the nature and uses of political power. Every argument here is reactive, trying to limit harm in a situation in which Democrats, their priorities and their constituencies are already defenseless. There’s a driving penchant to operate wholly within the lines.
This is a topic I’ve given a lot of thought to over many years. Twenty years ago an unnamed Bush administration source in a book by Ron Suskind told Suskind that Democrats were part of the “reality based community” and Republicans in the Bush administration were not. Many Democrats in turn adopted the line as an ironic badge of honor. You still see it in taglines and avatars twenty years later. And for good reason. The Bush administration itself provided lots of grist for the very good life lesson that reality is going to kick your ass every time when you go up against it. But I’ve always thought that center-left folks didn’t quite get what this person was saying.
What this person was saying was that Democrats, at least the Democrats in the world of politics with their quality educations and empiricism were wedded to “reality” in the sense of the world as it is. But that’s not all that can mean. What this person was saying was we’re going to take the power, which we have, and we’re going to use it to change the reality on the ground. And that’s going to open up new opportunities for us that you don’t see. We’re going to get a jump on you. Because we know how to use power.
Now, as I said, the Bush administration was a great object lesson in how reality will kick your ass. No truism or motto works in every case. Life is mostly a matter of having half a dozen mutually contradictory truisms or life lessons and knowing which to apply in different situations. But there was more insight in this remark than a lot of Democrats were able to understand. And there’s an important truth here. You need to know how power works and how to use it. Because if you can use power effectively you can change where the pieces are on the board. And if you lack that insight you’re condemned to always working within the lines in ways that are confining and ultimately self-defeating. Are you acting and forcing your opponents to react or is it the opposite. In adversarial situations that’s always more than half the game.
For Democrats the path of keeping their heads down means locking themselves into a pattern of perpetual reaction, at least until the next election, a pattern of never taking the initiative. In other words, a pattern of never taking actions that force the other guys to react. It’s possible to use a lot of brainpower to come up with an argument in which that totally makes sense. But can anyone imagine any scenario where the shoe was on the other foot and Democrats needed seven Republican votes in exchange for literally nothing and they found seven who said, “Okay, sure why not?”
It’s literally unimaginable.
The public is already visibly turning against what’s happening. We have lots of evidence for that. Democrats have this one chance to bring the matter to a head, increase the attention on something the public is already angry about. They need to take a real risk in order to change or at least slow the trajectory of the destruction.
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