The big story of the day is that on Sunday night, eight Democrats "caved" and voted to end the government shutdown. Even Steve Bennen - who usually maintains a clear focus on the Republican disaster - joined the chorus.
The public has blamed the president and his party; Democrats received a dramatic boost from the electorate five days before the Sunday-night vote, which should’ve stiffened spines; Trump’s approval rating is sinking; and GOP officials were increasingly divided against one another. The pieces, in other words, were in place for Democrats to stand firm in support of a popular cause. Eight of them folded anyway.
Of course, Bennen is right on all of those points. But as someone who tends to challenge conventional wisdom, I think there are a few other things to consider.
Back in February, I wrote about how Democrats need to think like community organizers and do a power analysis. If we apply that to the way the government shutdown has been playing out, there are three ways the Republicans had leverage.
The first is the one that Josh Marshall identified from the beginning of the year: Democrats are fighting an asymmetrical battle.
This is of necessity very much an asymmetric confrontation. It can’t not be. The White House has all the executive authority and, indirectly, the congressional power as well...to extend the metaphor — the Republicans have a big army and the Democrats have no army. Because of the 2024 election. So Democrats keep running out onto the open field with no power or defense and getting crushed, which creates these repeated set pieces of helplessness and impotence. That amounts to free programming for Donald Trump.
The second point of leverage for Republicans is something Barack Obama identified back when he was still a U.S. Senator.
The bottom line is that our job is harder than the conservatives' job. After all, it's easy to articulate a belligerent foreign policy based solely on unilateral military action, a policy that sounds tough and acts dumb; it's harder to craft a foreign policy that's tough and smart. It's easy to dismantle government safety nets; it's harder to transform those safety nets so that they work for people and can be paid for. It's easy to embrace a theological absolutism; it's harder to find the right balance between the legitimate role of faith in our lives and the demands of our civic religion. But that's our job.
The way this played out during the latest government shutdown is that Trump and Republicans are more than willing to let the American people suffer - whether that is fighting all the way to the Supreme Court to stop SNAP payments, disrupt air travel around the holidays, or take away people's health insurance. As a matter of fact, they're not simply willing to let people suffer during the shutdown. It is the core of their agenda.
The third point of leverage for Republicans is that, as David Roberts wrote a few years ago, they regularly disassociate their rhetoric from their agenda/actions.
Republicans thus talk about “taxes” and “spending” and “regulation” in the abstract, since Americans oppose them in the abstract even as they support their specific manifestations. They talk about cutting the deficit even as they slash taxes on the rich and launch unfunded wars. They talk about free markets even as they subsidize fossil fuels. They talk about American exceptionalism even as they protect fossil-fuel incumbents and fight research and infrastructure investments.
In short, Republicans have mastered post-truth politics. They’ve realized that their rhetoric doesn’t have to bear any connection to their policy agenda.
Trump and the MAGA movement have taken that one to a whole new level. As an example, last month Speaker Mike Johnson said, "Let me look right into the camera and tell you very clearly: Republicans are the ones concerned about healthcare. Republicans are the party working around the clock every day to fix healthcare. This is not talking points for us: we've done it." That would be laughable if it weren't so enraging. The only thing Republicans have done about healthcare is cut Medicaid and try to kill Obamacare more than 70 times. According to Project 2025, the Republican agenda is simply more of the same. As Roberts said, "their rhetoric doesn't have to bear any connection to their policy agenda."
It is that third point of leverage the shutdown effectively targeted. As Josh Marshall wrote, "The upshot of the shutdown is that Democrats now own the affordability issue, and they’ve focused it on health care coverage, which Republicans want to make more expensive or take away altogether."
I know that, in the midst of Trump's threats to almost everything we hold dear, Democrats are angry and want their representatives in Congress to "fight, fight, fight." But I'd suggest that we also need a strategy for winning those fights. Given those first two leverage points, I didn't seen an endgame for Democrats on the shutdown. If it had dragged on and on, Republicans would have been content to let the American people suffer, leaving Democrats to look weak and helpless to stop them.
I'm not saying that I agree with the 8 Democrats who voted to end the shutdown. Their stated reasons simply sound weak and reactive. But I would suggest that the party needs to continue to grapple with finding their own leverage points and using them wisely. No one strategy is going to be foolproof and work all the time. While taking a stand for affordable healthcare didn't accomplish all we hoped it would, the willingness of Trump and Republicans to inflict pain on the American people was exposed to the light of day. Let's take that win and run with it.
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