~~Atlantic~~ New Yorker articles have always (for me, at least) been long-winded and rambling. I still can't tell what the thesis statement is for this one.
But I do agree that the Democrat Party needs to retire its performative Old Ones.
Ultimately, the substance of the fight might not matter for congressional Democrats so much as having the fight at all: Schumer, in particular, lost a lot of credibility after he was perceived to have folded to Trump in March, and the Democratic base has been clamoring for the Party’s leaders to do something; whatever the merits of a shutdown, it’s become increasingly hard to imagine Schumer and Jeffries surviving another preëmptive climbdown. It’s unlikely that the Democrats will “win” this shutdown if winning means policy concessions; at some point, they’ll probably have to retreat. But making noise for a bit could revive an oppositional force that, as I wrote last week, appears fractious, distracted, and, ultimately, moribund. There’s an asymmetry in the vein of political analysis that emphasizes the power of Trump’s energized base while chiding Democrats whenever they stray from some perceived middle ground; sure, marshalling the base, on its own, is rarely sufficient, but is necessary. Maybe winning, here, is showing it a pulse.
And yet the Democrats’ lack of forceful, unified opposition, at least up till now, has put the pressure on the Party’s leaders to resort to a tactic that is politically risky, and, more important, will substantively harm federal workers and American citizens. Funding the government is a natural leverage point when you lack any institutional control but can gum up the path to sixty votes in the Senate. Still, it’s possible to imagine an alternate world in which the Democrats had opposed Trump more consistently already, and thus had more reputational leeway not to close the government now. Toward the end of his essay, Klein acknowledged that he was not “absolutely sure” that it was a wise path and that he’d welcome a better plan—but “if the plan is still nothing,” he wrote, “then Democrats need new leaders.” The plan, this time, was not nothing. But a shutdown isn’t everything either. And at some point, the Democrats will indeed need new leaders.