The Real Reason Behind Democrats’ Government Shutdown

Editor’s note: This is a lightly edited transcript of today’s video from Daily Signal Senior Contributor Victor Davis Hanson. Subscribe to our YouTube channel to see more of his videos.

Hello, this is Victor Davis Hanson for The Daily Signal. The government has now been shut down for the longest time in our 249th history of the republic, except on one earlier occasion. So, who’s responsible? How’s it gonna end? What’s gonna happen?

Ostensibly, government shutdowns occur when the out party has lost power in the House and the Senate, or at least they can’t push through an agenda.

So, they feel that the only leverage they have, usually when they’ve lost the presidency and control of the Congress, is to not approve. And basically, that is not approve of any bills that are going on filibusters. In this case, the Republicans do not have 60 votes in the Senate to override their refusal to vote on the budget, so to speak.

Why are they doing this? Why are the Democrats shutting down the government when we have a history of these shutdowns?

And if you go back and look at them, usually one thing happens. That is, initially, the party that’s in the minority and has shut down the government says, “Well, they won’t speak to us,” or “They won’t, they don’t, wanna negotiate,” or “They’re spending too much money and this is the only recourse we have.”

And that is a believable message, a persuasive message for a few days, but then certain things kick in, such as: I didn’t get my Social Security check. I didn’t get my paycheck. The air traffic control system is slowing my flights down. And the system slowly starts to grind down.

And at that magic point, people say, “Well, wait a minute. We had an election. You guys, whether Republicans or Democrats, lost, and now you’re kind of poor losers and you’re saying you’re losing in chess so you wanna overthrow the board and say, ‘I’m gonna shut it all down.'” And then public opinion starts to go against the people who shut down.

I think we’re at that point now where the Democrats are seeing a diminishing return on their investment of shutting the government down.

Why did they do this? The historian Thucydides said, for most disagreements, there is the pretext, the prophasis, and then there’s the real cause, the aitia.

They say that they’re shutting the government down because when they passed the Obamacare program, the Affordable Care Act—which, remember, was supposed to reduce everybody’s health care. And you know, there’s only about 25 million people now who are in need of these subsidies on Obamacare. Most people still get their private insurance or they’re on Medicare or they’re on Medicaid.

But when this program did not prove to be affordable, as everybody predicted it wouldn’t, when you rang a lot of people into the system that can’t pay for it, and you put these rules and regulations on the medical profession, something has to give. And that give was cost.

So, then the Democrats came back and said, “We need subsidies.” And the Republicans said, “Well, you said it was going to be cheaper. Why would you need government multibillion, hundreds of billion-dollar subsidies?” And so, they said, “We’ll put a time limit on it.” Well, that time limit expired or will expire.

And they knew that. They signed on to get us this far into the year by agreeing not to shut down.

So now they say the official reason is the Republicans are not going to extend a subsidy for the affordable health care. The Republicans said, “It should be called the nonaffordable health care. We told you it wouldn’t work. Why do this? Let’s rewrite the whole thing or get—”

So, that’s the pretext, but there’s two other reasons. One, in the general chaos of things, they think that it hurts the end party, in particular, President Donald Trump.

In other words, they look at Trump and they say he’s reduced crime. There is no such thing as illegal immigration anymore. He’s addressing illegal aliens that are criminals, 500,000. He’s pursuing them. He’s deported many, many thousands of criminals. There’s been seven or eight ceasefires abroad. He may bring peace to the Middle East. He’s restored the military’s shortfall recruitment. There’s 50,000. So, we don’t really have an answer. But if we create chaos, if we fill the streets full of protesters, if we get violent, if we make everybody upset and not calm, and we think we’re gonna go into the public, the voter will go into a fetal position, say, “Make it all go away.”

In other words: Shut down the government, cause general turmoil, maybe even lead us to a recession, and they will blame Trump.

“Trump did it. Trump did it. Trump did it.”

That’s one reason.

The other real reason that they’re not telling us is that the Democratic Party is in a doom loop. In other words, on all of these main issues—defund the police, open borders, illegal immigration, the trans sports issue, what we saw abroad, pro-Palestinian, pro-Hamas versus Israel—they’re on the losing side, and they do not have a charismatic President Bill Clinton or President Barack Obama to carry them through in a nationwide referendum on these unpopular votes.

So, they don’t have the leadership and they don’t have the votes. And so, they’re looking for something to do, as I said, to cause chaos.

But more importantly, they have a reason why they don’t have charismatic leaders, and they have a reason why they’re unpopular. And that is the party has passed the establishment by. Rep. Nancy Pelosi, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, all of ’em are ossified, calcified dinosaurs. And a young group of Mamdanis are running on issues that, while they may be popular in a particular jurisdiction or an East Coast liberal city, they have no residents nationwide.

And they will be running for office in the midterms. They’re gonna be challenging incumbents like Chuck Schumer. And they can win in this neosocialist, DEI, far left, Green New Deal constituency.

But the old guard is saying: They will lose in a general election, just like McGovern did, and they will take us down for 20 years. So now, what we have to do is we have to give in a little bit because they’re saying we’re old fuddy-duddies and letting Trump, you know, go to the races. He’s successful. Can’t they stop him? We’ll stop him. So now, we’re going to shut down the government so they can tell the base, “We’re just as radical as you are.”

And who’s the loser in the final analysis? The American people because the Democratic Party, who shut the government down, is basically saying: We are Samson and we’ve got a hand around each pillar and we’re gonna pull down the whole thing on top of you.

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