Democrats flying blind in a political tornado
By Richard Robbins
An untold number of Americans woke early last week with a sinking feeling: A handful of Democratic senators had bolted to support a Republican bill reopening the government, minus the health care subsidies Democrats had been fighting to save.
Donald Trump had won, Democrats had lost, and this only days after a Democratic rout in state and municipal elections.
Affordable Care Act (ACA) costs will now double or even triple for millions of Americans, and Republican lawmakers under Trump have their cruelty and callousness rewarded.
Voters who cast ballots for Democrats in this month’s elections did so in part to send a message to the president and to a lesser extent congressional Republicans: the direction you’re taking the country is far from the direction we want to go.
These voters had the vague notion that Democrats had their backs.
Maybe the outcome was all but inevitable. As the party of government, it must have felt unnatural to Democrats to have government workers laid off or going payless, to have food assistance terminated, to have major snarls at the nation’s air transportation hubs, a result of the squeeze placed on beleaguered and uncompensated air traffic controllers.
The party that largely scorns government saw these things too and just didn’t care. For sure, the flight delays might have caught Republicans’ attention, eventually. As for the others, not so much, or not at all.
During most of the government shutdown, President Trump acted with an intensity of indifference that was astounding. Unlike other presidents confronting a breakdown in government operations, Trump kept to a regular schedule; he even took an overseas trip. Back home, he presided at a swank, slightly decadent, and totally in-your-face blowout at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida.
The Great Gatsby Halloween party and the destruction of the White House East Wing to make room for the extravagant Trump Ballroom were among the things the president attended to during the government hiatus.
With a few caveats, the shutdown ended with a Democratic surrender. Democrats’ attempt to respond to a totally abnormal political moment abnormally (political commentator and journalist Ezra Klein’s framing) was an abysmal failure.
Keeping the government open while conceding the limelight to Republican indifference and outright hostility to Americans’ health care coverage might have been far better politically.
Imagine a Democratic success in extending the ACA tax credits: By saving Republican congressmen and Trump from blame for increased premiums, Democrats would have pulled Republican leaders’ fat from the fire pits of political retribution administered by angry voters.
Conversely, by eliminating ACA subsidies, Republicans now may have handed Democrats political victories in the midterm elections a year hence.
During the shutdown’s final days, it appeared that President Trump was beginning to stir. He proposed, none too coherently, to spend federal dollars on free-market health care coverage, for instance.
What might he and Republicans in Congress have conceded had they come face to face with hundreds of thousands of angry, frustrated travelers stranded in airport terminals just before and just after Thanksgiving, and with the holidays just around the corner?
The big picture is that congressional Democrats do not yet fully appreciate that they are in something more than a political knife. Social critic and political commentator David Brooks recently wrote that most Americans “don’t understand” the dire situation Trump has placed the country in. His appetite for unchecked power is something new; his compulsion to authoritarian control is completely alien to past experience.
People are “still thinking in conventional political terms,” Brooks posits. “This crisis is not about election cycles. It’s about historical tides.”
Trumpism is part and parcel of a worldwide movement of “global populism” untethered to the progressive impulses that yielded such magnificent results for ordinary Americans early in the 20th century, Brooks writes.
“Drowning in this historical tide, conventional … politicians … are hapless…. Church Schumer is not going to save us.”
The tides of public finance and political folly will carry us to another possible government shutdown at the end of January, when authorized spending for large chunks of the government again comes to an end. Stay alert.
Richard Robbins lives in Uniontown. He can be reached at dick.l.robbins@gmail.com.