Pushback Party

Democrats in Congress are upset over Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer's decision to not filibuster the recent bill to fund the government, allowing President Trump and Republicans in Congress to avoid a shutdown of the government. There's even been talk of having Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez run against Senator Schumer in his next primary election.

But for all of the "deep sense of outrage and betrayal" that Representative Ocasio-Cortez says that Democrats feel, I'm inclined to think that Senator Schumer understood something about a shutdown that  maybe some other Democrats don't at this point: None of the problems that people in Blue America are dealing with would have been solved by a shutdown. It wouldn't have undone any of the initiatives the Trump Administration is driving. As much as I understand people's frustration with the "the Resistance," and the feeling that Democrats don't have a viable plan to oppose President Trump, simply opposing the President hasn't worked for anyone thus far... so why stick with it?

The primary problem that Democrats have right now is that many Americans feel that the party is focused on identity politics and the problems of relatively small groups of marginalized people (some of whom aren't even Americans), rather than attempting to make things better for the nation as a whole. Senator Bernie Sanders has taken some grief for the position that Americans aren't really driven by racial animus, but I think that he's largely right in making the point that when people are regularly eating steak, they don't mind if someone else is thrown a bone now and again. But if they believe their own problems are being ignored, they resent the work that goes into finding solutions for others.

And shutting down the government wouldn't have been a solution to anything, other than Democratic lawmakers' feelings of powerlessness. No new jobs would have been created, no price hikes ameliorated, no justice done. The best-case scenario is that the Democrats picked up a bit of leverage; but it'd doubtful they could have done anything immediate with it, and, failing that, they would have been seen as the cause of whatever misery (and, let's face it, inconvenience) would have come out of the whole thing.

Donald Trump is not, by any means, a particularly popular President, but the support he does have is a result of the perception that he's solving people's problems. He may be going about it like a bull in a china shop, but as long as his supporters don't feel that it's their plates being broken, they're willing to support him, and turn their ire on people who don't. The problem with the four years of the Biden Administration was that President Biden came to see another four years as an entitlement, rather than something that he needed to actively work for, on the terms of the electorate. The problem wasn't that is was a do-nothing administration, but that too many members of the public felt that it did nothing for them. Something tells me that Senator Schumer, at least, saw where things went wrong.