If the furious reaction from progressives this week feels familiar, that’s because we’ve seen this song and dance before – and it is a symptom of the ideological civil war that is ripping at the seams of the Democrat Party.
After 41 pointless days of stalemate, eight Senate Democrats voted with Republicans on Monday to reopen the government, prompting their liberal colleagues to erupt in outrage and denounce the deal as a betrayal. But the truth is that most of these same Democrats are secretly relieved. Their anger is pure political theater – a carefully curated performance meant to appease a loud, radical base while most of the party quietly celebrates an end to a political disaster of their own making.
We saw the exact same dynamic earlier this year. Back in March, Democrats faced another government funding impasse, and ten of them crossed the aisle to keep the government open.
At the time, they were accused of “capitulating” to President Trump. The left vowed retribution. Activists threatened primaries. Yet eight months later, Chuck Schumer is still the party leader, and the same Democrats just ran the same play again.
The cynical strategy for Democrats is simple: make a big enough show of “fighting back” to appease the base and avoid a costly primary – even if everyday Americans are collateral damage.
Publicly, Democrats are lashing out about the vote to reopen the government. But it’s telling that none of them are personally attacking their colleagues who provided the necessary votes.
Take, for instance, the rhetoric from Democrats Mark Warner of Virginia and Tammy Duckworth of Illinois. Both of them voted “no” on reopening, while their Democrat counterparts, Tim Kaine in Virginia and Dick Durbin in Illinois, voted yes.
Warner claimed, “I cannot support a deal that still leaves millions of Americans wondering how they are going to pay for their health care or whether they will be able to afford to get sick,” and insisted that “simply kicking the can down the road is not good enough.” Duckworth went even further, saying, “Trump and Republicans refuse to fight for American families, but I refuse to give up on them. I simply cannot, and I will not, vote to do nothing to help protect them from Trump’s vindictive and malicious efforts in exchange for a vague promise from the least trustworthy Republican Party in our nation’s history.”
In those statements, Warner is essentially suggesting Kaine is abandoning sick Americans, while Duckworth implies that Durbin is complicit in Trump’s “vindictive and malicious” schemes. Yet notably, neither of them criticized their counterparts by name. The outrage is loud, but it’s not personal, because deep down, they’re grateful someone else took the hit.
A report from Axios provides another smoking gun that this is all performative outrage from Democrats. According to the outlet, a group of moderate Senate Democrats had told Schumer two weeks into the shutdown that they were ready to vote to reopen. Schumer, ever mindful of the party’s optics, urged them to hold out longer to make the shutdown look like a principled stand rather than the political dead end it was.
Ultimately, it was everyday Americans who suffered. Federal employees missed paychecks, families lost benefits, travelers faced endless flight delays, and the economy stalled – all for the sake of optics. It was political theater designed to placate a radical base that demanded confrontation at any cost.
For Democrats, it was better to let the country twist in the wind a few extra weeks if it meant pretending they were still “standing up to Trump.”
But now that the show is over, Democrats are quietly exhaling. The shutdown exposed how dysfunctional their coalition has become. They’ve spent years appeasing the far left, nurturing a small but fanatical faction that doesn’t believe in compromise and demands endless escalation.
That faction doesn’t care that Democrats lost in a landslide last year and no longer hold the levers of power in Washington. They just want destruction. They’re fine with federal workers missing paychecks and airports grinding to a halt if it means showing how “resistant” they are to Trump.
Meanwhile, most of the country doesn’t share that appetite for chaos. Ordinary Americans simply want stability. And Democrats, especially those who represent swing states, know that every day of shutdown pain eroded their credibility with the voters they need most.
So, Democrats try to have it both ways. They let the shutdown drag on long enough to look defiant, then quietly allow a vote to reopen when the pressure becomes unbearable. The moderates who vote “yes” are sacrificed to the outrage mob while everyone else gets to posture about “not giving in.” Then, as soon as the government reopens, the whole party sighs in relief. The radicals get their moral victory, the moderates survive, and leadership hopes the public forgets the whole mess by next week.
The irony is that the longer the shutdown lasted, the worse it was for Democrats politically. It drew attention to exactly the parts of government they don’t want voters thinking about – waste, inefficiency, and fraud. Americans got a close look at the enormous flow of taxpayer money into Obamacare subsidies, welfare programs, and bloated bureaucracies. The shutdown revealed how fragile and mismanaged many of these systems are. It sparked uncomfortable questions about where the money goes and why so many billions are vanishing into unaccountable hands. For a party built on defending big government, that’s not a conversation they want to have.
Meanwhile, the Democrats’ own leaders showed astonishing cynicism. Schumer was caught on tape telling colleagues that “every day gets better for us” as the shutdown dragged on, while House Minority Whip Katherine Clark described Americans’ suffering as “leverage.” Those are not the words of people fighting for working families. They’re the words of a political class that sees ordinary citizens as pawns in a messaging war.
The shutdown was a crisis of the Democrats’ own making – a desperate attempt to prove their loyalty to a base that’s become ungovernable. But when it finally came time to choose between endless chaos and reopening the government, most Democrats were quietly cheering for the same thing the rest of the country wanted: an end to the madness.
Shane Harris is the Editor in Chief of AMAC Newsline. You can follow him on X @shaneharris513.
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