The Stupidity of Shutdowns – The Dispatch

Dear Reader (including all admirers of the Canadian bus hijacker),

Hey now, hey now, don’t dream the shutdown’s over. 

That doesn’t really make sense, I just wanted to give you an earworm. 

Anyway, I’m glad the shutdown is over. I find shutdown arguments exhausting because of the riots of hypocrisy and cynicism that fuel them. But now that it’s over—for now—I thought I’d offer one cheer for government shutdowns. 

Yesterday, the U.S. editor at The Economist asked, “Why is America the only big democracy that routinely shuts down its government in budget battles?” My answer: American exceptionalism, baby. 

Remember when I used to rant about how American exceptionalism never meant “better than everyone,” it just meant “different”? Well, insert one of those rants here.   

We have budget shutdowns because—cue Bill Murray’s Stripes speech voice—we’re the United States of America!

Just to put a fine point on it: We’re not alone just among “big” democracies, or all democracies or big countries or even all countries with just the right mix of vowels and consonants in their name (no offense, Kyrgyzstan). 

As far as I’ve been able to tell after literally double-digit minutes of research, the cheese—by which I mean the U-S-of-A—stands alone when it comes to this sort of thing. Sure, other countries fail to form governments. Belgium went 592 days without forming a government five years ago. Who can forget all of the sleepless nights that cost us? 

Will all those fountains of micturating male boys run dry? Will the Brahmins of Belgian Hegemony still be able to dictate the allowable curvature of a cucumber? 

But our worries were for naught. Pretty much every other democracy in the world, including the Belgies, puts basic government functions on autopilot, because nearly all of those countries have a permanent “state” that sits atop or alongside the government. More on that in a moment.And what about non-democracies? Well, authoritarian regimes can’t have government shutdowns because control of the government is what makes them authoritarian in the first place. If Russia’s government workers stopped working, the streets of Moscow would run red with blood as bureaucrats rained down from their respective windows. As Judd Nelson’s character in The Breakfast Club might say, “Recalcitrant bureaucrats fall from windows all the time. It’s an imperfect world!” But if the government really did shut down, the next thing we’d see is Vladimir Putin being hung upside down in Red Square Mussolini-style, or images of him boarding a plane for Beijing or Riyadh to live in exile, or him retreating from Moscow in a convoy of loyalist troops.

If you want to be annoyingly argumentative, get your own “news”letter. But I’ll concede that two exceptions to my sweeping, vaguely informed generalization might apply. First, failed states of all varieties are government shutdowns of a kind. But that’s not the result of a budgeting process breaking down. Passing a continuing resolution would not have spared Somalia or Libya all that unpleasantness. 

The other exception would be some kind of general strike. That’s happened in a few places, where the government is de facto shut down or paralyzed. But that’s a form of civil disobedience that isn’t really a function of the system of government but a quasi-rebellion against it.  

In Wednesday’s G-File on postliberalism, I quoted Ernest Gellner’s definition of nationalism: “Nationalism is primarily a political principle, which holds that the political and the national unit should be congruent.” 

The political unit—the state—cannot shut down in a “true” nationalist or socialist system because the state is the brain of the body politic or the expression of the people (though in Leninist systems, it’s the party that is above the state—but you get the point).

Now, having just written some 3,000 words on eggheady political theory (all because Dispatch Managing Editor Michael Reneau goaded me into it), I don’t feel like going too far down this rabbit hole. But I think this is an underappreciated fact of how our system works. 

First of all, the concept of the state as the Europeans and, really, most of the world understand it has never really been accepted in America. We have a government. Not only that, we have a government of separated branches, which the founders saw as a bulwark against European statism, which at the time took the form of monarchy or empire. 

Heck, that’s not even right. We have a whole bunch of governments: state governments, city governments, county governments, etc. And, to the best of my knowledge, all of them are divided up into separate legislative, executive, and judicial branches. They all compete and cooperate with each other—vertically and horizontally as politics and the law may require.

But more to the point, the people ultimately in charge of the government(s) are, well, the people. One of our bedrock principles is that the government can’t have our money without our say-so: no taxation without representation, and all that jazz. 

Side thought: Did you ever wonder whether that phrase would have caught on if it didn’t rhyme? Would we have gone with “no taxation without conversation” or “no pay without our say!”?

Anyway, I’ll keep going while you clean up the mess of your blown mind. The idea that the state can’t keep on chugging away without our say-so is really wonderfully American. Indeed, I’ve argued for a very long time that for more than a century, the project of American progressives has been to Europeanize our understanding of the government as a capital-S state. That’s what Herbert Croly meant by adopting Hamiltonian methods for Jeffersonian ends (it sounds even better as rap). That’s what Woodrow Wilson meant when he wanted America to get past the “Newtonian” Constitution and embrace a “Darwinian” conception of governance. 

I’ll skip summarizing various chapters of my books and keep moving.

The 2012 Democratic National Convention began with a video that proclaimed, “The government is the only thing we all belong to.” The charitable reading of this claim prompts me to respond, “So what?” The less charitable reading fills me with rage: We don’t belong to the government, the government belongs to us. 

You can often hear hints of the statist mindset during government shutdowns. In 2013, Barack Obama and other Democrats liked to say that the Republicans were “holding the whole country hostage.” I didn’t like that formulation 12 years ago, and I didn’t like it this week when Donald Trump said, “For 43 days, Democrats held the American people hostage.” Lots of other Republicans used the same language. I only bring that up to note that Republicans these days sound an awful lot like right-wing progressives. 

Anyway, I certainly understand that if you depend on SNAP food benefits, or if you’re a federal worker, or if you rely on some other federal government service or program, you might feel like your interests have been held hostage in some sense. And you’d be justified in thinking so. My only point is that as important as the federal government is—opinions vary!—the federal government isn’t “the country” or the “people” because our government isn’t “the State.” 

And yeah, I get it. Expecting rhetorical or philosophical hygiene from politicians during a government shutdown is like expecting literal hygiene from hippies at the orgy tent at Woodstock after the acid-laced brownies have been handed out. 

But this assumption that the government—or these days, the president—is the brain of the nation, regulating the central nervous system of the body politic, is really quite un-American. I remember how Dan Rather and his ilk used to say that any conservative reform or deregulatory effort “turned back the clock” in America, as if the government was the engine of all progress.  

Trump certainly subscribes to a variant of this thinking when he likens the entire economy to a department store that he runs and sets all the prices for. In our system, the economy—within reasonable limits, bound by law, not presidential whim—is a zone of freedom where “capitalist acts between consenting adults” are none of the government’s business. 

To the extent government shutdowns remind us that the country and the people are at least somewhat independent variables from the government, they are useful. 

But please don’t get me wrong: Government shutdowns are really stupid. Hence my one cheer for them.

There’s no inconsistency here. No taxation without representation is a good principle, and it doesn’t become a bad principle simply because our representatives behave like idiots. 

Think of it this way: The right to free speech is a good principle. That doesn’t mean I have to celebrate every stupid or irresponsible thing someone says. The right to self-defense is a good principle. That doesn’t mean someone can’t exercise that right poorly or irresponsibly. A guy who shoots an innocent bystander while defending himself has made a terrible mistake. That doesn’t invalidate the right to self-defense as a principle, even if the guy’s actions might jeopardize his right to exercise it. 

The same logic applies to our politicians today. I think pretty much every one of our elected officials in Washington, D.C., should be fired. That would be unfair to a few folks, to be sure. But as institutions, the federal legislative and executive branches have really screwed things up. 

The system is good, but the people and parties running it have made a mess of things, and government shutdowns are merely a symptom of that. 

I can give you a couple dozen reasons why shutdowns are stupid. They’re expensive (government shutdowns never save money). They provide the president opportunities (at least politically) to do things they shouldn’t—including, in the case of Bill Clinton, the ability to play Barn-and-the-Milkmaid with a White House intern. They do real damage to the economy. For yours truly, they make talking about politics on TV an even more soul-deadening exercise. 

But the most important reason they’re stupid, and the one most relevant one to my larger point, can be summarized with a number: $38.2 trillion. 

That’s how much money the federal government owes (this doesn’t even include unfunded liabilities like Social Security and other entitlements which add, at least, another $78 trillion to the books over 75 years). 

Our economy—and by extension the global economy—depends on a very high level of trust. I don’t mean that in some namby-pamby way. I mean that when you’re $38 trillion in debt, a whole bunch of people, banks, and governments need to trust that you’ll make good on the loan. 

And because we spend nearly $2 trillion more every year than we raise from taxes, that means we have to keep borrowing. Shutdowns don’t exactly help our reputation as a good credit risk. Imagine you’re a loan officer at the bank and your biggest client’s business has temporarily closed because the accounting department is having a huge argument. You might pass on giving them another loan on favorable terms. 

But that’s a practical point. It’s a philosophical point that makes the national debt so relevant. Assuming the republic endures, that debt will be paid—one way or another—by hundreds of millions of Americans who never voted for it. If you truly take no taxation without representation seriously, we are a bit like King George taxing the unborn temporal colonials without their consent. Borrowing lets politicians buy now and stick the yet-to-be-born with the tab. Every deficit dollar is a future tax dollar, plus interest. The only question is which generation gets the bill. A deficit is just a tax with a longer fuse.

Now in fairness, there are two ways in which this isn’t entirely true. You can minimize the burden through inflation, but as Americans have recently learned, inflation is really just another kind of tax. The other way is to grow the economy so that the debt burden becomes lighter for future generations. But you are still taxing future generations without representation. 

If government shutdowns actually helped the people or their representatives learn that lesson, then I’d offer more than one cheer for government shutdowns. But I don’t see anyone learning that lesson anytime soon.

Yesterday I did some late-afternoon TV. The Fair Jessica had to go meet a friend for a drink and simply couldn’t get the beasts to come inside, so she left them out in the backyard. They were both happy and scolding upon my return. I’d say three or four days a week, Pippa has to be convinced to get out of bed in the morning. She has very strong “five more minutes” teenager energy. Zoë, meanwhile, retains her “we’re going to be late for hockey practice!” energy. But once Pippa is out and about, she is a happy girl. I dig Clover’s shadow spaniel moves. Gracie is still thirsty, even at night. My animals are getting old, and that makes me very sad. But one of the benefits is that they’ve really become expert at sleeping and relaxing in ways unappreciated by younger critters. Finally, amid all of my disagreements with Tucker Carlson, I guess I’m guilty of hypocrisy on one point. I, too, support appeasement of a sort.

Why I’m a Dispatch Member: I joined at the onset of pandemic lockdowns when Steve, Jonah, David, and Sarah were talking about the origins of COVID-19 at the Wuhan virology lab. I love the podcasts, and became addicted to The Remnant and Advisory Opinions (I’m a lawyer) at that time. I also am proud that my fellow Gen Xers set a fine example for civic engagement by taking the world and American politics seriously. I feel like they are all my fellow travelers, and they make me feel less alone in the world—that I’m not the crazy one.

Pet’s Breed: Clumber spaniel

Gotcha Story: Met a breeder at a dog show

Pet’s Likes: French fries, blueberries

Pet’s Dislikes: Water/swimming

Pet’s Proudest Moment: He went from 88 pounds to 60 pounds in less than 15 months by switching off bagged kibble to a baked potato and canned salmon twice a day.

A Moment Someone (Wrongly) Accused Pet of Being Bad: He found and devoured a 1-pound box of See’s Candies chocolates. (We had to pump his stomach with a tablespoon of hydrogen peroxide in a cup of milk.)

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