The Ghost of Shutdowns Past

Fans of American exceptionalism can point to one way we are exceptional among advanced democracies.  We are the only one to have government shutdowns.  Parliamentary democracies often have deadlocks in which they are unable to form a government, but the state bureaucracy marches on, carrying out its every day tasks, but without direction from the top.  This can continue for a long time without serious inconvenience, although ultimately it can cause trouble direction is needed.  But shutting down the bureaucracy of the state is a uniquely American pathology.

The United States has had short lapses in funding before, for a few days, but only two shutdowns that were serious crises. 

The first was under Bill Clinton in 1996 and lasted for 21 days.*  The shutdown was the result of a budget standoff.  I constantly hear that Republicans assumed that Clinton would be blamed and found they had miscalculated, but I think that is incorrect.  Economic royalists are opposed to government on general principle, of course, but Republicans had managed to make some degree of peace with it until Clinton was elected in 1992.  Then they discovered to their horror that having a federal government means that sometimes a Democrat can be in charge of it.  This led to a complete freakout on their part an unleashing of the economic royalist instincts they had kept in check till then.  Republicans ran not just against Clinton, but against government in general.  They denounced government as a monstrous parasite, draining our life blood, trampling liberty underfoot, and giving us nothing in return.  They ran for office promising to cut government, not with a meat ax, but with a chain saw.  One (state) candidate ran on a promise to eliminate her office altogether. 

The tactic proved wildly successful  Denouncing government as a pure an unmitigated evil proved an effective campaign strategy, and the Republicans won control of both houses of Congress for the first time in 40 years.  So naturally they assumed that if the American people hated government so much, shutting it down would be popular.  The American people, in turn, assumed that if government was a monstrous parasite draining our life blood, trampling on our liberty, and giving us nothing in return, then shutting it down would not be accompanied with any inconvenience.  When it turned out that shutting this monstrosity down cause problems, shutdown quickly lost its popularity and went out of practice for another 17 years.

The other shutdown to cause a crisis was the next one, the one that happened 17 years later in 2013, under President Obama and lasted 16 days.  Adding to the crisis was that it was not merely a shutdown, but also a threat to breach the debt ceiling.  The two events became blurred together in the public mind.  During the shutdown, Obama closed national parks and museums and non-essential services.  Republicans cried foul, saying that he was making the shutdown more painful than necessary to put pressure on them.  They had part of a point.  There can be no doubt that Obama really did want to make the point that a lot of government is more popular than most economic royalists think.  But they were dead wrong if they believed a shutdown could be made painless.  Far more dangerous than the shutdown was the threat of a default on the debt, a danger which ultimately led Republicans to back down.  Republicans went on to major victories in 2014, but did not shut the government down again throughout the Obama Presidency.

However, they do not appear to have learned the same lesson in 2013 as in 1996.  Instead of seeing shutdowns as an evil to be avoided, Republicans -- at least their right wing -- came to see them as the most emphatic way of stating their principles.  Quite a few times before this shutdown, when Trump failed to get funding for his border wall, he said that what we needed was a good shutdown to get it -- and this while the Republicans still controlled Congress!  There was a brief shutdown early in 2018, with parks and museums not closed, and minimal inconvenience.

And, most famously, at the beginning of this shutdown Trump said loud and clear on national television that he was proud to own a shutdown.  I can only assume from this that he expected shutdown to be popular, at least with his base.  And he left the parks and museums open -- only to find out that the Obama Administration closed them for a good reason.  Museums and parks deteriorate fast when open to the public but without maintenance staff.  And no end is in sight. 

Let's hope that this shutdown has a stronger impact than even the 1996 shutdown, and even leads to passage of the Stop STUPIDITCY Act to prevent any more of this uniquely American pathology.

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*There was an earlier shutdown in 1995, but not long enough to rate as a full-blown crisis.