Something that isn’t discussed much about the Democrats’ 43-day shutdown of Washington is that it demonstrated their scant interest in government as distinct from their insatiable hunger for tactical leverage and power.
It’s obvious on one level that people who stop a government from functioning aren’t interested in government. But there are details beneath the surface that are revealing.
Ostensibly, the Left wanted to use the shutdown to force Republicans to filch hundreds of billions of extra dollars from taxpayers to subsidize Obamacare insurance premiums. But that wouldn’t have fixed America’s healthcare system, which Democrats claimed they’d fixed 15 years ago when President Barack Obama signed their purely partisan legislation into law.
Their massive new money demand was actually to prevent the healthcare system from being fixed. You read that right. It was to make sure there was no real fix. The billions would have obscured the fact that the 2010 Affordable Care Act did not make healthcare affordable. In 2035, the Democrats would then come back and demand more subsidies to do the same thing.
It’s like their decision in Obama’s first term not to fix the immigration system. They wanted it to be a running sore all the way up to the 2010 and 2012 elections — some Democrats complained bitterly but were overruled — so Obama and the rest of the Left were able to campaign on the issue and accuse Republicans of heartless intransigence.
The Democrats love persistent problems and love to make problems persist. That way, they can keep protesting about them. The last thing they dream of doing is fixing them. If they fixed them, they’d go away, and the Democrats would lose a potent weapon.
A political consultant once bluntly told me that our political culture is predominantly negative because negativity works. You might think politicians would get support by doing something good, but there’s more electoral mileage for them in blaming the other side for doing something bad.
It doesn’t really matter what the issue is, as long as the Left can seize on it and say it represents a right-wing Republican threat to the country. Not stealing billions of dollars from our children and grandchildren to cover up the uselessness of Obamacare can be presented as an attack by the greedy right-wing billionaires’ party on the nation’s health.
BBC BIAS, DONALD TRUMP, AND NIGEL FARAGE
As Sarah Bedford has noted, Democrats and the wider Left latch on to any issue, no matter how much of a stretch it is, to protest about it and present it as President Donald Trump destroying democracy. In one month, the pretext is the president pardoning Jan. 6, 2021, rioters; in another month, it is that he stanches the flow of taxpayer dollars to rich colleges; and in yet another month, it is his construction of a ballroom at the White House. If you squint hard enough at these things, you’ll see fascism on the march.
Protest and complaint are what the Left does. Governing and attending to the concerns of their fellow Americans is not. If the Left and its obedient party on Capitol Hill actually fixed something, it would produce a dose of national satisfaction, which would be unhelpful to their cause. They want to keep the nation disgruntled and obstreperous. That’s how things can be torn down. That’s the way of revolutionary change.
