Imagine if you threw a party and no one came. Pretty humiliating, right?
Well, imagine if you represented the party of big government, lost the presidency and both houses of Congress, then demanded a federal shutdown to impose your welfare-state agenda on the nation — and no one seemed to care much.
In that scenario, you’ve become your own worst enemy: You’ve inadvertently made your adversaries’ case that there really isn’t a meaningful voter constituency for a big-government leviathan.
The Obamacare premium subsidies which you have made the central issue in your shutdown stand aren’t beloved the way you thought.
You are hoisted with your own petard.
This is what the Democrats have done to themselves.
The AP-NORC poll last week reported that 54% of voters either have no opinion about or outright oppose extending the subsidies, and a recent Kaiser Family Foundation poll found that 61% of voters know little to nothing about them.
There is no organic street energy on the issue.
The markets have gone up since the shutdown started.
The average voter seems to be pretty “meh” about the whole Washington drama.
Ironically for Democrats, the shutdown actually exposes how the welfare state Ponzi scheme works — and in fact helps make the case for smaller government.
“Give us a temporary increase in health-care subsidies, including for the very wealthy, to help us get through COVID!” the Democrats cried in 2021.
But now it’s clear that was just a bait-and-switch.
The moment Republicans allowed the COVID “bonuses” to expire in 2025, as the Democrats promised they would, the Democrats called the GOP “authoritarian” for doing exactly what the Democrat-written law originally intended.
And this is how the big-government Ponzi scheme is always played: Find a crisis, fund it massively on the backs of taxpayers in hopes of gaining a new base of voter patrons, then call the other side bad names for not giving your new patrons more free stuff.
When they resist, you have your next campaign issue. Voilà!
This “feed the patronage beast” mentality may keep liberals in office, but it is fundamentally unpatriotic.
The United States is running a $38 trillion debt, 123% the size of our annual GDP, and our entitlement programs are rapidly headed towards insolvency.
Nearly two million Americans are improperly enrolled in both Medicaid and Obamacare, or in government health-care programs in multiple states.
The Paragon Institute estimates that about 6.4 million people are improperly enrolled in Obamacare itself.
Americans making $500,000 a year now get Obamacare support.
Further, the goal of Obamacare, when first passed, was to control soaring health care premiums — but premiums have continued to skyrocket.
The commissars of the welfare state are never held accountable for failure or abuse.
For them, it’s never about subtraction to save taxpayer funds for the truly needy; it’s always about expansion to grow the voter base at others’ expense.
Americans have a healthy spider sense for when they’re being snookered, and polls consistently show voters want smaller government in the face of soaring public debt.
The collective yawn over the shutdown proves just how much steam the political Ponzi game has lost.
“Health care hasn’t been front and center for years,” says pollster Nate Cohn, with fewer than 1% of voters reporting it as their most important issue.
It all means that taming the runaway welfare state seems far less politically risky today than it was in previous eras.
Democrats got their heads handed to them in the last election because the public believes the party has no economic program to speak of and is intolerably too far left of the median voter on just about every major cultural issue.
The GOP continues to hold double-digit leads on these major issues, and voters trust Republicans more on key questions surrounding cost of living, the economy and attaining major life goals (having a good job, ability to retire, creating wealth for children.)
No shutdown can cure this problem for the left.
What the Democratic Party needs is a leader with the guts to say that progressive socialism may have appeal in deep-blue urban enclaves and with the downwardly mobile podcast class, but nationally it is a very unpopular brand.
A leader with charisma and courage enough to challenge the progressive socialist left the way President Bill Clinton did in 1992.
A pro-growth, culturally centrist, modest-government message just might salvage a party that seems otherwise marooned on “woke island” as far as the eye can see.
Julian Epstein is the former chief counsel for the House Judiciary Democrats and the former staff director of the House Oversight Committee.