The Shutdown Was a "Brilliant" Political Move

The longest government shutdown in modern history has ended, with no apparent victories for Democrats, and everyone has an opinion on why it happened and what it means. I’m not the only one who quietly wondered what the point was. Even though it was nice to see Democrats finally standing up for once, they had no real strategy for getting what they wanted.

As an article in Vox says:

But the reality is that Democrats never had a plausible strategy to get what they said they wanted — an extension of expiring Affordable Care Act subsidies — out of the shutdown fight. And after 40 days, they may have been winning the politics of the shutdown, but they had made no apparent progress toward getting Trump and Republicans to give into their substantive demands.

Indeed, rather than negotiate, Trump has in recent days started pressuring Senate Republicans to abolish the filibuster — removing the tool Democrats used to cause the shutdown, and letting the GOP pass laws with the party’s votes alone.

Honestly, a lot of us are trying to distance ourselves from the political noise these days because it’s just so painful to watch. That doesn’t mean we’re checked out. We still care about what’s going on. Many of us still vote. We still help. We’re just not jumping on every bandwagon.

If nothing else, even the most hardcore preppers and the most pessimistic “doomers” probably want to know some of the core motivations for what their politicians are doing. Until today, I honestly didn’t understand what the point of the shutdown was, if there was any strategic logic involved at all.

Turns out, there was some logic.

It was just…