The Strategic Poverty of Shutdown or Surrender

How False Choices Constrain Opposition and Enable Authoritarianism

People have tried to take me to task on my recent piece, “The Perfect Opposition,” in which I constructed a counterfactual imagining of what it might look like if Schumer and the Democratic leadership were controlled opposition. Some people, in public comments, in DMs, and in emails have asked me what the wisdom would have been in shutting the government down—doing Musk's work of destroying the government for him—and I must admit, I am perplexed at the premise of this charge.

This criticism becomes even more baffling when you consider the full context: This funding bill wasn't presented in isolation. It came immediately after the House Republican leadership literally changed the rules to redefine the rest of 2025 as a single calendar day to prevent votes on Trump's tariffs, as I detailed in my piece “The Day That Never Ends.”

Let that sink in. Before Democrats were asked to fund the government, the Republican House had already suspended time itself to avoid constitutional accountability. They had already demonstrated their willingness to break any rule, twist any procedure, and violate any norm to shield executive power from legislative oversight.

Might it not have been important—indeed, imperative—for Democratic leadership to stand before cameras and explain to the American people the environment around what they were being asked to support? To make clear that basic government services were being held hostage by an administration that had already shown its contempt for constitutional constraints?

Critics may point out that Democrats are in the minority in both chambers. They cannot unilaterally initiate formal oversight without Republican help. But this objection misses the point entirely. A government shutdown would affect everyone—Republicans included—creating precisely the kind of leverage Democrats could have used to advance defensible demands around transparency, accountability for taxpayer money, and understanding what Elon Musk is actually doing with his unprecedented and unelected authority.

None of this is rocket science. This is politics. We have a public discourse. Democratic leadership's role is not merely to respond to public sentiment but to help shape it—by informing it, by contextualizing what is happening for the many Americans confused about current events, by clarifying what the stakes actually are. This is how you build political capital to stand on principle. None of this is radical. This is how good politics has always worked.

Instead, Democratic leadership appears so stuffed into its own rear, with poll-tested talking points and carefully workshopped speeches, paralyzed by the misguided belief that somehow focusing on democracy issues is what handed Trump the election—that if only Biden and Harris had stuck to kitchen table issues, the outcome would have been different. This is nonsense. Absolute nonsense.

You can make people care about anything. You just need to explain to people why it matters to them. Why it's relevant to their lives. MAGA certainly did a pretty good job at explaining why trans issues should matter to their base, even if the reasons were demagogic bullshit. It, at least, proves that persuasion is possible. That public opinion can be shaped, not just responded to.

The criticism reveals exactly the binary thinking trap I was critiquing in the first place. It assumes only two possible paths existed: either fund a government being systematically dismantled or trigger a shutdown that would accelerate that dismantling. This framing itself represents a failure of political imagination—a collapse of strategic thinking into a false choice that serves those working to undermine constitutional governance.

The notion that these were the only options available exposes how thoroughly our political discourse has been captured by the very forces working to constrain it. It's as if we've collectively forgotten that political power extends beyond procedural votes—that it includes narrative framing, public education, institutional resistance, and the strategic deployment of legitimate constitutional authorities.

Consider what genuine opposition might have looked like:

First, it would have recognized that the spending bill wasn't merely about funding the government but about enabling its transformation into something fundamentally anti-democratic. This isn't normal politics requiring normal responses—it's a systematic effort to replace constitutional governance with personal rule.

Second, it would have mounted a comprehensive public education campaign explaining exactly what's happening inside agencies like DOGE—not as partisan talking points but as factual documentation of how civil service protections, regulatory functions, and constitutional constraints are being dismantled in real time.

Third, it would have leveraged the leverage created by the shutdown threat to demand specific transparency provisions—public reporting requirements, inspector general reviews, congressional briefings—that would shed light on what's happening inside the government.

Fourth, it would have coordinated with institutional actors both inside and outside government—career civil servants, legal scholars, former officials from both parties—to create a unified front around defending constitutional governance rather than specific policies.

Fifth, it would have framed the issue not as a partisan battle but as a fundamental question about whether we'll maintain a constitutional republic or slide into an autocracy where laws apply selectively based on personal loyalty.

The binary “shutdown or surrender” framing serves those who benefit from constricting our political imagination. It's a perfect example of what I've called “epistemic authoritarianism”—narrowing the range of conceivable options until democratic resistance seems not just difficult but literally unimaginable.

What's most telling about the criticism is how it accepts the terrain of conflict as defined by the administration itself. If Trump and Musk define a shutdown as automatically empowering them to accelerate dismantling government, and Democrats accept this framing uncritically, then the battle is lost before it begins. Genuine opposition requires contesting the framing itself, not just the specific policy outcomes within that frame.

This isn't about whether Democrats should have forced a shutdown. It's about the poverty of strategic thinking that saw only two options—shutdown or surrender—when the actual imperative was to shift the entire battlefield toward defending constitutional governance itself.

The greatest victory of authoritarian movements isn't when they win direct confrontations—it's when they succeed in limiting their opposition's imagination so thoroughly that resistance itself becomes inconceivable. When we can no longer envision how power might be effectively contested, we've already surrendered the most important terrain of all: the cognitive space where democratic possibilities are first imagined.

Consider the strategic advantage that could have been gained by simply making the constitutional stakes explicit. Imagine Schumer holding daily press conferences detailing specific violations occurring within agencies. Imagine Democrats using the shutdown leverage to demand basic transparency provisions. Imagine them creating a public record that would survive regardless of the immediate political outcome.

Instead, by accepting the administration's framing of the situation, Democrats normalized what should have been treated as an extraordinary assault on constitutional governance. They treated a fundamental crisis of democratic rule as just another budget negotiation.

This approach does nothing to prepare the public for the reality we're facing. It doesn't build the cognitive infrastructure necessary for resistance. It doesn't establish the factual record that will be essential as the crisis deepens. It doesn't create the shared understanding that democratic defense requires.

What's particularly frustrating is that this isn't a matter of partisan politics—it's about whether we maintain a constitutional system at all. There are principled conservatives who recognize the danger of an executive unbound by law. There are institutional actors across the political spectrum who understand what's at stake. A genuinely strategic opposition would have built bridges to these allies rather than retreating into partisan frameworks that limit rather than expand the possibilities for effective resistance.

Two plus two equals four. There are twenty-four hours in a day—except when House Republicans declare otherwise. And political resistance isn't limited to the binary choices your opponents want you to believe are your only options.

The path forward isn't about winning the next news cycle or the next procedural vote. It's about contesting the very cognitive terrain on which political imagination operates. It's about expanding what seems possible rather than accepting artificial constraints. It's about recognizing that in moments of constitutional crisis, the most important battles are fought not just in legislative chambers but in the public understanding of what's actually happening.

Until Democratic leadership grasps this fundamental truth, they will continue to find themselves trapped in false choices that serve only those working to dismantle constitutional governance itself. And we will all bear the consequences of this strategic failure.