There is no other way to put it: When the executive branch of the current U.S. government is using the tools and resources of the government to attack its own citizens, to launch chemical munitions at reporters and protesters, to zip-tie children and extract them from their apartments in the middle of the night, and to capture those extra-constitutional assaults on video to create social media content for hate clicks, the U.S. government has failed.
I cannot begin to tell you how difficult and unnerving it is to have been in Chicago these past few weeks; to exist indefinitely in the contradictory space between knowing and living. To see video of masked agents in an unmarked car tossing a tear gas can into a busy intersection outside a grocery store and elementary school less than two miles away from your home, and then go to a block party the next day and watch your 5-year-old run continuous loops around a giant inflatable bounce-house playground. To drop him off and pick him up at daycare every day while scanning the latest ad hoc Google doc created by organizers to see which schools need volunteer escorts to ensure that unaccompanied children can enter and leave their schools safely. I dread Fridays because I know they will be filled with doomscrolling videos of reporters getting pelted with pepper balls outside the Broadview ICE facility, and yet the daily work of participating in Zoom meetings, sending meaningless emails, and buying groceries persists because it simply must.
But what I need you to know is that the inherent contradiction of everyday life in Chicago for any one person of privilege like me—of living in and loving this vast, vibrant city while it gets besmirched and infiltrated by racist goons—pales in comparison to the inherent contradiction that is congressional Democratic leadership in Washington right now.
We are in week two of a federal government shutdown. Perhaps Beltway reporters have become inured to the extraordinary idea of a government shutdown, given how many they have covered. My boredom with the dysfunction and destruction of these sorts of events inspired me to leave my work as a congressional reporter, but many of the colleagues I left behind simply live for the “intrigue” of rank incompetence. Worse than how these legislative impasses have become commonplace in the rhythms and cadence of D.C., though, is how Democrats do not seem to know how to use them to build political capital, leverage, and public consensus.
Yes, Republicans control the White House, the U.S. Senate, and the House of Representatives. They undoubtedly own this shutdown, despite their cartoonish protestations on every government website, which skirt federal law. These missives are giving “clunky dictatorship” vibes—only underscoring how unworthy our would-be oppressors truly are. But Democrats control their own behaviors, words, and actions. They have been living with these mendacious Republicans and this dysfunctional media since the Tea Party takeover of 2010.
The rise of right-wing extremism in the corridors of the Capitol aligned almost perfectly with the rapid ascent of social media. And yet Democrats struggle to accept that the information environment has changed into a Hobbesian wilderness, even now. They have failed to figure out that there are two kinds of conflict: the real conflict I’m seeing my neighbors endure as they fight for the collective safety of the people of Chicago and the rhetorical jousting the Beltway media lives for; the “he said, she said” fighting that defines the corrosive paradigm of the nationalized bothsides journalism that shapes our public understanding.
Every time Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer of New York—the Democrat with the most power in a shutdown because his withholding of seven senators toward a procedural vote keeps Republicans from proceeding—says that Democrats are looking to open the government through a negotiation around and deal on Affordable Care Act subsidies, he is acquiescing to the idea that a government in which Border Patrol agents paid with our tax dollars can shoot real bullets at protesters in Chicago after screaming “Do something, bitch!” can and should be deemed legitimate.
The truth is that Democrats can pay a million consultants to come up with a million different talking points on health care subsidies. They can keep holding press conferences in the Senate studio like every other press conference before it, talking to the same reporters, pretending like we live in a redeemable timeline where if they just keep on acting like it’s 2007, we might fall through a time portal that makes it so. But we live here in a country with a co-opted executive branch led by racist, xenophobic idiots who do not believe in law, empowered by a slavishly devoted Supreme Court that has decided shoveling unlimited power to said executive is more important than the law it disregards, and where the president thinks he can send national guardsmen from red states to blue states just because people of color live here and Fox News hosts hate that.
Who is served by pretending we live in an America different from this one? It’s certainly not the people being attacked in the streets in Chicago’s Logan Square, Humboldt Park, South Shore, Brighton Park, and Little Village, among many other diverse neighborhoods.
Democrats thought they could ride out the first Trump administration like it was any other Republican administration. Events since should have disabused them of the possibility of doing it a second time—as if January 6 did not happen, as if the people who tried to destroy our government would not come back and be serious about finishing the job, as if they actually hadn’t written it all down in a manifesto and published it.
The result is that, as In These Times reported this week, the United States now has an immigration enforcement apparatus that, if it were its own national military, would be the thirteenth-most-heavily funded military in the world. And the president of the U.S. wants to turn that heavily funded, extramilitary military into a force to be unleashed against the American people, to do war crimes against us. Who authorized and appropriated that funding? Was it Congress? (Spoiler alert: It was.)
I was shocked but not surprised to see that Democratic Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut told The New Republic’s Greg Sargent last week that the thing he hears most often from his colleagues is: “Well, we ran on democracy in 2024 and we lost. And so, let’s not do democracy, let’s do economics and health care.”
It is certainly self-evident that Democrats do not care to “do democracy,” but what I would argue is that speeches about democracy do not carry the weight of collective action in support of democracy. In 2024, President Joe Biden told us repeatedly that “democracy was on the line,” and yet three years earlier, Senate Democrats prematurely ended the second impeachment trial of Donald Trump because top Biden ally Chris Coons of Delaware wanted to go home for Valentine’s Day. Congressional Democrats, despite their supposed 2024 warnings that democracy was on the brink, almost all attended Donald Trump’s inauguration in 2025 as if it were normal and acceptable, and Biden himself welcomed the Trumps back into the White House with open arms.
When you utter words aloud but then act in opposition to the intent of those words, you are not, in fact, running or standing on anything. You are just complicit in the subversion of government that is getting people killed. Affordable health care is important, but it is not more important than refusing to normalize this government.
If congressional Democrats believe in government, they should never vote to fund this one. Make Senate Majority Leader John Thune blow up Senate rules to have Republicans reopen the federal government all on their own. Let Republicans have the literal blood of American citizens on their hands—and make that the central issue of the shutdown. Otherwise, enjoy having your health care subsidy debate in the gulags these people would happily send us all to. I hear that poll-tests great.
