When politicians stage courage, citizens pay the bill

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SPEAKER_00 (00:02):
Another government shutdown.
Dysfunction as ritual by DarrellMcLean once again.
The government of the UnitedStates has decided that the best
way to prove its seriousness isto stop governing.
The doors of federal officesclose, workers are furloughed,
services grind to a halt.
Citizens who rely on thoseservices are told to wait or to
fend for themselves.
The world's oldest continuousdemocracy has developed the

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curious habit of holding itsbreath until it turns blue.
This spectacle is not new.
The first modern shutdown datesback to 1980, when President
Carter's attorney generaldecided that agencies could not
legally spend money withoutappropriations.
Since then, shutdowns havebecome a ritual of American
political life.
Clinton and Gingrich sparring inthe 1990s Republicans in
Congress trying to derailObama's Affordable Care Act in

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2013, Trump's vanity wall fightin 2018-19, which produced the
longest shutdown in history, 35days of dysfunction that ended
exactly where it began.
Each time politicians explainthat they are standing on
principle.
Each time the outcome is thesame.
Compromise.
Which raises the obviousquestion if the ending is
inevitable, why perform the playat all?
The theater and principalshutdowns are advertised as bold

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acts of political courage.
In reality, they are tantrums incostume.
No principle is ever won.
No lasting reform is everachieved.
The only guarantee isdisruption.
Shutdowns do not save money.
They cost it.
Billions vanish and lostproductivity, delayed contracts
and backpay for furvoedemployees.
Programs stall, research isdisrupted, inspections are

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missed.
Government is not a machine thatcan be switched off and on
without consequence, it is aliving system, and every
shutdown is an act of self-harm.
And yet the theater persists.
Why?
Because it is entertaining.
Because it allows politicians tolook like warriors rather than
clerks.
Because in the age of permanentcampaigning, dysfunction is more
valuable than compromise.
The price paid by citizens thevictims of shutdowns are not the

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politicians who engineer them,but the people who rely on
government to function.
During Trump's 2019 shutdown,Coast Guard families lined up at
food banks, their paychecksfrozen.
Farmers were left waiting forsubsidies promised to offset
trade wars.
Veterans endured delays andbenefits.
Scientists were locked out oftheir laboratories, experiments
spoiled behind closed doors.
Air travel wobbled as TSAofficers and air traffic

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controllers worked without pay.
These are not abstractions.
They are costs borne by citizensin the name of political
theater.
The rhetoric is aboutprinciples, the reality is
groceries, rent, medicine.
A shutdown is a transfer of painfrom politicians to the public.
Dysfunction is normalcy, thegreatest danger of repeated
shutdowns is not the temporaryloss of services, but the
permanent erosion of trust.
The more often government ceasesto function, the more citizens

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begin to assume that governmentis unnecessary.
Maybe government doesn't matterat all, they shrug, as though
the soldiers, inspectors,scientists, and clerks who keep
the machinery of society runningare expendable.
Cynicism replaces trust.
And cynicism, once installed, isnearly impossible to dislodge.
This is how democracy corrodes,not in a single coup, but in
repeated demonstrations ofincompetence, until citizens

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stop believing the system candeliver anything worth
preserving.
The historical pattern historyshould have taught the lesson by
now.
Every shutdown ends the sameway.
In 1995 and 1996, Newt Gingrichshut down the government to
force Bill Clinton into budgetconcessions.
Clinton emerged politicallystronger, Gingrich politically
weaker.
In 2013, Republicans under TedCrew shut down the government to

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repeal or delay the AffordableCare Act.
They failed.
Obamacare survived intact.
In 2018-19, Donald Trump stagedthe longest shutdown in history
to extract funding for hisborder wall.
Thirty-five days later, hereceived nothing more than he
could have negotiated at thebeginning.
The pattern is almost comical.
A grand standoff, enormouscosts, human suffering and then
inevitably, a compromiseindistinguishable from the one

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available before the dramabegan.
The definition of insanity, theysay, is doing the same thing
over and over while expectingdifferent results.
By that measure, Washington hasachieved a kind of institutional
madness.
The cynicism of spectacle it istempting to dismiss shutdowns as
mere dysfunction, but they aremore than that.
They are deliberate spectacle.
Politicians perform paralysis asproof of conviction.
They pose as defenders ofprinciple while abandoning

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responsibility.
And the public weary of the showbegins to accept that paralysis
is the norm.
Dysfunction as ritual is notsimply a phrase, it is a
reality.
The shutdown has becomeWashington's kabuki, stylized,
predictable, and ultimatelymeaningless except for the
damage it inflicts on thoseoutside the theater.
The economic wreckage beyond thehuman toll, shutdowns inflict
measurable economic damage.

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The Congressional Budget Officeestimated that the 2019 shutdown
alone cost the economy$11billion billion, with$3 billion
billion permanently lost.
Contractors never recoveredtheir income.
Small businesses, depending onfederal loans or permits,
suffered lasting harm.
Markets grow jittery each timeWashington toys with
self-sabotage.
Investors may pretend to berational, but capital has no

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patience for repeateduncertainty.
To the world, each shutdown is areminder that the United States,
while fond of lecturing otherson governance, cannot reliably
govern itself.
The international spectacle itis worth pausing to consider how
shutdowns look abroad.
Other democracies have crises,yes, but they rarely stage them
by refusing to fund their owngovernments.
To allies, America appearsunserious to rivals it appears

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weak.
Imagine explaining to a diplomatfrom another nation, yes, our
government is closed.
No, not because of a war ornatural disaster, because our
politicians prefer drama toduty.
The laughter is muffled, but itis real.
The betrayal of public service,perhaps the cruelest aspect of
shutdowns is the betrayal ofpublic servants.
Federal workers are not wealthy.
They are middle class Americanswho choose to serve in positions

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that, while often invisible, areessential.
Inspecting food, maintainingparks, processing benefits,
ensuring safety in the skies,each shutdown tells them their
work does not matter.
Each shutdown reduces theirlabor to a bargaining chip.
It is difficult to imagine amore effective way to demoralize
a workforce, and yet Congressrepeats it again and again as

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though contempt for publicservice were a virtue.
The illusion of leverageshutdowns persists because
politicians believe they provideleverage.
But leverage only exists if oneside is willing to collapse the
system entirely.
In reality, both sides areconstrained by public outrage,
by markets, by the simplenecessity of government.
The end game is always the samereopen, repair, and pretend

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victory.
If leverage is the goal,shutdowns are the least
effective strategy imaginable.
They do not shift publicopinion.
They do not produce policy wins.
They merely reveal theincapacity of leaders to govern
without inflicting collateraldamage.
The long decline of trust everyshutdown contributes to the long
erosion of American faith ininstitutions.
Trust in government is alreadynear historic lows hovering

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around twenty percent.
Each closure confirms thesuspicion that politics is
incapable of solving problems oreven of functioning at the most
basic level.
The damage is cumulative.
A republic cannot endure foreveron cynicism.
At some point, citizens eitherdisengage entirely or embrace
alternatives more dangerous thandysfunction.
Toward a culture of compromise,what is the alternative?

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It is not complicated.
It is the same conclusion everyshutdown reaches belatedly
compromised, not as anafterthought, not as a
humiliation, but as the ordinarypractice of governance.
Compromise is not weakness.
It is the essence of politics ina diverse republic.
To reject compromise is toreject governance itself.
And yet, for decades, Americanpoliticians have treated

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compromise as betrayal,preferring ritual destruction to
pragmatic settlement.
The Republic will not survivesuch contempt indefinitely.
At some point, citizens mustdemand that leaders govern as
adults rather than actors.
Conclusion, dysfunction asritual, another government
shutdown has come, as it alwaysdoes.
It will end as it always does incompromise.
The only question is how muchsuffering we will endure in the

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interim.
Shutdowns are not revolutions.
They are not acts of courage.
They are rituals of dysfunctionrepeated until the audience no
longer believes in the play.
And when that disbelief curdlesinto indifference, democracy
itself is in peril.
The Republic deserves betterthan theater.
Citizens deserve better thanleaders who mistake paralysis
for principle.
Until that lesson is learned,the ritual will repeat.

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The curtain will rise, theactors will perform, the
audience will suffer, and thelights of government will
flicker on and off, like arepublic unsure whether it still
believes in itself.