Over before it began
The importance of fighting for real victories, and moral ones too. And a bit about Clausewitz, because I took Law of War in law school. So there.
The post-shutdown debate is essentially this:
The Democrats won v. The Democrats lost
Nobody’s really arguing that the Republicans won or lost anything because nothing material about their position has changed, and they chose to act like they didn’t care one way or another whether Congress ever came back into session.
The “Democrats won” position taken by pundits and the eight members who took the fall for chicken Democrats in the Senate seems less a statement of true victory and more of a “no harm, no foul” position. We didn’t win per se, but we didn’t lose either. We got nothing, there was no sign we were going to get anything, and we didn’t want to hear it from our fellow parishioners, or Capitol security, or federal workers, or, it goes without saying, from major donors and interest groups.
The other version - a slightly more cynical version, chillingly - is something like, “How can rank and file Democrats say we lost the shutdown when we won last Tuesday’s elections?” I’ll return to this argument in a bit.
The “Democrats lost” position is clearly the more popular stance. There’s a word that’s used by most commentators: “caving”.
It’s clear that those taking the “eh, maybe we won, actually?” believe that if voters think the Democrats caved, the voters are wrong, and they’ll come around eventually. As Symone Sanders put it on stage at CrookedCon last week - before the shutdown ended - “I don’t think Democrats need to do a wholesale brand rebrand because I think frankly the Democratic Party brand - it might never be popular and that’s kay because what you need are candidates who people like and they want to vote for and who they believe in.”1
But, as my college political science adviser used to say, “perception is reality.”
So let’s talk about perceptions.
According to a YouGov poll of 1663 Americans, 51% of Democrats said the shutdown personally affected them a great deal or somewhat; 39% of Independents agreed, while 33% of Republicans agreed. The pain was starting to be felt, but it was not yet a majority feeling.
It’s my belief that when you look at net-negative or net-positive ratings, you should wonder first and foremost what the rate of “not sure/don’t know” answers are. In my opinion, if the “not sure/don’t know” is 10% or less, you can be far more sure that opinions are pretty well cooked. If it’s higher than 10% there is room for persuasion and change, and if it’s higher than 30%, it means a great many people haven’t even started paying attention. That’s my analytical stance, and I use it with clients in the commercial side. If we have very high rates of “don’t knows” in a survey, the audience doesn’t know you well enough.
So what are the “don’t know/not sure” responses telling us in the YouGov poll?
34% of Americans surveyed said they weren’t sure if they approved of the deal to end the shutdown. That includes 22% of Democrats, 44% of Independents, and 33% of Republicans.
34% of Americans said they weren’t sure who benefitted more from the deal reached by Congress to fund the government and end the shutdown, Republicans or Democrats. Another 20% said “both equally”. That’s about half the population that has no idea what the shutdown was about. Of the half who had an opinion, the vast majority said the Republicans won. Democrats in particular felt this way - 52% of Democrats felt the Republicans won the shutdown fight.
The poll also found that blame was pretty evenly distributed.
34% blamed the Democrats, 36% blamed Republicans, and 24% said they blamed both equally. Democrats’ message - that the shutdown was “owned” by the Republicans, had not congealed.
Now obviously this question comes with a particularly partisan valence: 72% of Republicans blamed Democrats; 75% of Democrats blamed Republicans. But among Independents, blame was evenly distributed: 33% blamed both equally, 31% blamed Republicans, and 26% blamed Democrats.
You might be taking solace in the 5-point gap between Democrats and Republicans, but this is statcope. The 33% that blame both parties tells you that Independents were not yet persuaded by the Democrats’ preferred narrative. And to be honest, “I blame them both” is probably a proxy for “not sure” for at least 20% of those selecting that answer and says more about why people are Independents than about any particular issue.
That poll also asked, “Do you think Democrats in Congress should hold out for changes to health care funding — such as extending subsidies for Affordable Care Act coverage — before agreeing to end the shutdown?” 41% said they should, 39% said they should not (a bare tie), and 20% said they weren’t sure. 22% of Republicans said they weren’t sure!
This makes me wonder - if you asked normal people, not the weirdos who care about politics enough to follow the shutdown day-by-day, what the shutdown was about, would they even know? Would they be able to guess? If you told them it had something to do with health care funding would they be surprised, impressed, moved in any way?
My guess is a lot of people would say they aren’t really sure what it was about, and most people would say, “oh, that makes sense… was there anything else they wanted?”
Who won? Who lost?
The Republicans neither won nor lost. Nothing changed about their position and nothing will change about it. They’re not going to honor any of those promises if Trump doesn’t want them to.
The Democrats didn’t win, either. But they did lose. They lost an opportunity to let the controversy bake a little longer. Most people weren’t feeling the pain of the shutdown. Most people couldn’t tell you what was at stake. A third couldn’t tell you what was in the deal, or who benefited from it. A third blamed both parties or didn’t know who to blame.
This has led me to wonder what the definition of victory even is.
In 2006, General Tommy Franks said, “What constitutes victory? I think that is a fundamental question, and it is good for each of us… to ask ourselves that from time to time. When we try to decided whether or not we’ve been victorious, we have to think, for just a second, what the term ‘victory’ means.”
War is politics by other means, and vice versa
The last hundred years or so of warfare have raised questions about the nature of victory. The editors of the book Moral Victories: The Ethics of Winning Wars wrote, “The problem with modern warfare is that it is … instead a rather more amorphous proposition. Ever since success in battle ceased to function as the prime determinant and/or maker of victory in war, it has become harder to ascertain not only who the winners and losers are in any given conflict, but even whether the conflict in question is over.”
They go on to write,
“Efforts to jettison the term ‘victory’ and substitute notions like ‘success’ in its place may be attractive at first glance. But upon further inspection they reveal themselves to be merely window dressing: a recoding of the problem rather than its resolution. Moreover, such efforts distract from the fundamental point that, no matter how vexatious it may be, the concept of victory is hardwired into how we think and talk about and practise warfare. It therefore behoves us not to shy away from analysing victory, but instead to embrace the opportunity it presents. This will involve asking how one can discern a just from an unjust victory, and how best to balance the obligation to wage wars justly against the imperative to win them. … To the degree that one is fighting for a just cause, would it be a dereliction of duty to settle for anything less than victory? Can victory ever be worthy of the sacrifices rendered by young men and women in its pursuit? And what is its relation to the peace that everyone hopes will emerge once the guns have fallen silent?”
In a subsequent chapter of this book, Sibylle Scheipers writes about Carl von Clausewitz and the concept of “moral victory”. While Clausewitz is perhaps better known for his focus on combat, and uses a commerce metaphor for war (battle is a currency the opponents have to pay), “he also presented the possibility of an honorable defeat as a form of success, and, by extension, a dishonorable defeat as the ultimate failure.”
Clausewitz wrote about a pre-Napoleonic period of war-fighting that was often largely symbolic, ritualistic, and that had receded with the rise of nation states and national armies, conscription and so on, that prioritized a “fight to the finish”. With this change in circumstances, defeat carries not only physical characteristics, but moral and political ones. It can demoralize a nation or faction to lose - he described it as “a sudden collapse of the most anxious expectations, and a complete crushing of self-confidence.”
If there was ever a sentence to describe the state of Democrats after each of Trump’s electoral victories, I’m not sure I can think of one.
A way to avoid this morale-collapse, is to engage in a strategic retreat. Fall back, amass resources and manpower, reevaluate your strategy, and press again when conditions are more favorable. If you want to ensure the ultimate defeat of the opponent engaging in a strategic retreat, you must not let them - instead, you should pursue them vigorously and deny them the opportunity to recharge their batteries.
You could argue that this Trump term has at least attempted a pursuit — the early work of DOGE, the browbeating of law firms and universities, the politicized prosecutions of James Comey and Leticia James et al., attempted deportations of activists, sending CBP, ICE and national guard troops into “blue” cities, and redistricting efforts, etc. are all real attempts at pursuing liberalism in retreat. Except that they have also been stymied (so far) in most of those pursuits. Not all law firms or universities caved, political prosecutions are running into the problem of credibility in courts and in front of juries, and governors have fought to block national guard deployments, and voters in California signed up to fight redistricting with their own strategic redistricting should red state governors move forward with their own stupid plans.
But here I’d like to draw some distinctions. Governors and mayors, law firms and university boards and councils, juries and judges, civil society and ordinary people have not (at least not uniformly) chosen to retreat. The main forces retreating are what I have called in other posts Professional Democrats, and this includes elected officials as the standard bearers. They are in retreat, one that I imagine they believe to be strategic. Whether they realize it or not, the pro-democracy factions that are not officially part of the national Professional Democrat faction are creating room for that national faction to maneuver. The shutdown looked like it was just such a maneuver.
Scheipers makes the argument that Clausewitz’s views on war were not solely militaristic but emancipatory. If you want to nerd out about this, you can read the full essay, but here are a few things to consider in Clausewitz’s ideas of “moral victory”:
A noble fight for freedom by the people is, in effect, impervious to defeat.
Even if, after a painful yet honorable fight, the people are defeated, the honorability of the fight itself - for freedom, by the people - will “secure the rebirth of this people”, and the fight will renew itself, stronger and even more established.
A moral victory “is lasting and guaranteed owing to its inherent emancipatory qualities.”
But a moral victory still requires combat. “Participating in combat is both the means of the emancipation of the individual and the expression of its moral qualities.”
A moral victory has to integrate passion and reason. “Without passion, the soul is dead, and the rational capacities of men become formalistic and idle.”
The problem with the battle the Democrats in Congress just waged to shut down the government is multi-fold. They were unable to tolerate real pain, unwilling to engage in political combat, the goal was not emancipatory but protective of a defunct status quo, and the political soldiers were both “formalistic and idle.”
This is why I wrote last week about the always-on brand. When you know that your fight is symbolic, it is, especially in the — hopefully non-violent — realm of politics, a brand campaign. That campaign can’t go dark. It can’t take a pause. It can’t be vague or quiet or tentative or contingent.
The Democrats in Congress should have gone out and actively sold the shutdown. They should not have left that to Bernie and AOC — they all should have done it. They should have honestly described the pain people would feel but framed that pain as both righteous to endure and the fault of the opposition. Instead, they picked a fight, and immediately apologized, and then, eventually, walked away from the fight before any meaningful, metaphorical, punch was thrown.
The people - pro-democracy people who want affordable housing and healthcare and education and energy, who want safe streets and clean air, who want the freedom to speak their minds and worship as they please and love who they love - they showed up to the political fight. They voted for any Democrat they could get their hands on, even as they remain deeply disappointed in, frustrated with, and angry at the Democratic Party.
And their reward for this show of strength was for their national representatives to cave before the fight had even begun.
And we know that the fight had not really begun, because a third of the people hadn’t felt the shutdown pain yet, didn’t know what it was about, and wasn’t sure who to blame or credit for it.
Too much, in my estimation, was made of who was going to “own” the shutdown. It would have been acceptable for Democrats to “own” the shutdown if the fight had been seen as just. But Democrats wanted it every which way - they wanted credit and forgiveness, to stand on principle and to blame the other side, to insist on material wins and give them away for a promise from people who routinely break them.
This is not a moral victory.
It’s a demoralizing loss.
The only good news, for varying definitions of “good”, is that it seems only to have further infuriated the pro-democracy base of citizens who were paying attention. Fury is better than depression, if you ask me. It spurs people to action.
But this was bad for the Democrats’ brand. It reinforced their brand story: Democrats are weak. And even if the third who weren’t paying attention don’t remember anything specific about this moment a year from now, the brand story will nevertheless have been reinforced.
Which means the only hope for Democrats in Congress seeking reelection next year is for pro-democracy voters to still be so repelled by the Republicans that they will vote for any Democrat they can find.
Still, the downside risk of so much disdain for both parties, is that they continue to alienate people from the political process altogether. Off-year elections have historically been great for Democrats when Trump is in office. Democrats won in the 2018 midterms, too. But they also had record turnout.
Demoralizing losses, unlike moral victories, tend not to lend themselves to that sort of mobilization. And if pro-democracy citizens choose to vote for Democrats in 2026, it will continue to be in spite of the party, not because of it.
My friend, that is branding.