In 2020, Democrats won a convincing election victory. They proceeded to do what all victorious parties do. They passed legislation in accord with their priorities, including raising health insurance subsidies to families making above 400 percent of the poverty line. They wrote the law so that the subsidies would expire in 2025.
In 2024, the Republicans won a convincing election victory. They proceeded to do what all victorious parties do. They passed legislation in accord with their priorities, including letting the Democrats’ insurance subsidies expire as planned.
If the Democrats were a normal party that believed in democratic principles, they would have planned to go to the voters in the next elections and said: These Republican policies are terrible! You should vote for us!
But of course that’s not what the Democrats decided to do. Instead, they shut down the government. Why did they do that? Because we don’t live in a healthy democracy. We live in a country in which the norms, beliefs and practices that hold up a democracy are dying even in the minds of many of the people who profess to oppose Donald Trump.
Daniel Patrick Moynihan once wrote an essay called “Defining Deviancy Down.” His core point was that when the amount of deviant behavior rises, people begin to redefine deviant behavior as normal. This is a column about that.
In a functioning democracy, a politician’s first instinct is to go to the voters and let the voters decide. In a diseased democracy a politician’s first instinct is to amass power by any means necessary. In a healthy democracy politicians abide by a series of formal and informal restraints because those restraints are good for the nation as a whole. In a diseased democracy like ours, all the decent rules and arrangements are destroyed. Anything goes.
Trump is destroying democratic norms. Democrats have decided to follow him into the basement. When both parties cooperate to degrade public morality, then nobody even notices as it’s happening.
Government shutdowns became a thing during the Carter administration. The first few shutdowns during the Reagan administration lasted a day or two. Leaders in both parties did not want to face the wrath of voters who would be offended by this level of gridlock and incompetence. Now we’re in our 20th shutdown (depending on how you count them) and nobody cares. Neither political party is paying much of a price because the public has been rendered utterly cynical about government. Nothing is shocking anymore because there are no moral norms left standing.
Let me try to illustrate how deeply this cynicism has penetrated the American mind. When Democrats did decide to shut down the government, they could have done it to protest Trump’s historically unprecedented assault on democracy. But instead the Democrats decided to organize their messaging around the expiring health insurance subsidies. Why did they do that? Because they calculated that the American public doesn’t care about democracy’s degradation. It’s been going on so long voters are simply inured to it. So better to talk about Obamacare.
And in fact there are good reasons to think that Americans simply don’t care about their democratic rights. For example, several states are redrawing congressional district maps to come as close as possible to eliminating competitive races. If you live in Texas or California, then you probably will not have to vote in November 2026. The district maps will have been redrawn in a way that makes House elections largely predetermined. By then you will probably have been effectively disenfranchised.
I don’t think I appreciated how much a democracy depends upon regular people standing up to defend their rights and their powers against the elites who try to usurp them. These days people are happy to give up their rights and power if they can find some strongman or strongwoman willing to take it. This is a much larger part of human nature than I thought.
For example, when I first started covering Congress, in the 1990s, backbench members could pass legislation if they had a good idea and some entrepreneurial mojo. Back then, congressional committees and their chairmen were still powerful. Power was dispersed, in true democratic fashion.
But for at least 30 years members of Congress have been content to give away their power. First, they gave the power to leadership, so that today four people basically run the legislative branch. Then they gave power to executive branch agencies, letting more and more key decisions get made by the unelected civil service.
The blunt truth is that a lot of Americans don’t find our founding ideals sacred, so they don’t get upset when the Constitution is trampled, so long as it is their side doing the trampling.
Let me try to describe something that may seem trivial but which I believe is at the core of our rot. It is politicians’ tendency to use the word “fight” in their campaign rhetoric. I noticed this trope when Hillary Clinton ran for president. She was continually promising to “fight” for middle-class Americans. It didn’t bother me then. She was a woman running for an office that had been held entirely by men, so she had to prove she was tough.
This is no longer just a metaphor. It’s a mind-set. We now have a lot of people in this country who do not believe that democracy is about trying to persuade people, it’s about fighting, crushing and destroying people.
The New York Times
