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Brian Lehrer: It's the Brian Lehrer show on WNYC. Good Friday morning, everyone. And as we sit here on a Friday, a big and possibly historic decision is looming in less than three weeks for the Democratic Party, particularly Democrats in the US Senate. If it sounds familiar, it should. It's a decision very much like the one in March over whether to shut down the government by refusing to go along with a Republican Budget Bill. But many see the stakes as about more than just what to spend money on, rather as having implications for American democracy itself. I'm sure you remember when Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said this in March as he decided not to block a stopgap funding measure called a continuing resolution or a CR.

Chuck Schumer: While the CR bill is very bad, the potential for a shutdown has consequences for America that are much, much worse.

Brian Lehrer: That decision and that vote brought a wave of calls for Schumer to resign as the Democratic leader, as most of you know, in favor of someone with more willingness to fight the Trump agenda by more dramatic and possibly more risky means. Now, the stopgap budget that passed expires at the end of this month. The new fiscal year for the federal government begins October 1st. The same decision or a very similar one, looms for Senate Democrats again with so much more that the White House has done since March.

From deploying the military on US Soil to firing the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics when the president didn't like the numbers, they made them look bad. To pushing Texas to gerrymander in mid decade to stack the deck for next year's midterms, plus actual budgetary things like withholding $5 billion of already approved foreign aid. Trump's unilateral hold, if you missed this, approved by the Supreme Court this week, at least for now.

Something happened yesterday in the Senate that you also might not have heard with all the coverage of Charlie Kirk dominating the news. Something that happened in the Senate yesterday that might contribute to pushing Schumer to a new view of things and also might be pushing congressional democracy to a new brink. As the New York Times puts it, Senate Republicans used what is known as the nuclear option to break a Democratic blockade of President Trump's nominees, weakening Congress' vetting role. The Times called it an extraordinary move that is likely to undercut Congress's future role in vetting executive branch officials.

The change, pushed through along party lines, lowered the existing 60 vote threshold for considering a group of presidential nominees to ascend simple majority. It was the latest step in a years long back and forth between the two parties that has eroded the filibuster, a once potent Senate tool to protect the rights of the minority and force consensus. That from the New York Times today.

Now, comparing today to March, Schumer told the Associated Press just yesterday, "I did what I thought was right. It's a different situation now than then." He said things "will get worse with or without it," with or without a shutdown, "because Trump is lawless." The AP quotes Schumer saying he and House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries are united in opposing any legislation that doesn't include key health care provisions and a commitment not to roll them back. But as Schumer said in March, withholding enough votes to cause a shutdown carries its own risks, both for the party politically and for the American people,who would suffer even more spending cuts, at least temporarily, including on health care.

What the Democrats would not have going into a shutdown is an exit strategy. Now, it's unclear if the assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk this week and the national or the president's reaction could play yet an additional political role one way or another, and we'll talk about all of this now with Zack Beauchamp, senior correspondent at Vox, where he covers challenges to democracy in the United States and abroad, right wing populism and the world of ideas.

He's the author of the book that came out last year called The Reactionary Spirit: How America's Most Insidious Political Tradition Swept the World. His article on VoxNOW is called, the Democratic shutdown is about something much bigger. Some of you may have heard him on the media last weekend with some of this. Zack, thanks for your time today. Welcome back to WNYC.

Zack Beauchamp: Hey, I'm happy to be back. Always a pleasure.

Brian Lehrer: Again, your headline, the Democratic shutdown debate is about something much bigger. What do you think it's about?

Zack Beauchamp: I think running through the internal conversation Democrats are having about not just the shutdown, but I think all sorts of other tactical and strategic issues in the Trump era is this big picture question, which I've sort of tried to simplify in terms of whether you're on Team Normal or Team Abnormal. By which I mean not that you think the Trump presidency is normal or you don't. I think there's now universal agreement on the sort of broader American left that we are in the midst of an extremely abnormal period in history where the president is trying to grab authoritarian powers.

I think the question that's dividing Democrats is whether the normal strategies and tactics of politics are the way in which to resist that abnormal power grab or whether they need to be adapting fundamentally different ways of thinking about politics in order to successfully resist the erosion of American democracy. I think the shutdown debate is just one of many different debates that are sort of swirling around this basic distinction.

Brian Lehrer Well, to put your own cards on the table, you argue in the article that Team Abnormal is right to say the Democrats should fight, even if they have no hope of winning on that specific issue. One reason is that you say Team Normal's entire argument depends on the 2026 midterms being conducted under free and fair conditions. How threatened do you think those are for next year?

Zack Beauchamp: The honest answer is I don't know, and it's contingent. I came to this analysis because I've spent, as you suggest in your intro, a lot of time studying countries where Democratic backsliding has happened. One of the distinctions I've been able to parse between places like Hungary, where that process continued until democracy was functionally destroyed, and places like Brazil, where it was stopped, is that delay can equal victory. By which I mean that a lot of backsliding in a country that's currently a democracy is a race against time, and the deadline is the next election.

In between now and the election, what they try to do is grab as much power as they can to erode that fairness. I can't predict how unfair or fair the elections will be. My inkling is that they'll probably be fair because it's actually very difficult in the American system to erode them, but I'm also certain that Trump will try to stack the deck. It's very clear from the reporting inside the White House that he's really scared of the consequences of losing the next election.

Brian Lehrer: We know he's trying to cancel mail in voting by an executive order, for example.

Zack Beauchamp: Which is illegal. He can't do that

Brian Lehrer: We'll see if he can get away with that. Plus his push for the Texas redistricting for five more Republican seats that has already gone through.

Zack Beauchamp: That's right. That is spurring counter gerrymandering in Democratic states, both of which I think is bad, by the way. This is all a broader side of Democratic decay. But counter gerrymandering is a good example of Team Abnormal. In the past, I have argued vociferously that even since the wave of extreme Republican redistricting in 2010, Democrats shouldn't escalate.They shouldn't counter gerrymander because that's likely to lead to reciprocal escalation and it's just bad for democracy. That's not true anymore.

That logic doesn't hold because Trump is pushing Republicans to go further than they want to, to go as far as they can to functionally try to rig the midterm elections to prevent Democratic accountability. In this case, something like the plan in California, which I on principle I think is terrible, is under these very specific abnormal circumstances, justifiable and defensible as a means of eroding the immediate emergency of a threat to fair elections going forward.

That's what I mean by Team Abnormal. Not that everything has to violate Democratic principle in the way that gerrymandering does and that I only very reluctantly feel comfortable endorsing as a political tactic, but rather that you need to consider things that otherwise might have seemed like they wouldn't work, or backfire, or have negative consequences because the circumstances have changed. Because the contours of political conflict are fundamentally different when you have an executive who's working swiftly to consolidate power and trying to use that power to cement their or their own party's control over the political system.

That is nothing like the situation-- Even during Trump's first term, frankly. Normal processes did a reasonably good job at checking his instincts towards self aggrandizement. These include internal executive branch checks. His own appointees would stop him from doing thing. This time around, the Office of Legal Counsel was constrained. This time that's not true. None of that's in operation.

The United States is currently a kind of hybrid country that's hybrid regime that is still Democratic, I think, contrary to some academic experts who have a reasonable case that it's not, shouldn't be considered democracy right now, but I think it should be. But it certainly is the case that it's being ruled without the rule of law protections that characterize normal Democratic politics, that we have an executive who's acting like an elected dictator.

That wasn't true in Trump's first term. It wasn't. It hasn't been true at any point in modern American politics. As the rules change, the strategic considerations, the types of and the tactical considerations, both how you think about the objectives of politics and what tools you might use to accomplish those objectives need to change accordingly.

Brian Lehrer: Listeners, if you're a Democrat, do you think Schumer and his members in the Senate should have a specific line in the sand for a government shutdown rather than allowing a Republican budget that they really object to to go through by September 30th. If so, what should that line in the sand be? If so, do you see any exit strategy? We'll talk about the whole exit strategy question, or an ultimate victory of any kind, shorter or longer term. 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-969, call or text or with any questions for Zack Beauchamp from Vox, whose article is called the Democratic shutdown debeate is about something much bigger. 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692.

More on the something much bigger. Interesting that Schumer yesterday in his AP interview seemed to make healthcare spending the line in the sand because comparing this moment to the Republican Congress' government shutdown over Obamacare in 2013 you wrote, "Trump's agenda is so qualitatively different from a fight over healthcare policy. It's not a mere partisan dispute but an attack on the system itself, that it may no longer make sense to think of a shutdown as a policy fight at all. Rather, it is best seen as an act of sabotage and resistance against a would be authoritarian trying to consolidate power."

Your words. Why do you use the word sabotage as well as resistance? I think resistance as a word generally sounds righteous. Sabotage, like something more dangerous or destructive.

Zack Beauchamp: I did that in part because I want to illustrate the stakes here. When we're talking about a government that is acting in an authoritarian fashion, we have to think about how seriously and what the role of an opposition is in that world. Sometimes that means honestly obstructing the functions of government to prevent them from operating in the way that the executive wants them to, which normally in Democratic politics I think is not- that's not the role of the opposition. It shouldn't be obstruction. It should be constructive participation in the shared enterprise of governance. But Trump has declared through the way that he's ruled, and I use the word ruled rather than governed deliberately, that he's not engaged in a process of constructive disagreement.

Just today he talked about how in a Fox News appearance, he talked about how the radicals on the-- Being asked about violent radicals by Fox News, he's like, well, the radicals on the right aren't the problem. The radicals on the left are the problem. If you look at his speech after Charlie Kirk's death, the way that he only listed examples of right wing political violence and vowed a crackdown on some undefined scope of people who he believes may be responsible for Kirk's death, largely clearly alluding to the political left. This isn't consensus politics anymore. It's an attempt to consolidate power.

Yes, sabotage, I think, is a justifiable end when what you're sabotaging is an effort to, in the broader sense, sabotage the system of American self-governance. Now, I want to go back to your sort of introduction to that question, to what Schumer said. I've heard Democrats try to make the case that the shutdown should be about healthcare. I find that to be the worst possible mix of Team Normal and Team Abnormal politics. The shutdown is very risky. I'm not sure even if you fully buy the Team Abnormal logic. I've been laying out that a shutdown is a good idea. My colleague Andrew Prokop made a very good case this morning that the shutdown could help Trump's authoritarianism rather than hurt it.

That's a serious consideration, and I'm not fully sure where I think about this. But trying to shut things down over authoritarianism is at least, the goal is commensurate with the really dangerous risk you're taking in doing it. For healthcare policies? Why? It's not that it's not an important issue, but it's a very normal political issue. It's not a system threatening one. It's not one that could use the shutdown as a means of changing the terms of national political discourse. It would come across as petty. In fact, it did when Republicans did the same thing the last time and they lost thoroughly. It would normalize the stakes of the political dispute.

The argument that Democrats make is, well, healthcare is one of the issues where we poll really well. If we force the Republicans to fight on that, then it'll be better in the 2026 midterms. Ultimately that's what we need in order to stop a Senate majority, in order to stop creeping authoritarianism. To which I say, you don't understand how these things actually play out. We have a lot of evidence about how trying to do shutdowns and treat them as normal politics works, and it doesn't work for the out party. It never has.

I see no reason to think that this would go any differently, if that's the logic you're doing, than 2013. It would just gum up your message as a procedural obstructionist thing, and make everything seem like yet another boring partisan dispute over a program that's important, but it's not worth shutting down the entire government over. Democrats, I don't think would ever dream of doing this without the background context of Trump's authoritarianism.

If you're going to do it in response to the authoritarianism, do it in response to the authoritarianism. Don't pretend that this is about something else. It's too clever by half. It's a consultant brain, as many people on social media would put it.

Brian Lehrer: I think that last answer is the takeaway from this conversation so far. If you're going to do it to oppose authoritarianism, say you're doing it to oppose authoritarianism. A couple of texts along these lines. One listener writes, "The main reason for Democrats to shut the government down is to show the demoralized base that they're even willing to fight. If they can't or won't fight, then they should step down." Another one says, "The Democrats are just supposed to roll over? I don't think they should. I think if there is a government shutdown, so be it. Yes, it's going to hurt, but they have to fight."

Let me ask you the exit strategy question. Have you played out scenarios for how a government shutdown plays out as a potentially winning or losing act of resistance framed as against authoritarianism or how ever they frame it? I'm not sure anyone knows what the exit strategy would be. You did also write previous shutdown fights, like the GOP's disastrous 2013 bid to defund Obamacare, show that Congress doesn't have the leverage.

Zack Beauchamp: Yes, look, I think that's the genuinely weakest part of trying to apply Team Abnormal logic to the specific shutdown fight. It could be the case that the background description of politics, everything I'm describing, is true, but in this specific tactical consideration, the means the Democrats have available just won't accomplish the end of trying to sufficiently or successfully abnormalize Trump's politics. The tail risk is that Democrats just obstruct for a long period of time, and that causes the Senate Majority Leader to extend his already procedurally aggressive moves on nominations to just nuke the filibuster entirely, and then Trump will be able to pass whatever legislation he wants. This was my colleague Andrew's case that I mentioned earlier.

That the Democratic shutdown could give Trump legislative powers that so far have been one of the greatest checks, accidentally and unintentionally, on his ability to aggrandize power. Democrats need a way to avoid that scenario. If they are going to go about this tactical fight as an attempt to obstruct authoritarianism, I think they need to think about two things. The first is that what you're going to get is not actually a statute that limits Trump's authority to deploy ICE in different places. Trump will never agree to that, and he controls the Republican Party. There's just no way you can force them to do that. The pain of the shutdown will hurt you more than it will hurt Trump eventually. Plus, the parts of the government that he really cares about, like ICE, are technically exempt from a shutdown. They're deemed essential under current law.

You're not going to win that in the long run. The way to think about it is that you're buying time. You are forcing the Trump administration to pay a lot of attention and energy, which is finite, on trying to end the shutdown fight or to message it and so on. That's energy that they otherwise could've been spending trying to consolidate authoritarian power in various different ways. That's what you're doing, you're buying time. Preventing the consolidation of extraordinary power in advance of the midterms, which means that you need to have a strategy for climbing down without looking like you've all of a sudden been like, authoritarianism, not really a problem in the United States anymore.

There needs to be a way that you can figure out a negotiated compromise that in all likelihood won't significantly limit Trump's ability, but would be a face saving compromise that allows you to say, we stood in principle and we got something that you can make with John Thune and the Republicans in Congress. Something that won't cause Trump to immediately say, "This won't happen. I will destroy any Republican who votes for it." That's what you need to find.

Do I know what that is? No, I don't know what that is. If I knew what that is, I would be calling this a Democratic caucus and telling them, but that's not my job. I'm a journalist. I'm outlining, I'm trying to understand what's happening and outline the broad contours of what we understand. If there's any Democratic strategists working on this, I'd love to hear them make that case to me, but that's what it would look like to have a successful strategy.

Brian Lehrer: Okay. Democratic strategists, 212-433-WNYC or anyone else, of course. Here's an interesting text from a listener, "I was 100% supportive of a shutdown before hearing this, but I am now against it. I really do feel that Trump's policies are a disaster, and if left to their own, they may turn a generation against the GOP, if democracy can survive that long." Here's a question listener asks you, could you discuss the concrete consequences of shutting down the government? I think they mean in the short term, who would actually get hurt among the American people and how.

Zack Beauchamp: Look, lots of people. A lot of essential government employees, they would get some money, but then they would start losing their paycheck. The millions of people who work for the federal government would suffer. A lot of essential services, they're not-- There's a legal category, essential, with people who have to keep working despite a shutdown and they keep getting funded, but there are lots of things that I would consider essential government services that would no longer be operating. To give one concrete example, national parks. National parks are closed due to government shutdowns, because the park rangers aren't able to maintain order and keep things safe. Even mundane things like cleanup trash to prevent the environment from being damaged irreparably while they're not there. They close the national parks.

National parks are great. We love national parks, right. I think the NPS is one of the highest approval ratings of any government agency. There are lots of things like that, these invisible parts of government because you don't think about them all the time that are valuable to people, and those would be shut down. Sometimes the consequences can be serious. You don't get to visit a national park, that's bad, but the people who work there will suffer because they're not getting paid. Their families will suffer. I think the biggest burden falls on federal employees and people who depend on them, but that's a non trivial percentage of the American population.

Government shutdowns they're not jokes, they're not toys. When you do them, people get hurt. The stakes have to be appropriate. A lot of the problem with past shutdowns is the stakes haven't struck most Americans as being appropriate. Yeah, the parties disagree about healthcare policy, but that's something they disagree with all the time. Why do they need to be putting people's livelihoods in jeopardy over that, benying people access to national parks and other government services they care about and depend on? That's why I, again to go back earlier, I find this healthcare strategy that a lot of Democrats are pushing to be just totally crazy.

Brian Lehrer: Let's get a couple of callers on who I think are on different sides of this question, if the Democrats should force a government shutdown when the budget year ends on September 30th and they strenuously object to the budget the Republicans are trying to put through through. My guest, if you're just joining us, is Zack Beauchamp from Vox, who wrote the Democratic shutdown debate is about so much more. Klaus in Norwalk on one side of this. You're on WNYC. Hi, Klaus.

Klaus: Good morning. Thanks for having me on. As I mentioned to the guy that answers the phones, I'm German and there's a very painful history there as well. I wish our politicians read more of it, but I think again, I've been a lifelong Democrat and I think shutting down the government would only provide Trump with more of an excuse to grab more power. Even intelligent people in Germany thought they would wait for the next election until there was no next election.

I think the Democrats should get out there, keep fighting about what those values are and what's happening to the country, and get people motivated. I can't believe that a majority of the United States supports Trump. I just can't believe it.

Brian Lehrer: Klaus, thank you very much before you respond to that, and I'm definitely interested to hear what you think about what he said. Trump could use this as an excuse presumably to declare more states of emergencies, martial law, take power in more ways than he's already trying to do or doing, but Ryan in Jersey City around WNYC first. Hi, Ryan.

Ryan: Hi. Hi, Brian. Thanks. Thanks a lot for having me on the show. First off, to the last caller, a majority of Americans didn't vote for Donald Trump. He had a slight percentage under 50%, and I'm sure that that's declined by now as people start to feel that Trump regret. But I agree with your guest that this is an abnormal time, and I think that he's absolutely right that it's time to do abnormal things. The Democrats for too long have played by the rules.

Even if you go back to the McConnell era, you've seen Merrick Garland not getting approved. You're seeing the filibuster being destroyed in front of our eyes. All of these non-Democratic things such as gerrymandering that the Republicans are just not playing by the rules, and the average American is not paying attention to the minutia of government to that degree and caring about it. They need to also start to fight fire with fire a little bit, in my opinion, and do some abnormal things.

Brian Lehrer: Ryan, thank you very much. You did write in your piece act, one of your observations is that Trump continues to win on his signature initiatives even though recent polling continues to confirm that most of them are unpopular. But why don't you respond to Klaus in Norwalk first on this concern that Trump would use a shutdown as an excuse to seize even more what you would consider authoritarian power?

Zack Beauchamp: Yes. No, I think that's a very serious concern. I think that it really, really is given he wouldn't have the legal authority to do that, but like so many things in this administration--

Brian Lehrer: Until the Supreme Court said he did.

Zack Beauchamp: Yes, within a two-page note that doesn't actually explain their reasoning. It's one of those things that requires you to grasp the new rules of the game. I don't think I know what they are. I'm not sure anybody does. The stable and predictable rules of the game have been outlined in lengthy lower court rulings, saying various things that Trump was doing were are obviously illegal. Reappropriating funds, firing people in jobs who have been congressionally allocated, and you have civil servants whose jobs have been congressionally created and have civil service protections, and the Supreme Court just says, "Nuh-uh. You can't do that."

Normally I would say, well, Democrats counter their strategy, their response to any power grab done during a shutdown is to sue or find someone to sue, and then the courts would side with them. But the Supreme Court is doing things for reasons that no one really understands. We all have theories. The Justices are partisan operatives. Enough Justices believe in expansive executive power that they're willing to overlook Trump. The Justices are scared of Trump and have threats to their lives. These are all credible explanations, but we don't know which one is true.

We don't know how the Justices would react or to an immediate power grab that we can probably guess, given some of these cases. It makes it very, very difficult to game out what a response would be for an attempt by Trump to say, "I'm just going to do X and try and stop me." But it's certainly something that you would need to think about how to deal with beyond just lawsuits.

Brian Lehrer: We'll continue with Zack Beauchamp from Vox. His article, the Democratic shutdown debate is about something much bigger. More of you. After the break, I'm going to play two clips from New Jersey Democratic Senator Andy Kim on the show just last week, which might add maybe a preview of where the Democrats are headed or at least one possible strategy. Stay with us.

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Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC as we continue with Zack Beauchamp from Vox. His new article, the Democratic shutdown debate is about something much bigger, the shutdown debate like the Democrats had in March. If you're just tuning in and you remember that moment when Chuck Schumer decided not to risk shutting down the government to oppose Republican spending priorities and what he already saw as an authoritarian takeover attempt of American democracy by Donald Trump. Well, they're coming up on another such deadline on September 30th. We had new Jersey Democratic Senator Andy Kim on the show last week, and he said this when I asked him about voting for a possible shutdown.

Andy Kim: If Trump wants to continue what he's doing with these rescissions and basically telling Republicans in Congress that they should take actions that would lead to a shutdown, that's on Trump, and so be it. If he's gonna continue to push in that direction, that's what the American people need to see and point the finger of blame towards Trump for just how damaging he's operated in terms of our ability of our government to be able to provide that support that it needs to the people.

Brian Lehrer: That's the classic blame the president, not us from Senator Kim. But he also said this, what is.

Andy Kim: So important for the American people, and I'm just pressing Democratic leaders across the board on this, is we can't just say what we're against. We have to show what we're for. We have to show a positive sense of what the budget is that we're trying to get past and why. Not just that we oppose this or oppose this action by Trump, but say, look, this is the funding that we want for cancer research in this country. This is the kind of support that we need to be able to keep our healthcare open so that kids with mental health challenges get the care that they need. When we see people with disabilities and how concerned they are about losing some of their Medicaid coverage. We need to show not just what we're against, but what we're trying to build.

Brian Lehrer: Senator Andy Kim. Zack, I'm curious if especially the latter clip there fits into your framework in any way, this wanting to present a positive vision as an alternative. Because we could argue that looking back to 2024, vilifying Trump as a wannabe authoritarian or they use the word fascist, citing some members of Trump first term national security officials, using that as a centerpiece didn't work.

Zack Beauchamp: I think people learned all the wrong lessons from that episode. I find this revisionism from Democratic pundits incredibly frustrating. Does anyone really think that that's why Kamala Harris lost? Seriously? We know why Kamala Harris lost. She lost because inflation was too high and because Joe Biden was extremely old and dropped out and put her in a very difficult position dealing with the fallout of many people believing the Democratic Party couldn't be trusted after that. That's why she lost.

It has nothing to do with the messaging choices she made in the last few weeks in the election. People who like to pull, well, this ad did better with focus groups groups and this one, the focusing on cost of living did better. It wasn't that kind of election. It was not one in which those televised ads in the last three weeks were going to make the critical difference.

Brian Lehrer: You don't think if she offered a better positive vision for fighting inflation than what Trump was saying, which is Biden caused inflation, could've made a difference?

Zack Beauchamp: No. Look at the international points of comparison. Kamala Harris did better than virtually any other incumbent in advanced OECD democracy having an election in 2024, period. I believe it was the highest or the second best result anywhere in the world for a similar party facing reelection under the global difficult, anti-incumbent, and inflationary headwinds.

It's very odd to look at the structural situation and be like, "Oh, the issue here was that Harris didn't have a well defined enough issue agenda." I'm just not sure this was a winnable election for Democrats. It might have been different had there been less anti incumbent sentiment because there hadn't been a serious breach of trust when it comes to hiding or not discussing openly Joe Biden's medical conditions.

I think that that might've made a difference because it would have dealt with or addressed some of these structural issues we saw in countries around the world, which is a sense of dissatisfaction with the way that incumbent politics was operating. They didn't and she was dealt a losing hand. I really don't think that that can be blamed on anti fascist messaging on her part, even if that didn't do especially well in focus groups. I have no time for that argument. Because I think it's really mostly a proxy for intra-Democratic factional fighting.

It's not even that the faction pushing it is wrong. Many of my friends are on this more moderate focus on cost of living-type, this is how the party wins-type faction, and I think they make good arguments otherwise. This is not one of their good arguments. It's one that is, I think, very facially a way of leveraging Harris's failure into a factional schema.

I felt the same way in a different way. I suppose that's a confusing sentence, but I felt similarly is a more precise way to put it, listening to Senator Kim talk. What you're doing here isn't trying to define the Democratic Party on healthcare. That's not the purpose of a shutdown, because it's not what people are going to be thinking about. What they're going to be thinking about is the government's not working. Why isn't the government working? You need to figure out a way to make this Trump's fault.

Shutdowns are about blame. They're about presenting something bad happening and then trying to make the case that this bad thing is happening because of X choice by this person. I the argument that you're going to make is what we want is a government that functions according to rules. Donald Trump has broken all the rules and he can't be trusted. What he's done is illegally taken money away from things that you care about and done so in order to advance his own agenda and consolidate his own power.

That's why there are parts of the government that aren't working that well. That's why the FBI has seemed dysfunctional in the hunt for Charlie Kirk's-- Manpower, right? I think there was an ideological purge that targeted the head of the Salt Lake City office, who is a widely respected veteran, described as one FBI source as legendary. The government's not working now, and it's not working because Democrats are, in the short term, denying funding. It's because it's not working because the Trump administration has broken it.

This health care stuff is a bank shot. You're not talking about the thing that we're all thinking about. It's certainly not doing what the Democratic base wants. If your argument is you're doing a shutdown in part to rally opposition to the base and boost the party standing with its hardcore following, well, they don't want you to talk about healthcare funding. They want you to talk about the authoritarianism. There's a reason that Democrats are down to 70% approval rating among Democrats, and it's because Democrats widely believe, something like 89%, that America is in the midst of a Democratic crisis, and the leadership isn't standing up to do anything about that.

Again, I want to be clear about something that I said earlier. I'm not certain a shutdown is the right way to pick this fight. I am certain that Democrats need to do something different. This conventional thinking about how we need to define ourselves based on our social policies which poll well, that's not different. That's normal politics. Maybe it should be part of your strategy, but building the entire structure, the identity, the identification of the Democratic Party around doing politics the way that you would do it as if it was 2006, that's just a category area about where we're at.

Brian Lehrer: How about this suggestion from a listener who writes, "How about a nationwide strike or boycott. Stop buying stuff." You know, Zack, one of our segments later in the show is going to be about the political crisis in France right now. And you may know there's a burgeoning new protest movement there called, let's block everything.

Zack Beauchamp: I appreciate the sentiment, but I think that in order for this kind of direct action to work, you need to have an organized movement to do it. Individuals disaggregated unless there's a massive groundswell of public support, which there hasn't been. I live in Canada now, and when Trump announced the tariffs in Canada, there was an immediate grassroots response to boycott American goods. No one messaged it. No one needed to. It just was the immediate response that many Canadians had.

They wanted to buy local, buy things to support the local economy amidst the attack on their sovereignty. The 51st State stuff in particular was a death knell there. There's been nothing like that happening in the US in response to Trump's authoritarianism. It didn't lead to an immediate direct consensus on how individual citizens should, in their own lives, change their behavior to start putting pressure on government. Now, if someone were to organize a campaign, I think that's not a crazy idea.

One thing I've heard from experts on Democratic backsliding is that oftentimes in these emergency circumstances, opposition political parties follow the cues of citizens because they're so used to doing things in the normal way, that they don't understand what the new rules are or even the need for extraordinary measures until it's too late and their power is already circumscribed.

Were there to be a significant push among citizen organizers, among the activist infrastructure in the United States for something like a general strike, well, that would be very different. But it can't just be a few people posting about it on like, left wing social media. There has to be an actual institutional, organizational push. The kind of thing that produced the No Kings protest. I need to have a strategy. It's another thing people miss about protest and other forms of direct action like boycotts, is the people who have successfully practiced them in the past didn't do so just to signal discontent. They did so because they had concrete and specific demands.

They were using these forms of pressure and public demonstration, trying to get the weight of public opinion on their side in order to try to force some specific concrete changes, like an end to segregation in Montgomery buses, for example, and did so with a very specific theory of who you're pressuring and why you're pressuring them, and what ways in which that leverage would in fact put pressure on them.

Now, I think there are ways to design a nonviolent resistance campaign in the United States, one that I think would be very justifiable given the nature and scope of the Democratic emergency, but that needs to happen. Somebody needs to be doing that. Right now, I don't see there that activists force in place.

Brian Lehrer: One more call. Christian in Brooklyn, you're on WNYC with Zack Beauchamp from Vox. Hi, Christian.

Christian: Hello. Hi. I'm going to be quick about this. One, why not let it shut down? Why I say that is because we're so busy saying what they will or what they will not do, what they will and what they won't do that we haven't forced their hand on too much of anything. It's either going to be a slow death, which means they're going to slowly take away everything, which they have been doing. Project 2025 is 50% into effect already.

You're not slowing anything down by saying, we're not going to have a shutdown. We're going to see if he's going to resurp or take the power of the filibuster. Because at the end of the day, if the Republicans do destroy the filibuster, okay, because here's why. They've been using it for the past 20 years to destroy all kind of progress. Every time we want to do something, we don't find out until months later, 50 different concessions we'd have to make because of how many times they try to shut down the government for this, but how many times they to try filibustered that, that if they do something like this now, they don't have that power against us anymore.

What we're in, yes, we're in unprecedented times. No one has made a strategy and it's unfortunate because this process has been going for the past 60 years in the making. Every single component that we're trying to use to the normal methods for going against it, there's been countermeasures already for, and we're sitting here when he was elected the first time. The only reason why Trump lost the first time was not because of anything Democrats did. No. The pandemic actually is what went against Trump the first time.

Then the second time rather than actually protecting the ballots, we know that there was actual places where the ballots were not used. We know that there were places where there was effective means to destroying the ballot process altogether. The man demanded in his first term for you to find him more votes.

Brian Lehrer: Christian, I'm going to leave it there. I hear all your points. Thank you very much for making them. Call us again. But to the thing that Christian started with or his main premise about nothing to lose, what about this latest move against the filibuster just yesterday by the Republicans, the so-called nuclear option, to end the 60-vote requirement on more nominees that need Senate confirmation. Any thoughts on it in and of itself or as a possible factor now in Schumer's calculations? Does he need the filibuster in order to even have the power in a majority Republican Senate to shut down the government?

Zack Beauchamp: Yes, that's the risk. I think that the issue is that there is not consensus in the Republican caucus on a need to nuke the filibuster entirely. What the episode with appointments showed is the Democratic obstructionism can block them for a long time, but can also build support in the caucus for changing rules. Because they are so Trump-y that if Trump's agenda is being obstructed, eventually they'll get on Republican Team Trump and will do changes to the way that the Senate has operated that otherwise would've been unthinkable in the caucus. Certainly during the Biden years. The risk of a shutdown is that you force the same thing to happen in the context of legislation, not just nominees. Then once the legislative filibuster is gone, Trump could do whatever he wants.

They're in Congress. The only constraints are the opinions of the marginal Republican voter, and Trump has shown an ability to railroad Republicans in the past. That's a serious risk. Right now, it doesn't seem like they're willing to nuke the legislative filibuster. That could change. There are a few calculations you need to make. First, do you think that'll just change over the course of Trump's first term? That he'll get tired of doing executive action. He'll demand Republicans should get rid of the legislative filibuster, and they'll just do it. Second, how confident are you, if you're a Democrat, that you're winning the 2026 midterms? Because if you're going to win the midterms, maybe it doesn't matter if the legislative filibuster gets nuked next year or something like that, but it would make a big difference if it got nuked this year.

Now, if you're going to lose the midterms, then, I mean, the consequences of legislative filibuster being destroyed are even bigger because then you have to deal with four years of Trump being able to get stuff through the Senate and the House, if Democrats don't take the House. It's like the series of nested choices and projections based on uncertainty about what the likely consequences are that are often, I think, in large part rest on your sense of the individual psyches and susceptibility to pressure from Trump of the marginal Republican senator. It's not an easy call. It's a really complex question.

Brian Lehrer: Last question. You also wrote a Vox article after the assassination of Charlie Kirk this week. You call the murder horrible. Almost everyone agrees with that, of course. You also wrote that it could become its own additional threat to democracy. That's a larger conversation that you and us and other people are starting to have. But do you think it could play a role at all, the aftermath to it, in Schumer's decision whether to shut down the government?

Zack Beauchamp: I think a lot of things are changing right now. This is a really scary moment in American politics, and we're not really sure what the fallout is going to be. The way that Trump has talked about Charlie Kirk's killing has been incredibly aggressive and disconcerting. Certainly this track record in the second term leads one to believe that he'll be very willing to use it as a pretext to use some kind of force against his political opponents. He talked about a RICO investigation into the Soros charities, which is outrageous. It's beyond even what other authoritarian regimes have done in persecuting people like this. I'm thinking here specifically of Hungary [unintelligible 00:46:54] have been obsessed with the Soros.

I think that that both raises and lowers the odds of Democrats getting on board with a shutdown on different axes. If Trump doesn't take some kind of aggressive action, Democrats will wonder if a fight over the shutdown would prompt him to do so anyway, given that he's already angry and maybe there's very little holding him back. It's important to remember here that Charlie Kirk was a very good friend of Donald Trump Jr. and was close to the Trump family. There will be a lot of pressure on Trump to act aggressively in response. These are not the moderate factions of the Republican Party. These are the [unintelligible 00:47:31], destroy them, culture of war factions.

If Trump does take these kind of actions in the next, I think it's something like two and a half weeks before the budget vote has to happen, then that'll change Democrats calculus severely because then Trump will be transitioning not to sort of subtle authoritarianism, but aggressive, using the policing powers of the state against the opposition. Really outright authoritarian, 20th century model of politics. If that happens, you just cannot roll over. You can't. You have to stage a fight and say, if you're not going to get angry about the FBI being deployed against the political opposition, what are you going to be angry about American public? What is it going to take to wake you up to the fact that the government is being deployed to destroy the freedoms in the Constitution?

I don't really like talking like this. When I hear myself get into that register, it feels partisan in a way that's uncomfortable for me as a journalist. We are non-partisan. That's an important part of our ethos. I don't identify with the Democratic Party as a member or strategist or anything like that, but look, I've seen the other side of this internationally. Been to to places like Hungary and Israel, where the opposition is being persecuted by the incumbent government. It doesn't matter what your politics are, your normative politics, on normal issues, what matters is democracy. Once democracy starts being destroyed, it's very hard to protect it.

Democrats need to grow a spine for the world's sake, for ours, and for American's sake, for the freedoms that we cherish. They need to think about what happens in a world where we're facing a very, very, very serious risk of a kind of repression that has few precedents in modern American history.

Brian Lehrer: The views of Zack Beauchamp. I should say the views and the reporting of Zack Beauchamp, senior correspondent at Vox, author of the book that came out last year called The Reactionary Spirit: How America's Most Insidious Political Tradition Swept the World, and of the new article on Vox or the one that came out a few days ago called the the Democratic shutdown debate is about something much bigger. Thank you for joining us.

Zack Beauchamp: Thank you. I appreciate it.

 

 

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