People just aren’t that interested in talking about government shutdowns.
Maybe we’ve all gotten inured to them—the apocalyptic talk, the stock footage of national parks with “closed” signs, the weedy negotiations. It feels like we’ve seen this over and over.
But this one feels different. The looming shutdown raises questions: political questions about what the Democratic Party is all about, legal questions about whether the laws that Congress passes are even relevant anymore (since we have a president who’s able to openly defy the law without repercussions) and deep, fundamental questions about whether our entire political system is broken.
Because when you put the pieces together, our system feels like a house of cards built on sketchy ways of raising campaign money to fund creaky ways of persuading voters to elect representatives to pass laws that our president ignores…until our government shuts down entirely.
To get into all of this, in today’s livestream, I welcomed outstanding political scientist
of the Substack . We talked about the looming apotheosis of dysfunction, and all the broken cogs in our system that are creaking toward collapse….and yet, whether it’s the kind of breakdown that’s necessary in order to start to make a repair.You can catch the embedded video above, or watch/listen to the pod version (which you an take on the go) by clicking here:
