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View all search resultsHow the Democrats can “win” the US government shutdown
Given that Democrats are confronting dilemmas that all opposition parties face when battling aspiring or practicing autocrats, a fruitful exercise is to consider the lessons of two decades of what political scientists are calling a global “democratic recession.”
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A view of the United States Capitol's rotunda as the US government continues its shutdown on Oct. 6, 2025, in Washington, DC. (AFP/Brendan Smialowski)
W
ith many United States government services shutting down for lack of funding, the blame game in Washington is intensifying, and journalists are playing their own game of trying to predict the political winner. But given that Democrats are confronting dilemmas that all opposition parties face when battling aspiring or practicing autocrats, a more fruitful exercise is to consider the lessons of two decades of what political scientists are calling a global “democratic recession.” This recent history makes clear that some strategies for dealing with would-be autocrats work much better than others.
One of the Democrats’ biggest problems is that they are very unpopular, even with their own base. Their supporters feel, justifiably, that party leaders are constantly sending mixed messages. They call President Donald Trump and his henchmen fascists one day, and the next they behave as if they were operating in a chummier, bipartisan time when Congress could cobble together solutions to practical problems.
During politically normal times, opposition parties are supposed to develop policy alternatives and use parliamentary procedures to hold governments accountable. A classic example is the rhetorical dueling that takes place during Prime Minister’s Questions in the United Kingdom. But these are not normal times in the US. Trump, like all aspiring autocrats, is changing institutions to make it less likely that he will lose power in the future, as well as intimidating civil society, harassing political adversaries and inciting hatred against certain segments of society.
Such conduct does not merely “erode norms.” We are confronting what scholars have called “autocratic legalism”: the use of duly enacted laws to undermine constitutional systems and, in particular, to concentrate power. In fact, the situation may even be worse than that. In his second term, Trump no longer bothers maintaining a façade of legality, and simply engages in illegal conduct openly.
In theory, how opposition parties should respond to autocratic legalism or outright lawlessness is straightforward: play “tit-for-tat.” Transgressions from one side must be answered with a matching transgression. As game theory teaches, that is the only way to get back to normal with repeated play. Ideally, the opposition party, in the process, will also explain to the public that it is pursuing such a strategy because a core democratic principle, not just a policy disagreement, is at stake.
But the problem, in practice, is that a governing party bent on autocracy can escalate. Not only has it already proven willing to break the rules, but it also has more power with which to do so. One could see this clearly with Democratic Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer’s attempt to slow the confirmations of Trump’s nominees. In response, Republican Majority Leader John Thune simply went for “the nuclear option,” changing the rules so that whole batches of nominees could be waved through with a simple majority.
Another problem is that politicians beholden to an aspiring autocrat are unlikely to negotiate in good faith, or even to tell the truth to the public. Republicans, for example, are simply lying about the Democrats wanting to give health care to undocumented immigrants. And since aspiring autocrats systematically work to capture media organizations, the space for making the opposition’s case steadily shrinks.
