The shutdown of the American government is not about healthcare. Democrats have seized on healthcare as a popular hook, betting that people will see them as fighting for affordable healthcare while Republicans seem indifferent to a major cost-of-living concern. That framing may work. Or it may not. In either case, the deeper fight is elsewhere.
In truth, both sides believe that shutting down the government serves their interests. Trump and the Republicans see it as a chance to massively reduce the size of a bloated government, fire recalcitrant workers, cut liberal programs, and increase executive power at a time when Congress has lost its way. Democrats — pushed by a base rightly furious at Trump’s disregard for law and the Constitution — see a shutdown as a last ditch effort to assert power and congressional relevance. They fear that even when Congress passes laws, the president finds ways around them. Shutting the government down becomes, for them, an extreme act of resistance to an extreme administration.
The shutdown, then, is less about policy than power. And in a contest defined by power, compromise is defeat. Neither side believes it can be seen to be caving in.
For Democrats, this presents a particular danger. To fight on the terrain of pure power is to play into Trump’s strength. He thrives on brinkmanship. He will bring the country to the brink before he blinks. Are Democrats prepared to let the shutdown drag on for weeks or months, even at the cost of disintegrating government services? Activists will demand it, but some within the party still believe in preserving competent, lawful government. The pressure to cave will mount. To cave, however, is to lose — again.
There is, however, a deeper danger. By accepting that politics is only about power — a conclusion that seems harder and harder to avoid — the center-left risks abandoning the core liberal conviction that law, procedures, and compromise should limit power.
Maybe this is necessary. Across Europe and the United States, liberal comebacks have failed to stem the tide of illiberal populism: Robert Fico came back to power in Slovakia. The populist Andrej Babiš is about to win re-election in the Czech Republic. In Poland, the liberal return of Donald Tusk has failed to stem the rightward wave, especially among the young. And, of course, in the United States, Joe Biden’s promise of competence, normalcy, and legality failed miserably. It is time to take seriously that people are tired of liberalism itself — that they crave not the temperance of limits but the exhilaration of power.
We are in the throes of a revolutionary return of politics. People care less about policy than about power, and the greatest worry is not about democracy or legality; it is about preventing the other side from winning. Half the people believe that the other side will bring about tyranny, or worse. The other half are sure that if their opponents win, civilization as they know it will end. As Ivan Krastev writes, politics is now consumed by opposed imaginations of apocalyptic urgency.
This apocalyptic mood is precisely what the postwar liberal order was designed to prevent. Determined to tame politics and restrain power to prevent tyranny, fascism, and totalitarianism, liberal elites built institutions meant to hold extremism at bay. But in taming politics, they also hollowed it out, forgetting basic human needs: the longing for risk, the need for belonging, the exhilaration of wielding collective power. Too often, the liberal project was less about cultivating politics than about suppressing it.
As N.S. Lyons has argued, very much in the spirit of Hannah Arendt, the postwar liberal project was built to tame politics itself. Liberalism promised security, but in the process it suppressed dissent and conflict. The justified liberal fear of strong gods led to a rejection of politics and thus to disempowerment and atomization. Terrified of the “strong gods” of nationalism and ideology, elites sought safety in what Karl Popper called the “open society,” governed less by plural citizens in conflict than by bureaucrats, experts, and technocrats. This managerial order kept democracy at arm’s length, hoping that rationalized procedures implemented by technocrats could replace the passions of the people.
The weakness of liberalism has provoked a backlash. Populism, Lyons writes, is more than grievance — it is a passionate desire to bring power and pride back into politics, embodied in Trump’s brash dismantling of the managerial state, his rejection of international liberalism, and his bid to assert direct executive control. For Lyons, history swings like a pendulum: the “Long Twentieth Century” of liberal proceduralism is ending, and the strong gods are inevitably returning.
Lyons is right to see how technocracy hollowed out politics and how Trumpism channels resentment at the suppression of popular will. But he overstates the case. The return of the strong gods is not destiny. To treat it as inevitable is to surrender the very possibility of politics — the human capacity to begin again.
The danger of the current shutdown is not simply its economic or political costs but that it accepts as inevitable the breakdown of the liberal order. By treating politics as a test of sheer will, Democrats risk proving Lyons right: that liberalism can only end in the return of the strong gods. But politics is not condemned to that cycle. Hannah Arendt, who shared Lyons’ sense of liberalism’s weakness yet rejected his fatalism, points toward another path.
Arendt, like Lyons, saw the weakness of liberal technocracy and the appeal of closed societies built on loyalty, sacrifice, and collective passions. Arendt knew that human life is above all a search for meaning, and that we find meaning in acting collectively through politics. The liberal retreat from politics, therefore, risked dehumanization. At the same time, she saw that the totalitarian rupture had made a return to closed societies impossible — and dangerous.
What makes Hannah Arendt’s work so powerful is that she grasped the need for political transcendence but insisted that we accept plurality and reject the allure of the strong gods and a closed society. Where the transcendence of religion or nationalism once gave life seriousness and purpose, Arendt sought what might be called a political transcendence founded in plurality: the experience of speaking and acting together to build a shared world amidst our differences.
The true danger of modern liberalism, for Arendt, was not weakness but bureaucracy — the “rule of nobody.” When politics is reduced to administration, rebellion becomes impossible because there is no one left to resist. Her answer was not to enthrone new “strong gods” but to multiply power so that no single power could dominate: federalism, citizens’ assemblies, local councils, and the plural institutions of self-government. Against Lyons’ pendulum of open versus closed, Arendt affirmed a third way: the open society renewed through participatory politics. She showed how political action itself could cultivate courage, seriousness, and meaning without collapsing into tyranny.
Arendt so admired the American Constitution not because it was a written document that restrained the power of the people, but because it embodied a uniquely American experience of power through self-government. She saw it as rooted in the colonial experience of local councils and town hall meetings, where citizens learned to act together. Its core innovation, she believed, was its federalist principle: it allowed for the proliferation of politics and the activation of power, while seeking to prevent any one power from dominating. This meant not only the separation of powers but also the diffusion of powers through the federal and state governments, so that politics could flourish without becoming tyrannical. The separation of powers, the division between federal and state authority, and the dense network of civic and non-governmental associations meant that power was both cultivated and restrained. In this way, the Constitution made politics meaningful for citizens, giving them opportunities to act together without surrendering to sovereignty or tyranny.
Arendt’s alternative is both humbler and more radical. It does not promise the certainty of tradition or the inevitability of history. Instead, it affirms politics itself — the human capacity to begin anew. That is what is at stake in the shutdown. To fight Trump only on the terrain of power is to accept Lyons’ cycle of weakness and strong gods. To resist him through Arendtian politics — by multiplying institutions of freedom and power, renewing our capacity for collective action, and refusing the seductions of sovereignty — is to keep open the possibility of democracy itself.
