The Art of the Fold

On mob-style governance, the punditocracy, and logical conclusions.

On November 4th, 2025, the Democratic Party had its best day in years. As such, it was perhaps inevitable that the party’s leadership wouldn’t even wait a full week before they chose to completely give up on the longest and most politically successful shutdown in American history. For the price of a meaningless messaging vote and a bag of chips, a large bloc of moderate Democrats gave the GOP the votes they needed to fully fund the government until January. The deal they agreed to was so bad, so utterly lopsided, that it actively and meaningfully made things worse compared to the reality where the party simply agreed to fund the government from the start. Whether they admit to it or not, the Democratic Party has given its buy-in to Trump’s style of governance, effectively providing him with the supermajority that the public did not come even close to giving him in the 2024 election.

In the aftermath of all this, we are left with only one question: why did the Democrats engage in this entire endeavor at all? The official party narrative—that it was all about reversing and/or tying the GOP to a set of apocalyptically bad cuts to Obamacare subsidies—is impossible to believe after the party abruptly surrendered on the issue even while enjoying strong polling numbers and political momentum. There was a logic to just giving up on the issue, and there was a logic to going to the mat, but there was no logic whatsoever to forcing the longest shutdown in American history only to give up on it in the end. Evidently, the motivation and logic behind their decision came from someplace else.

Or, for that matter, a great many places.

As the months go on and establishment Democrats the country over stare down the barrel of an enraged base, you will hear what we saw occur over the past month-and-a-half be described as just yet another addition to a litany of moments where moronic, out-of-touch centrists have stuck to an old theory of politics and been rolled by Republicans. This will be politically effective, and it will be broadly true. Yet it will not be the most accurate accounting of what, exactly, led Democrats to take such a historically bizarre set of decisions. The fundamental reality that has been revealed here is that, beyond all of the usual cowardice and institutionalism, the Democratic Party completely lacks confidence. It doesn’t know what the people want, hardly knows what it itself wants, and does not trust itself to know how to get anywhere. It has outsourced all of its critical and strategic thinking to a set of unelected elite pundits and applied their recommendations as inelegantly as possible. It is a party that has made a complete 180 degree turn from undeserved arrogance to a crippling level of self doubt and is somehow failing in the exact same way.

It is, in a word, the first political party in the world to be ruled by a punditoracy. Here is the true story behind the longest shutdown in American history: the liberal wonks who motivated it, made it what it was, and doomed their moronic party to snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.

The Art of Losing: The Party of Ezra