Elon Musk’s Ill-Informed Foray into Shutdown Politics

T here’s a lot to admire about Elon Musk’s innovative and entrepreneurial career path. As a space nerd, I count myself among his admirers. I am a regular consumer of documentaries, books, and periodicals on space exploration, and I even write about it when the subject intersects with my professional vocation. But I don’t write about space much because I’ve learned enough about the subject to know I’m no expert, and I don’t know what I don’t know. At most, I’m a hobbyist.

Musk would benefit from the humility that accompanies acknowledged ignorance. That might have prevented him from indulging in a journey of intellectual discovery that clearly strikes him as epiphanous but is utterly banal to more seasoned political observers.

Don’t stop me if you’ve heard this one before because, if you’ve been following politics for more than the last several months, you have.

“No bills should be passed [in] Congress until Jan 20,” Musk declared on Wednesday. “None. Zero.” The declaration occurred amid his vigorous efforts to kill what was billed as a continuing resolution to fund the government into next year but was, in reality, a mini omnibus bill. It’s hard to argue with our editorial, which celebrates the implosion of a bill larded up with costly giveaways. But that isn’t an endorsement of Musk’s prescription for total legislative lethargy until Donald Trump takes office, because to follow that course of action would be to force the government to shut down on Friday night — just days before the Christmas holiday.

The political pitfalls for the party that instigated a shutdown at a time that would be maximally advantageous for Democrats, who are capable and practiced demagogues when it comes to government shutdowns, would seem obvious. But they’re not obvious to Musk.

Musk’s confidence is showing. He attacked this “criminal” legislation in the most hyperbolic terms (despite a tenuous grasp of some of its provisions), and even called for lawmakers who vote for it to be primaried. And, after all, if the worst-case scenario is that the government can’t keep the lights on for a month or so, what’s so bad about that?

Ah, this old chestnut. And I do mean old. Every few years, Republicans who are duly concerned about the nation’s fiscal trajectory convince themselves that, this time, a government shutdown may actually be popular, particularly if the logjam that culminates in a shutdown is a standoff over public spending. And every few years, those Republicans find out that they’re still wrong.

This was the logic that prevailed in 1995 when Bill Clinton vetoed the new GOP-led Congress’s appropriations bills, precipitating two brief government shutdowns. The party’s confident freshmen were convinced they had the upper hand — the country had just delivered to the GOP its largest vote share since 1946. They believed their priorities were America’s priorities. Save the unsympathetic public sector unions who would be imposed upon by the shutdown, most voters would probably learn that they didn’t need that much government in their lives. Those assumptions proved unfounded. “The confidence grew from a belief that government was so unpopular that people would cheer,” the writer Peter Wehner observed. “And they didn’t.”

The 1995 impasse did produce some valuable outcomes, but it did not result in a more popular GOP. The Republican Party and its leaders saw their respective approval ratings collapse, and the party underperformed in the 1996 and 1998 election cycles.

The lessons from that shutdown were thoroughly internalized by all who weren’t invested in revising the history around that strategic error. “I’ll buy you a Coke Zero if you can tell me what the government shutdown was about in ’95,” Senator Lindsey Graham later mused. “Nobody remembers!” All they remembered, in fact, was that the GOP lost that fight. But those lessons had been forgotten by 2013.

“If you get outside of Washington, D.C., there is a frustration with Washington that is palpable,” Senator Ted Cruz told reporters that year amid a standoff over funding to implement the 2010 Affordable Health Care Act. Obamacare was deeply unpopular, and, despite the president’s reelection, Republicans had reason to believe that activist government in general was in bad odor. Sure, Democrats controlled the White House and the Senate, but if the GOP could just summon the will, it could mobilize the voting public behind them and force Democrats to abandon Obama’s signature legislative achievement.

Not only did the strategy fail to persuade Democratic lawmakers, the Obama White House went out of its way to ensure that the government shutdown Cruz initiated was as painful as possible. Once again, the public reacted with hostility toward the GOP. Within one month, Gallup found the GOP’s brand had suffered a ten-point drop in its approval rating — leveling out at a meager 28 percent. “How many times must we learn the lesson? You can’t govern from one house of Congress,” the late Charles Krauthammer observed in exasperation. “This is about tactics. If I thought this would work, I would support it. But I don’t fancy suicide. It has a tendency to be fatal.”

The longest government shutdown in U.S. history somehow occurred despite unified GOP control of government in the winter of 2018–19 over an internecine standoff on funding for Donald Trump’s border wall — an impasse that only grew worse when victorious Democrats retook control of the House in January 2019. Once again, a strain of blithe commentary on the right welcomed the cessation of government activity because it would visit economic hardship only on the denizens of Washington, D.C., and nobody cares about the plight of Washingtonians. And once again, the GOP soon learned that the images and narratives the shutdown produced were not well regarded.

“Few welcome the sight of breadlines in Washington,” I wrote at the time, “reports that federal workers are pawning family heirlooms to make ends meet, or the news that food banks are sprouting up in the capital amid this political impasse.” On the shutdown’s 35th day, Trump conceded to a stopgap spending bill to reopen the government with the mere promise of negotiations over wall funding at a later date. It was a retreat made palatable only by the recognition that the shutdown was once again sapping the GOP of support.

Donald Trump has a mandate to pursue real change. He might even have a mandate for disruption, in a limited sense. But voters did not entrust him with control of the government because they welcome chaos and long to see their political opponents suffer. Republicans would do well to distinguish desirable small government from undesirable dysfunctional government.

If you have been around for long enough to know how this story ends, you don’t need to be informed of all this history. But those of us who are just tuning in could probably use the refresher, particularly when it seems like the neophytes are setting the agenda.