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Opinion
Hollywood Rediscovers the Bomb
Nuclear films have been canaries in the uranium mine; each resurgence has coincided with waves of nuclear escalation. What does it mean that top directors are tackling the subject again?
Oct 21, 2025
As the nuclear threat once again dominates the headlines, the nuclear blockbuster has returned to screens. Following the success of Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer, Kathryn Bigelow’s A House of Dynamite reminds us that the atomic bomb is not mere history. Equal parts political thriller and apocalyptic horror, the film compels viewers to imagine the unimaginable, refusing any illusion of security or assurance that catastrophe could not happen here.
There is no catharsis, no safe distance from which to retreat. What we confront on screen is not fiction but the collective madness of our current reality. The dread that Bigelow conjures does not dissipate with the closing credits; it follows us out of the theater, past the exit signs, and into a world where the possibility of instant annihilation remains stitched into everyday life.
Such films are hardly new, though their resurgence should give us pause. Since 1945, Hollywood has capitalized on the mix of fear and fascination unleashed by the atomic age. In response, studios have produced roughly 1,000 nuclear-themed films, a cinematic proliferation mirroring the buildup of nuclear arsenals (70,000 warheads by 1986). As scholar Jerome Shapiro observes, these works became “a statistically important part of the American filmgoer’s diet” for decades.
Yet atomic cinema has always been more than entertainment. It has served as both warning and witness, shaping a collective consciousness of the bomb. Within the secretive and anti-democratic architecture of the nuclear security state, these films often served as cultural critique and political resistance, piercing the veil of official classification, challenging the monopoly of defense experts, and democratizing a debate otherwise foreclosed to the public.
What we need now are stories that break the spell of American innocence.
Nuclear films have been canaries in the uranium mine. Each resurgence has coincided with waves of nuclear escalation. But they have also served as calls to action, catalyzing mass movements demanding disarmament. To understand what this revival signals, and what more is needed to reignite the anti-nuclear movement, it is worth revisiting the earlier cycles of Cold War filmmaking that were shaped by and informed nuclear and popular culture.
Dr. Strangelove and the Madness of Deterrence
The first major wave of atomic cinema emerged in the late 1950s and early 1960s. This was a time in which the United States had lost its temporary monopoly on nuclear force and both Washington and Moscow were producing, testing, and stockpiling weapons a thousand times more destructive than the now nearly obsolete fission bombs that had obliterated Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In less than a decade, the atomic bomb had evolved from a “city-killer” to a “nation-killer.”
The earliest films of this era confronted a growing public anxiety over radiation. They represented a response to official efforts to downplay the danger, as politicians prioritized the management of political fallout over the prevention of radioactive fallout. From the very beginning, there emerged attempts to trivialize radiation, none more infamous than General Leslie Groves’ 1945 remark that radiation poisoning was a “very pleasant way to die.”
By 1954, the Lucky Dragon incident had made the deadly consequences of nuclear contamination impossible to ignore. Science fiction movies such as Them! and Godzilla, both released that same year, translated these fears into monstrous allegories. Yet even as such films dramatized the terror of nuclear technology, official discourse worked to normalize it.
Kubrick’s dark satire exposed the Nazi-like madness underwriting “rational” deterrence, ridiculing mutual destruction while indicting the US for deepening the peril through its own policies.
Strategic war planners like Herman Kahn embodied the technocratic detachment of the emerging nuclear priesthood. By 1960, Kahn was publicly arguing that nuclear war was winnable and that even scenarios resulting in tens of millions of deaths would not ultimately preclude “normal and happy lives for the majority of survivors and their descendants.”
He also dismissed concerns about radiation, insisting that the numbers of children born “seriously defective” due to such exposure would rise by “only” 10%. Noting that there are still birth defects in peacetime, he concluded, “War is a terrible thing; but so is peace.” Such statements shocked the public, revealing the moral vacancy of those entrusted with preserving life and preventing death in the atomic age, fueling a growing fear that ordinary people might be sacrificed on the altar of Cold War credibility.
After the October 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, when the United States came to the brink of serving as ground zero of nuclear annihilation, many Americans fully awoke to the insanity. The public backlash, led by SANE and Women’s Strike for Peace, that followed the near catastrophe helped push President John F. Kennedy to sign the Limited Test Ban Treaty of 1963, a rare moment when popular and political pressure combined to produce tangible reform.
In response also came Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove (1964), one of the most indelible films of the Cold War. Drawing inspiration from figures such as Kahn, it confronted the suicidal nihilism of the defense intellectuals. Kubrick’s dark satire exposed the Nazi-like madness underwriting “rational” deterrence, ridiculing mutual destruction while indicting the US for deepening the peril through its own policies. These included stationing nuclear weapons in Turkey to attempting to overthrow Castro, actions that helped manufacture a crisis that threatened to extinguish the lives of as many as 200 million North Americans and even more Soviet citizens. This is not to mention the many millions dead attributed to what is perversely termed “collateral damage.”
Imagining The Day After
Two decades later, a new wave of films emerged amid another period of nuclear escalation. Their arrival in 1979 marked what many remember as the spark that reignited the anti-nuclear movement after more than a decade of dormancy. That year saw the rise of presidential candidate Ronald Reagan, whose rhetoric revived the language of nuclear confrontation, alongside two disasters that reawakened fears of radiation: the partial meltdown at Three Mile Island and the uranium mill spill at Church Rock, New Mexico. Together, these events rekindled public anxiety about the existential dangers of nuclear weapons and deepened fears surrounding nuclear power.
Reagan’s campaign and subsequent presidency again advanced the chilling notion that nuclear war might be winnable, even at the cost of millions of lives. This sentiment persisted despite scientists warning of “nuclear winter,” stressing that a nuclear exchange could devastate the atmosphere and result in “omnicide,” the death of all life on Earth. The mix of apocalyptic scientific doomsaying and bellicose political posturing sent fear soaring. By the early 1980s, polls showed that nearly half of Americans believed they might die in a nuclear war.
As historian Paul Boyer observed, even the most devastating portrayals inevitably fall short, since the only truly accurate nuclear war film, he wrote, “would be two hours of a blank screen.”
Released just 12 days before the disaster at Three Mile Island, The China Syndrome (1979) captured this mounting dread with eerie prescience. What began as a fictional thriller about a near meltdown quickly became a public relations catastrophe for nuclear power. The film’s portrayal of institutionalcorruption and bureaucratic negligence, alongside the industry’s efforts to dismiss it as propaganda, exposed official narratives on nuclear safety. In a post-Vietnam, post-Watergate America defined by cynicism and mistrust, the movie crystallized public anxieties about nuclear power and the broader dangers of corporate and governmental deceit.
Under Reagan, the popular energy unleashed by this moment coalesced into a mass movement. By 1982, anti-nuclear activism had reached its apex. On June 12, some 1 million demonstrators filled the streets of New York City for what remains the largest single protest rally in American history. Their message was unambiguous: The nuclear status quo was intolerable.
Their reach extended far beyond the streets. The Nuclear Freeze campaign mobilized communities across the country, while the 1983 ABC television film The Day After brought the horror of nuclear annihilation directly into American living rooms. More than 100 million people, including the president himself, watched as a bucolic Midwestern town of Lawrence, Kansas, emblematic of the American heartland, was reduced to a radioactive wasteland. The film remains one of the most searing depictions of nuclear war ever produced. Yet, as historian Paul Boyer observed, even the most devastating portrayals inevitably fall short, since the only truly accurate nuclear war film, he wrote, “would be two hours of a blank screen.”
But public pressure grew impossible to ignore. In a remarkable reversal, Reagan declared that “a nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought,” beginning direct talks with Soviet premier Mikhail Gorbachev to pursue arms-reductions. This marked at least the second time that protests rendered potential nuclear weapons use not only morally unimaginable but also politically untenable (the other being the 1969 Vietnam Moratorium protests which helped dissuade President Richard Nixon from carrying out a contemplated nuclear strike against North Vietnam).
The Limits of the New Nuclear Films
The two major nuclear films of the past two years are significant cultural events. They have revived an apocalyptic imagination and a sense of nuclear consciousness that are essential if we are ever to confront the nuclear nightmare and end the arms race before it ends us. Yet they also fall short in critical ways, and risk being remembered as great films that stirred awareness but failed to inspire the resistance necessary to meet this perilous moment.
Oppenheimer, despite its cinematic brilliance, was a missed opportunity to reckon with Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Rather than compelling audiences to confront historical responsibility, it offered a familiar narrative of tragic necessity. The bomb had to be built; the bombings, though regrettable, were justified. The moral center of the story was not the victims in Japan but Oppenheimer himself, the tormented “American Prometheus.” The result was not reckoning but retreat into myth.
A House of Dynamite follows a similar trajectory. The film is powerful and unsettling, reminding viewers that any city, and the world, could be reduced to ashes within minutes. It captures the immediacy of the danger and the near impossibility of containing a “limited” exchange. Yet it ultimately retreats into American exceptionalism, reinforcing the comforting illusion that our nuclear arsenal exists only in a defensive posture to deter aggression while it is “our enemies” that recklessly endanger both us and the planet. In reality, the most perilous moments of the atomic age were less the product of foreign provocation than of American escalation.
To imagine the United States then as only a victim of a nuclear war is to obscure its role as the principal architect of prospective annihilation. For eight decades, Washington has held humanity hostage to the possibility of instant destruction, insisting that peace depends on the ever-present threat of total devastation, including in a US-initiated first strike. Moving beyond this suicidal logic of deterrence requires an honest reckoning with that history and the will to dismantle it.
What we need now are stories that break the spell of American innocence. The only sane position remains abolition, the dismantling of weapons for which there is no defense and whose risk to the continuity of human life is intolerable. Until that reckoning arrives, Oppenheimer and A House of Dynamite, and any other future films that fail to summon the courage to speak the full truth and mobilize resistance will stand as monuments to the mythology of American victimhood, stories about the terror of being attacked told by the most heavily armed nation on earth.
A House of Dynamite in limited theatrical release and will begin streaming on Netflix on October 24, 2025.
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No Kings Rallies Count, But We Need Bigger and More Sustained Civil Resistance
Just as President Trump is racing to consolidate his power, millions more Americans must move quickly to stop him.
Oct 21, 2025
In the early 1770s, American colonists, upset at heavy-handed British rule, waged a fierce resistance campaign that made it immensely difficult for the British to govern. Boycotts of British goods and refusals to pay taxes were just a few of the ways they made life unbearable before tensions erupted into the Revolutionary War.
The successful civil rights movement of the 1960s was sparked by small groups of students, including John Lewis, who conducted lunch counter sit-ins, street marches, business boycotts, and other forms of nonviolent resistance to protest and eventually end segregation in the South.
And so it has gone in America: Campaigns for women’s voting rights and nuclear nonproliferation trace their beginnings to deliberate, tactical civil resistance.
Now, as America approaches its 250th anniversary, groups of people—in geographies from Boston to Baton Rouge—are beginning to launch a nationwide civil resistance movement. And just like the Vietnam War, it is against our own government.
The president cannot consolidate power without airplanes to handle his deportation flights, banks that finance his detention centers, and a media that spreads his misinformation and squelches truth.
President Donald Trump and his loyalists are moving at jet speed to install an authoritarian government that is stamping out free speech, voting rights, civil rights, and other core foundations of our democracy.
They are also dismembering federal agencies that backstop science, healthcare, environmental protection, and a well-functioning economy. The protracted government shutdown, which has federal workers being furloughed and fired, is deepening the damage.
It is time to rise up again. We should not stand idle as our political institutions unravel. The ship is sinking rapidly, and it may not be salvageable a year from now. Even if the midterm elections bring more political resistance, much of the damage will have been done.
So it is up to us, average Americans to resist. But resistance needs strategy, training, and unwavering commitment to exercise that power. Every day. Every hour.
And in small but encouraging ways, it is happening again. One Million Rising, a national civil resistance movement launched in July by the nonprofit group Indivisible, is growing in numbers and impact. More than 300,000 trained volunteers are organizing protests, sit-ins, and other types of nonviolent interference aimed at businesses, the media, and other entities supporting the president’s policies.
The strategy is less about broad-based street demonstrations, such as Saturday’s No Kings! protests, and more about sharply focused, continuous collective action to undermine key pillars of support that the administration is relying on. By chipping away at vital institutions that uphold their power, the president’s castle of sand will erode and eventually tumble. The president cannot consolidate power without airplanes to handle his deportation flights, banks that finance his detention centers, and a media that spreads his misinformation and squelches truth.
We’re seeing positive progress, with the biggest focus being on Trump-friendly businesses.
Companies that are caving to the president’s pressure while getting favorable policy treatment are facing louder protests and boycotts.
When Disney and its ABC affiliate suspended Jimmy Kimmel’s show in September over his remarks about Charlie Kirk’s fatal shooting, consumers quickly responded. Disney’s streaming apps lost more than 1 million paid subscribers in a matter of days. The show was quickly restored—a major victory for free speech.
And there is Avelo Airlines, a budget commercial airline that flies out of dozens of US cities, including Bradley and New Haven airports in Connecticut. It is facing growing resistance over its contract to handle deportation flights for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). In New Haven, the teacher’s union, city government, and consumers have all come out publicly against the airline, calling for boycotts and an end to sponsorship deals. Similar protests are underway at Bradley and other airports in Baltimore, Atlanta, and across California.
Protesters are also targeting local governments deemed as being overly cooperative with the administration’s aggressive immigrant crackdown. Just this month, after loud protests inside and outside of City Hall, the Holyoke City Council narrowly rejected a resolution declaring that Holyoke is not a sanctuary city and would fully comply with all federal laws. Supporters said the resolution would protect Holyoke’s federal funding.
Councilor Patti Devine, who cast the decisive vote, said she planned to support the resolution but changed her mind after Latino, youth, and trans residents spoke in opposition.
These wins are surely important, but bigger, broader resistance efforts are urgently needed.
The movement needs more people. A lot more people. And it needs them every day. While it is encouraging that an estimated 7 million protesters participated in the No Kings! rallies on Saturday, most are not engaging in the more challenging and time-consuming resistance campaigns that the moment calls for.
So how many people do we need? One academic who has studied civil resistance movements globally, Erica Chenoweth, a professor at the Harvard Kennedy School, has developed what she calls the 3.5% rule. Chenoweth’s research of hundreds of campaigns over the last century shows that it takes around 3.5% of a population actively participating in civil resistance to ensure serious changes.
That means about 12 million people in America. No matter how you cut it, we’re not even close.
And we need to build these numbers quickly.
Just as President Trump is racing to consolidate his power, millions more Americans must move quickly to stop him.
A good first step is to sign up for One Million Rising and listen to its three online training sessions. They can also join local community groups that are already working on civil resistance campaigns in their communities. Or they can start a new community group.
It’s time.
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The Corporate Democrats Delivered Donald Trump
Addressing the root of economic systems that oppress Americans is exactly what the Democratic Party leadership, dependent on big corporate donors, has rigorously refused to do. If they continue this refusal, things will only get worse.
Oct 21, 2025
The human condition includes a vast array of unavoidable misfortunes. But what about the preventable ones? Shouldn’t the United States provide for the basic needs of its people?
Such questions get distinctly short shrift in the dominant political narratives. When someone can’t make ends meet and suffers dire consequences, the mainstream default is to see a failing individual rather than a failing system. Even when elected leaders decry inequity, they typically do more to mystify than clarify what has caused it.
While “income inequality” is now a familiar phrase, media coverage and political rhetoric routinely disconnect victims from their victimizers. Human-interest stories and speechifying might lament or deplore common predicaments, but their storylines rarely connect the destructive effects of economic insecurity with how corporate power plunders social resources and fleeces the working class. Yet the results are extremely far-reaching.
“We have the highest rate of childhood poverty and senior poverty of any major country on earth,” Senator Bernie Sanders has pointed out. “You got half of older workers have nothing in the bank as they face retirement. You got a quarter of our seniors trying to get by on $15,000 a year or less.”
Such hardship exists in tandem with ever-greater opulence for the few, including this country’s 800 billionaires. But standard white noise mostly drowns out how government policies and the overall economic system keep enriching the already rich at the expense of people with scant resources.
This year, while Donald Trump and Republican legislators have been boosting oligarchy and slashing enormous holes in the social safety net, Democratic leaders have seemed remarkably uninterested in breaking away from the policy approaches that ended up losing their party the allegiance of so many working-class voters. Those corporate-friendly approaches set the stage for Trump’s faux “populism” as an imagined solution to the discontent that the corporatism of the Democrats had helped usher in.
While offering a rollback to pre-Trump-2.0 policies, the current Democratic leadership hardly conveys any orientation that could credibly relieve the economic distress of so many Americans. The party remains in a debilitating rut, refusing to truly challenge the runaway power of corporate capitalism that has caused ever-widening income inequality.
“Opportunity” as a Killer Ideology
The Democratic Party establishment now denounces President Trump’s vicious assaults on vital departments and social programs. Unfortunately, three decades ago it cleared a path that led toward the likes of the DOGE wrecking crew. A clarion call in that direction came from President Bill Clinton when, in his 1996 State of the Union address, he exulted that “the era of big government is over.”
Clinton followed those instantly iconic words by adding, “We cannot go back to the time when our citizens were left to fend for themselves.” Like the horse he rode into Washington — the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC), which he cofounded — Clinton advocated a “third way,” distinct from both liberal Democrats and Republican conservatives. But when his speech called for “self-reliance and teamwork” — and when, on countless occasions throughout the 1990s he invoked the buzzwords “opportunity” and “responsibility” — he was firing from a New Democrat arsenal that all too sadly targeted “handouts” and “special interests” as obsolete relics of the 1930s New Deal and the 1960s Great Society.
The seminal Clintonian theme of “opportunity” — with little regard for outcome — aimed at a wide political audience. In the actual United States, however, touting opportunity as central to solving the problems of inequity obscured the huge disparities in real-life options. In theory, everyone was to have a reasonable chance; in practice, opportunity was then (and remains) badly skewed by economic status and race, beginning as early as the womb. In a society so stratified by class, “opportunity” as the holy grail of social policy ultimately leaves outcomes to the untender mercies of the market.
Two weeks before Clinton won the presidency, the newsweekly Time reported that his “economic vision” was “perhaps best described as a call for a We decade; not the old I-am-my-brother’s-keeper brand of traditional Democratic liberalism.” Four weeks later, the magazine showered the president-elect with praise: “Clinton’s willingness to move beyond some of the old-time Democratic religion is auspicious. He has spoken eloquently of the need to redefine liberalism: the language of entitlements and rights and special-interest demands, he says, must give way to talk of responsibilities and duties.”
Clinton and the DLC insisted that government should smooth the way for maximum participation in the business of business. While venerating the market, the New Democrats were openly antagonistic toward labor unions and those they dubbed “special interests,” such as feminists, civil-rights activists, environmentalists, and others who needed to be shunted aside to fulfill the New Democrat agenda, which included innovations like “public-private partnerships,” “empowerment zones,” and charter schools.
Taking the Government to Market
While disparaging advocates for the marginalized as impediments to winning the votes of white “moderates,” the New Democrats tightly embraced corporate America. I still have a page I tore out of Time magazine in December 1996, weeks after Clinton won reelection. The headline said: “Ex-Investment Bankers and Lawyers Form Clinton’s Economic Team. Surprise! It’s Pro-Wall Street.”
That was the year when Clinton and his allies achieved a longtime goal — strict time limits for poor women to receive government assistance. “From welfare to work” became a mantra. Aid to Families with Dependent Children was out and Temporary Assistance for Needy Families was in. As occurred three years earlier when he was able to push NAFTA through Congress only because of overwhelming Republican support, Democratic lawmakers were divided and Clinton came to rely on overwhelming GOP support to make “welfare reform” possible.
The welfare bill that he gleefully signed in August 1996 was the flip side of his elite economic team’s priorities. The victims of “welfare reform” would soon become all too obvious, while their victimizers would remain obscured in the smoke blown by cheerleading government officials, corporate-backed think tanks, and mainstream journalists. When Clinton proclaimed that such landmark legislation marked the end of “welfare as we know it,” he was hailing the triumph of a messaging siege that had raged for decades.
Across much of the country’s media spectrum, prominent pundits had long been hammering away at “entitlements,” indignantly claiming that welfare recipients, disproportionately people of color, were sponging off government largesse. The theme was a specialty of conservative columnists like Charles Krauthammer, John Leo, and George Will (who warned in November 1993 that the nation’s “rising illegitimacy rate… may make America unrecognizable”). But some commentators who weren’t right-wing made similar arguments, while ardently defaming the poor.
Newsweek star writer Joe Klein often accused inner-city Black people of such defects as “dependency” and “pathology.” Three months after Clinton became president, Klein wrote that “out-of-wedlock births to teenagers are at the heart of the nexus of pathologies that define the underclass.” The next year, he intensified his barrage. In August 1994, under the headline “The Problem Isn’t the Absence of Jobs, But the Culture of Poverty,” he peppered his piece with phrases like “welfare dependency,” while condemning “irresponsible, antisocial behavior that has its roots in the perverse incentives of the welfare system.”
Such punditry was unconcerned with the reality that, even if they could find and retain employment while struggling to raise families, what awaited the large majority of the women being kicked off welfare were dead-end jobs at very low wages.
A Small Business Shell Game
During the 1990s, Bill and Hillary Clinton fervently mapped out paths for poor women that would ostensibly make private enterprise the central solution to poverty. A favorite theme was the enticing (and facile) notion that people could rise above poverty by becoming entrepreneurs.
Along with many speeches by the Clintons, some federal funds were devoted to programs to help lenders offer microcredit so that low-income people could start small enterprises. Theoretically, the result would be both well-earning livelihoods and self-respect for people who had pulled themselves out of poverty. Of course, some individual success stories became grist for upbeat media features. But as the years went by, the overall picture would distinctly be one of failure.
In 2025, politicians continue to laud small business ventures as if they could somehow remedy economic ills. But such endeavors aren’t likely to bring long-term financial stability, especially for people with little start-up money to begin with. Current figures indicate that one-fifth of all new small businesses fail within the first year and the closure rate only continues to climb after that. Fifty percent of small businesses fail within five years and 65 percent within 10 years.
Promoting the private sector as the solution to social inequities inevitably depletes the public sector and its capacity to effectively serve the public good. Three decades after the Clinton presidency succeeded in blinkering the Democratic vision of what economic justice might look like, the party’s leaders are still restrained by assumptions that guarantee vast economic injustice — to the benefit of those with vast wealth.
“Structural problems require structural solutions,” Bernie Sanders wrote in a 2019 op-ed piece, “and promises of mere ‘access’ have never guaranteed black Americans equality in this country… ‘Access’ to health care is an empty promise when you can’t afford high premiums, co-pays or deductibles. And an ‘opportunity’ for an equal education is an opportunity in name only when you can’t afford to live in a good school district or to pay college tuition. Jobs, health care, criminal justice and education are linked, and progress will not be made unless we address the economic systems that oppress Americans at their root.”
But addressing the root of economic systems that oppress Americans is exactly what the Democratic Party leadership, dependent on big corporate donors, has rigorously refused to do. Looking ahead, unless Democrats can really put up a fight against the pseudo-populism of the rapacious and fascistic Trump regime, they are unlikely to regain the support of the working-class voters who deserted them in last year’s election.
During this month’s federal government shutdown, Republicans were ruthlessly insistent on worsening inequalities in the name of breaking or shaking up the system. Democrats fought tenaciously to defend Obamacare and a health-care status quo that still leaves tens of millions uninsured or underinsured, while medical bills remain a common worry and many people go without the care they need.
“We must start by challenging the faith that public policy, private philanthropy, and the culture at large has placed in the market to accomplish humanitarian goals,” historian Lily Geismer has written in her insightful and deeply researched book Left Behind. “We cannot begin to seek suitable and sustainable alternatives until we understand how deep that belief runs and how detrimental its consequences are.”
The admonitions in Geismer’s book, published three years ago, cogently apply to the present and future. “The best way to solve the vexing problems of poverty, racism, and disinvestment is not by providing market-based microsolutions,” she pointed out. “Macroproblems need macrosolutions. It is time to stop trying to make the market do good. It is time to stop trying to fuse the functions of the federal government with the private sector… It is the government that should be providing well-paying jobs, quality schools, universal childcare and health care, affordable housing, and protections against surveillance and brutality from law enforcement.”
Although such policies now seem a long way off, clearly articulating the goals is a crucial part of the struggle to achieve them. Those who suffer from the economic power structure are victims of a massively cruel system, being made steadily crueler by the presidency of Donald Trump. But progress is possible with clarity about how the system truly works and the victimizers who benefit from it.
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Help Me Out Here: What's the Democratic Party's Logic on the Shutdown Fight?
Isn’t it the goal of all this to win the midterms? Why save the Republicans from themselves, when it would soon be obvious to all that the GOP stole the premium subsidies to give more money to billionaires?
Oct 21, 2025
I’m really starting to wonder about the political IQ of the Democratic Party. First, they did just about all they could to elect Donald Trump in the last election. Letting Joe Biden bumble towards a second term was nothing short of crazy, but then anointing Kamala Harris without a primary was even worse. She was, after all, the weakest Democratic primary contender in 2020 and she did not raise her profile in the role of vice president. It’s difficult to rage against the autocratic Trump when you actively work to prevent your own rank and file from having any say about your candidates.
But that’s ancient history. These days the Democrats are again looking like political dummies by shutting down the government, giving Trump exactly what he wants. Didn’t he say he would lay waste to the deep state, on which he unleashed Elon Musk and his DOGE goons right after the inauguration? And wasn’t eviscerating the social welfare programs, the New Deal and Great Society Democratic legacies, a prime objective of Project 2025? Doesn’t the shutdown give Trump endless opportunities to execute his nihilist vision of governmental social responsibility?
Help me out here: What is the Democrats’ logic? Granted, they had to show they had some backbone to their pissed-off base, but couldn’t they find something that was maybe not as dramatic but an actual deliverable for voters?
Alas, they were not about to develop a path to citizenship for hard-working undocumented immigrants who had played by the rules, even though polls consistently show nearly two-thirds of the public would support that.
Haven’t they read Machiavelli? It would damage Republicans if premiums shot up dramatically for millions of voters because of Trump's so-called "big, beautiful bill."
Nor, God-forbid, were they going to call for the end of stock trading by members of Congress, a pledge they could have made unilaterally, putting Republican lawmakers on the spot. Then again, many Democrats seem to wonder what’s the point of getting elected if you can’t get rich by trading on the job? (BTW, according to our Rust Belt survey, ending lawmakers’ insider stock trading is the most highly supported policy proposal of the 25 we tested.)
Instead, the Democrats have proven, once again, that they are really in it for themselves and their monied donors, defending what was the status quo—before Trump spoiled things. They are willing to shut down the government to protect Obamacare funding so that premiums don’t go up, which is a laudable policy objective, but isn’t anything new.
Isn’t it the goal of all this to win the midterms? Haven’t they read Machiavelli? It would damage Republicans if premiums shot up dramatically for millions of voters because of Trump's so-called "big, beautiful bill." Why save the Republicans from themselves, when it would soon be obvious to all that the GOP stole the premium subsidies to give more money to billionaires?
If the Democrats can’t do better than shutting down the government to conserve a program we already have, they have no chance at all of bringing working people back to the party.
I’m not a political micro-guy. I’m not into the twists and turns of congressional maneuvers, bill mark-ups, and the like. I concentrate on big-picture trends, like the working-class abandonment of the Democratic Party and the inability of most Democrats to embrace radical economic populism even what that’s exactly what voters want. So, I’m just trying to figure out how the shutdown will play out with voters. And the big picture isn’t encouraging.
Various polls show that about 60 percent of Americans blame President Trump and the Republicans for the shutdown. That sounds like a win, but about 54 percent blame the Democrats. Those numbers are not encouraging for a Democratic uprising next year.
If the Democrats can’t do better than shutting down the government to conserve a program we already have, they have no chance at all of bringing working people back to the party. That makes me think that the rise of Trump is not an aberration. His first victory, maybe. He did lose the popular count by almost four million votes. But the second one, where he won the popular vote, shows that the Democrats are a failed party, and we could be in for Republican rule for a long time to come unless our political efforts change.
Can the Democrats get out of this shutdown mess? It won’t be easy. If they capitulate, they will look like failures. If they persist, and win something, it’s not clear the public will give them any credit. Lives will be better for it, but the tax credits people have now will keep on coming, which feels like no change at all.
Sorry for the bad news, but the good news is that working people really want a new political party. Working together we can make that happen, but it will take time to build. Meanwhile, it’s groundhog day as we watch one Democratic trainwreck after the other.
Can the Democrats get out of this shutdown mess? It won’t be easy.
If nothing else, I hope this ongoing mess convinces progressives that the game is up. I know many still believe (hope, pray) that AOC and Mamdani will pull off a miraculous takeover, but wouldn’t it be prudent to have a Plan B?
There’s bound to be a lot of arguments and counterarguments, but that’s the point. We need a serious discussion about starting something new, instead of shutting down the discussion by saying it’s impossible. And if we allow working people to speak their minds, they will tell us it really is time to build something new, totally independent of the two parties. Here’s a bumper sticker to get us started:
Not Red, Not Blue: I’m a Working-Class Independent.
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