Welcome to the first issue of the new Weekender edition of SLSC! The aim here is to hit your inbox as the work week winds down with SLSC’s patented blend of sardonic scrutiny, hopeful-yet-grounded analysis, and biting satire - weekend reading for the armchair policy wonk in us all. If you’re ready to tune out of work and into political commentary right about now, this dispatch is for you.

This week’s Weekender is a prototype of sorts- testing the waters with a longer edition for people to chew on in their downtime rather than in a spare 7-10 minutes during the week. I plan to cover meatier, ongoing, or offbeat stories here, as well as some running gags, and eventually an arts & culture corner. Anybody interested, please reach out and we’ll see about a collaboration effort.

Here’s my first crack at it - hope it’s an enjoyable read!

There’s a special kind of absurdity to watching one’s preferred political party accidentally stumble into the strongest negotiating position they’ve held in a generation - a Repulican-lit political dumpster fire. I’m talking about the recent record-breaking shutdown: the longest government stoppage in U.S. history, a shutdown so sprawling and economically punishing that even Chamber of Commerce-types started sweating through their patriotic polos.

For once, the structural gravity of American politics tilted leftward by accident. Trump was cornered. Republicans were fracturing. Federal workers were openly mutinous. Agencies were grinding to a halt. Airports were on the brink of turning into giant stress-ball arenas full of stranded families and angry pilots. The GOP’s “small government” fantasy had finally been stress-tested in the real world, and - surprise, surprise - the real world did not care for it.

And Democrats - wide-eyed, blinking, marveling at their unexpected moment of almost-unearned strength - responded by… immediately looking for an excuse to cave.

You couldn’t have scripted a better hand dealt to the Democrats if you’d hired Aaron Sorkin and offered him a hefty cocaine per diem to do three rewrites. The shutdown put the Trump administration on the ropes by showing folks what a destroyed administrative state (with no community-oriented alternatives in place) actually looks like:

For the first time in years, Republicans needed something from Democrats that they weren’t willing to part with for a few platitudes and a consolation prize. The last time Dems generated and expended this amount of political capital was in the ACA-PPI fight that gave us the resulting Obamacare subsidies and patient protections we’re trying to cling to for dear life- again!

Democrats didn’t just hold the cards - they had hands on the table, the chairs, the dealer’s visor…

And still… they folded.

The Democrats’ negotiating style typically follows their signature ritualistically-humiliate-ourselves pathology:

The shutdown was the purest example yet.

With Trump painted into a corner, Democrats could have extracted real concessions: DACA protections from ICE, broader immigration reforms, the healthcare funding they’d drawn as their line in the sand - better yet, they could’ve forced the Republicans to nuke the filibuster, and actually put up or shut up. Then we finally would have entered the “find out” phase; instead, just more “fucking around” in D.C.

Why? Because they hate leverage.

Leverage requires follow-through.
Leverage requires strategy.
Leverage requires being willing to say “no” without folding like a cheap suit.

Democrats do not like being responsible for the consequences of power. They prefer to hover in the uncanny valley between “resistance movement” and “governing party,” claiming neither identity fully and mastering neither role in the process.

Most people think the problem is that Democrats don’t know how to fight.
Incorrect.
Democrats know exactly how to fight - they just prefer fighting their own voters.

When the shutdown created a rare instance where public opinion, institutional pressure, and moral authority all aligned perfectly in their favor, they didn’t recognize it as an opportunity. They recognized it as a liability - a moment where they might actually have to deliver on promises, not simply make them.

Republicans, by contrast, recognize leverage the way sharks detect blood in the water. They devour anything in their path on the way to their desired political chum. Democrats, meanwhile, recognize leverage the way house cats notice vacuum cleaners - flee from it when it comes your way.

Look at the last twenty years:

This is not a coincidence.
This is an avoidant persoality type dressed-up as a governing philosophy: avoid clarity, avoid losing, avoid responsibility.

When given a chance to confront Republican extremism at its weakest, Democrats chose to “restore normal order,” which is D.C.-speak for “save the GOP from itself before anyone realizes they could be defeated.”

The fundamental problem isn’t cowardice.

It’s comfort.

Democrats are comfortable in the minority mindset - even when they’re not in the minority. They’re comfortable narrating constraints instead of breaking them. Comfortable managing crises rather than wielding them - or overcoming them. All-to comfortable being the pearl-clutching wokescold at the dinner party instead of the one flipping the table.

So when the shutdown created the single greatest moment of Democratic negotiating power in years, they reacted like someone who found a gun in their grandfather’s basement: frightened and eager to hand it to literally anyone else.

Because the issue here isn’t just Democrats fumbling historic shutdown leverage.
It’s that both parties — in their own ways — treat dysfunction not as a crisis, but as a resource.

And that brings us to Part II: the broader, bipartisan machinery that thrives when nothing works.

[Continued in Part II]

Dear Chairman Mao,

I’m writing about my partner, the local Democratic Party apparatus in my county - and, Chairman, they are completely impotent.

I keep trying to spark something real: mutual aid drives, rent control pushes, strike support, literally anything that looks like power from below. Every time I bring it up, they give me the same line: “We love your passion, but now’s not the time.”

They spend all night talking about how much they “care” and how “change takes time,” but when it’s time to actually do anything - knock doors in working-class neighborhoods, challenge the landlord-aligned incumbent, show up to a picket line - they go limp. Suddenly they’re “still healing from 2016,” or “focused on electability,” or “not trying to alienate moderates.”

I’ve tried everything to get them going: policy white papers, turnout data, even gently suggesting that maybe corporations shouldn’t write our platform. Nothing. Just more performance, more edging, no payoff. The closest they get to passion is a strongly-worded email that lands in spam.

I’m starting to feel like I’m in a political situationship with a party that only wants to cuddle up to donors and never, ever finish anything they start. Am I expecting too much? Is there a way to coax actual action out of this flaccid little apparatus, or do I need to accept that this is as “hard” as liberalism ever gets?

Sincerely,
“Blue-Balled by the Big Tent”

Dear “Blue-Balled by the Big Tent,”

The local Democratic apparatus is not a partner with “performance issues.” It is performing just fine for the people it’s actually in bed with.

Right now, it absorbs energy, converts it into email lists and consultant invoices, and releases nothing but statements “welcoming further dialogue.” That’s not dysfunction, though, that’s the business model. You’re feeling political blue-balls because you keep mistaking a fundraising operation for a movement.

Stop diagnosing impotence where there is, in fact, fidelity - to their donors, not to you.

They’re not “struggling to find the courage” or “still healing from 2016.” They are very deliberately refusing to cheat on capital with the working class. Once you see that, a lot of things stop being confusing.

So what do you do with that?

First, redefine the relationship.
The Democratic Party does not love you, and it doesn’t deserve your love. It deserves your scrutiny and, at best, your conditional, transactional participation. Think of it as a vending machine that occasionally coughs up slightly less-awful policy when kicked hard enough. Use it when there’s a clear tactical reason. Do not wait around for it to hold you afterward.

Second, stop begging them to “want it” more.
You will never out-passion their donors. You could deliver a thousand people to a picket line and they’d still be anxiously refreshing a poll of “suburban moderates.” Take the energy you’re wasting trying to turn them on and give it to people who actually get excited about doing things:

Those are your people. That’s where you’ll feel cause-and-effect again.

Third, withhold what actually matters to them.
They do not care that you’re disappointed. They care if you stop supplying free labor and emotional cover. So:

You’re not obligated to keep refilling their legitimacy tank.

Go poly with your politics.
If ballot rules or local quirks mean you have to stay registered under their banner, fine. Keep the “primary partner” label on paper if you must. But emotionally and practically, start seeing other structures. Build organizations that don’t dissolve the minute the election-night pizza is gone. Let the party chase you for once.

If, one day, your local apparatus suddenly gets “in the mood” for rent control, strike support, and anti-corporate politics, it won’t be because you lit the right candles. It’ll be because you and your comrades built power somewhere else and scared them into pretending they were into it the whole time.

Don’t wait for liberalism to get hard. Build something that doesn’t depend on it.

Affectionately,
Chairman Mao

Once you’ve watched Democrats drain the life of their own shutdown leverage like a sacrificial lamb given to the patron saints of their centrist Santeria, Norms and Procedures, the next question becomes unavoidable: Why does this keep happening?

Why does every crisis - no matter who caused it - end with both parties walking away just fine, donors happier than ever, and the public clutching an empty bag that was supposed to contain “representation”?

Because dysfunction isn’t a failure. Dysfunction is the business model.

It took thirty-five days of frozen paychecks, crippled agencies, collapsing airports, and very cranky air traffic controllers to expose the truth most political professionals hint at only after drink three: a functioning government is deeply inconvenient for the people who actually run the country.

Let’s get into it.

When public institutions collapse, someone fills the vacuum - and shocker, it’s never you, me, the starving federal worker, or the guy whose only crime was renewing his passport in January.

No, the beneficiaries are always:

This isn’t a glitch.
It’s a perpetually open “business opportunity.”

Every broken agency is a new contract.
Every “temporary workaround” becomes a precedent.
Every crisis nudges public services several inches further into the private sector’s maw, directly translating to fistfuls of gains in elected officials’ private investment porfolios.

The longer the shutdown lasted, the clearer it became: a dysfunctional, shuttered government is simply a free-trial offer for privatization.

Republicans practically purr during shutdowns.
Cat-in-a-sunbeam levels of relaxation.

Government not working proves their core thesis: government shouldn’t work. Period. A shutdown is a live demonstration of their ideology, like performance art but with more evictions.

GOP incentives during dysfunction include, but are not limited to:

Shutdowns are a stress test for governance - and the GOP celebrates every failed test like it’s a touchdown.

But here’s the uncomfortable truth liberals often avoid:

Democrats don’t like chaos aesthetically, but they sure benefit from it strategically.

Shutdown crises give them everything they need to maintain their favorite identity:
the well-meaning but tragically constrained adult in the room.

During dysfunction, Democrats get:

Chaos is the only time they’re allowed to cosplay as insurgents while still governing like technocratic bystanders.

The shutdown let Democrats posture like they were on the brink of slaying the authoritarian dragon - while carefully ensuring their swords remained sheathed and their quivvers full of arrows.

The Bi-Partisan Industrial Complex runs on a simple trick:
make the public believe the parties disagree on everything, while ensuring they agree on the only things that matter to their donors.

On the surface, Democrats and Republicans fight like raccoons in a Walmart parking lot.
Underneath, the consensus is smoother than artisanal mayonnaise.

Things both parties will happily support, with minimal fuss and maximum secrecy:

Things they will never agree on publicly but will quietly converge around when the cameras stop rolling:

Political polarization may be real - but it is real in the way professional wrestling is real.
The conflict is performative.
The outcomes are scripted.
The audience is the product.

Dysfunction produces despair.
Despair produces disengagement.
Disengagement produces political freedom for elites.

Shutdowns, debt ceilings, CR cliffhangers - all of it operates like a national-scale learned helplessness experiment. You can only watch your government careen into crisis-mode so many times before you stop expecting anything better.

And once you expect nothing better, guess who wins?
Everyone with power.

A permanently overwhelmed electorate is one that:

Public exhaustion is the glue that holds bipartisan dysfunction together.
It is the invisible subsidy that fuels elite stability.

Shutdowns aren’t failures of governance; they are demonstrations of who governance belongs to. And every crisis confirms the same bleak answer: the American political system functions perfectly -as long as you accept that you are not its intended user.