Democrats are about to learn the same lesson Republicans have several times before them: like a nuclear war, nobody wins a government shutdown.

That’s not for lack of trying. The federal government has been shut down for more than 40 days, as it took 15 Senate votes for Democrats to relent and allow a short-term funding bill to pass.

Virtually every government shutdown of the past 30 years has been resolved with the passage of a short-term funding bill. None has ever succeeded in forcing major policy changes on an unwilling president or majority, though shutdowns have become increasingly common.

The House Freedom Caucus, which has often backed shutdowns as a way to pressure Congress into cutting federal spending, hailed Monday night’s Senate vote to move toward reopening the government as “a complete and total win” for the group of conservative lawmakers.

It’s an irony that won’t be lost on longtime Washington insiders. Progressives are angry at the eight Senate Democrats who crossed the aisle to vote with Republicans in reopening the government. Unlike the Freedom Caucus, progressives wanted to use the government shutdown to increase spending and fight President Donald Trump.

Democrats thought they were winning the shutdown. Even though a Democratic filibuster was preventing a short-term funding bill from passing and thereby directly causing the shutdown, polls showed pluralities blaming Trump. The off-year election results seemed to validate these poll numbers and the Democrats’ overall approach, with bigger-than-expected wins in Virginia and New Jersey, both states with a large number of federal workers.

Federal workers were already conditioned to be wary of Trump after Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency cuts earlier this year and his efforts to bring the Washington bureaucracy to heel. The media coverage has often been friendly to Democrats’ shutdown talking points.

Republicans control the White House and both houses of Congress, which makes it hard to evade responsibility, while not everyone is familiar with the Senate filibuster rules. Trump has spent most of his second term exerting his will over the government, and has been active on every front from international diplomacy to White House renovations during the shutdown. Voters might assume that if Middle East peace is on the table, surely Trump can do something about reopening the government.

Even so, enough Democrats decided there was nothing to be gained by keeping the government closed indefinitely. The disruptions to holiday air travel and government benefits would be too great.

“Many of my friends are unhappy. They think we should have kept our government closed indefinitely to protest the policies of the Trump administration,” Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL) said on the Senate floor. “I share their opinions of this administration, but I cannot accept a strategy which wages political battle at the expense of my neighbor’s paycheck or the food for his children.”

Most Democrats in Congress have disagreed with Durbin, at least in public. Some are surely privately grateful that a handful of Senate Democrats caved. But this is less true of their outside progressive allies.

“If Trump wanted to cancel flights over Thanksgiving rather than keep health care costs down, I don’t see why Democrats should save him from making his priorities so exquisitely clear,” liberal New York Times columnist Ezra Klein wrote. “And I worry that Democrats have just taught Trump that they will fold under pressure. That’s the kind of lesson he remembers.”

This wasn’t just about Obamacare. “Democrats said the shutdown was about the subsidies, but for most of them, it wasn’t,” Klein continued. “It was about Trump’s authoritarianism. It was about showing their base — and themselves — that they could fight back. It was about treating an abnormal political moment abnormally.”

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) especially needs to show this to the base, which revolted when he sided with 10 Democrats in averting a shutdown back in March.

But all this flies in the face of what Democrats have said about government shutdowns dating back to when Bill Clinton was president and Newt Gingrich was House speaker. They have long treated using shutdowns to win unrelated policy fights or make grand political statements as a form of hostage-taking. Now Democrats have provoked the two longest government shutdowns on record, no small feat for the party of big government.

THE SHUTDOWN PARTY 

It’s possible attempts to reopen the government will fall apart in the House, where there is no filibuster, but Republicans have only a tiny, fractious minority. Democrats may well feel better about shifting the debate to healthcare, a tough issue for Republicans, without the immediate threat of a shutdown. 

For now, this shutdown seems likely to end like so many before — as an exercise in futility.