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The dictator of Belarus, Alexander Lukashenko, has signed an agreement with Russia to base Russian nuclear weapons in his country. The strategic impact of such a move is negligible, but a lot can go wrong with this foolish plan.

First, here are four new stories from The Atlantic:

The play that explains Succession (and everything else) The Russian red line Washington won’t cross—yet. COVID shots are still one giant experiment. AI is unlocking the human brain’s secrets. A Tense Summer

Russia has taken another step toward nuclearizing its satrapy in neighboring Belarus. This is bad news but not a crisis (yet). But first, I want to add a note to what I wrote a few weeks ago about the drone attack on the Kremlin.

I suggested that the weird strike on a Kremlin building was unlikely to be an act sanctioned or carried out by the Ukrainian government. My best guess at the time was that the Russians might be pulling some kind of false-flag stunt to justify more repression and violence against Ukraine as well as internal dissent in Russia. I didn’t think the Ukrainians would attack an empty building in the middle of the night.
The U.S. intelligence community, however, now thinks the strike could have been some kind of Ukrainian special operation. Those same American analysts, according to The New York Times, are not exactly sure who authorized action against the Russian capital:

U.S. intelligence agencies do not know which unit carried out the attack and it was unclear whether President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine or his top officials were aware of the operation, though some officials believe Mr. Zelensky was not.

That’s not much to go on, especially because the intelligence community’s confidence in this view is “low,” meaning there is at least some general, but not specific, evidence for it. The Americans suggest the attack may have been “orchestrated” by the Ukrainian security services, but that could mean any number of possibilities, including civilians, a small militia, a few people loosely affiliated with the Ukrainians, or even a commando team.

The best evidence, however, that this was not a false flag is that with the exception of firing a wave of missiles, the Russian government has said and done almost nothing in response either in Ukraine or in Russia. If Vladimir Putin’s security forces had engineered the incident, they’d almost certainly be taking advantage of it, but they’re not. Instead, the Kremlin seems paralyzed and has clamped down on any further reporting about the whole business; if the Ukrainian goal was to rattle Russian leaders, mission accomplished. So my theory has gone up in smoke—a hazard of trying to piece together an explanation while waiting for better evidence—but I thought it important to update you here.

Now, about those Belarus nukes.

Putin announced back in March that he intended to station nuclear arms in Belarus, a move that had Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko doing a bit of uneasy throat-clearing as he tried to stay in Putin’s good graces while being understandably nervous about hosting weapons of mass destruction in his fiefdom. The hesitation is over: Belarusian Defense Minister Victor Khrenin and Russian Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu yesterday signed a formal agreement allowing the deployment of Russian nuclear weapons in Belarus.

This would be the first time post-Soviet Russia has stationed nuclear weapons outside its own territory, but the bombs aren’t in Belarus yet. Lukashenko was in Moscow yesterday to attend a summit of the Eurasian Economic Forum, and although he claimed that the complicated process of relocating Russian nuclear bombs has already begun, I don’t believe him. (There I go again, theorizing in the absence of evidence. But Western intelligence agencies watch the movement of Russian nuclear weapons pretty closely, and so far, none of them has indicated that they see anything happening.) Besides, Lukashenko’s assertion wasn’t exactly definitive; when asked in Moscow if the weapons had already arrived, he said, “Maybe. I will go and take a look.”

Now, without getting too far over my skis, I will say that the leaders of countries with nuclear weapons in their territory know without exception whether they have them or not, and don’t need to “go and take a look.” Lukashenko’s flip comment suggests to me that he knows that nothing has been moved yet, and that he understands that his role in this dangerous sideshow is to play along with the Kremlin’s attempt to jangle Western nerves about nuclear war.

Putin, for his part, has said that storage facilities for Russian nuclear arms will be complete by July 1. Nuclear weapons, of course, require highly secure military installations and personnel trained in dealing with such systems, such as how to load them onto their delivery vehicles, and the unique safety precautions that surround them. Even in the best of times, nuclear weapons are a high-maintenance proposition, and accidents do happen: In 2007, an American B-52 flew across the United States with six nuclear bombs that the crew didn’t realize were mounted on the wings.

It’s also possible that Putin is squeezing political impact of a nuclear agreement while he still can, given recent questions about Lukashenko’s health. The Belarus strongman has looked weak lately. It would be very much Putin’s gangland style to make sure he gets Belarus as a stage for his nuclear threats as soon as possible, if he thinks the grim reaper is about to step in.

Putin’s July deadline is also important because it means the Russians will be moving nuclear weapons in the middle of what looks to be a summer of intense fighting. Such a timetable is probably intentional. The Kremlin boss believes that the West is deeply afraid of nuclear war, and he intends to play on that fear. Western leaders, of course, are deeply afraid of nuclear war, because they are not utter psychopaths. Putin and his generals, although brutal and vicious men, are afraid of it, too, no matter what they might say, because they are not suicidal. (So were Soviet leaders and their generals, as we learned after the Cold War.)

What Putin fails to understand, however, is that years of struggling with the Soviet Union taught the United States and its allies how to contend with an aggressive Kremlin and the dangers of escalation at the same time. Putin, as I often note, is a Soviet nostalgist who longs for the old Soviet empire and who still seems to believe that a weak and decadent West will not continue to oppose him.

As ever, I worry not about Putin’s deliberate move to start World War III, but about some kind of error or accident when transferring nuclear weapons from one paranoid authoritarian country to another. Putin may well place nuclear weapons close to Ukraine and then claim that NATO is threatening Russia’s nuclear deterrent, thus provoking a crisis he thinks will induce the West to back away from supporting Kyiv. This would be yet another harebrained blunder in a series of poor moves, but Putin, as we know, is not exactly a master strategist. It’s going to be a tense summer.

Related:

“Lukashenko is easier to unseat than Putin.” The irreversible change in Belarus Today’s News A South Carolina circuit-court judge has temporarily blocked the state’s six-week abortion ban, one day after Governor Henry McMaster signed it into law. A House committee led by Texas Republicans recommended the impeachment of State Attorney General Ken Paxton yesterday, citing years of alleged lawbreaking and misconduct. The Mississippi police officer who shot Aderrien Murry, an unarmed 11-year-old Black boy, has been suspended with pay as the shooting is investigated. Dispatches Work in Progress: The hottest trend in investing is mostly a sham, James Surowiecki writes.

The Books Briefing: Books editor Gal Beckerman breaks down what you should be reading this summer—just in time for the season’s unofficial start.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

Evening Read Carlos Lopez-Calleja / Disney

A Chinese American Show That Doesn’t Bother to Explain Itself

By Shirley Li

Growing up in suburban New Jersey, I dreaded having new visitors over. I wasn’t asocial; I just feared that anyone who wasn’t Chinese—as in, the majority of my classmates—wouldn’t understand my family home and all of its inevitable differences from their own. Even if they didn’t ask me about the cultural objects they might stumble upon around the house, I felt the need to explain what they were seeing, in order to make them comfortable. We have this taped to the wall because it’s the Chinese character for fortune! These hard-boiled eggs are brown because they’ve been soaked in tea! In an attempt to prove that my surroundings were perfectly normal, I turned myself into a tour guide, and my own home into a sideshow.

American Born Chinese doesn’t bother with such disclaimers. The Disney+ show, now streaming, is exuberant and unabashed about its hyper-specific focus on the Chinese American experience.

Read the full article.

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Jennifer Egan: Martin Amis taught me how to be funny.

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Culture Break Kailey Schwerman / Showtime

Watch. Yellowjackets’ Season 2 finale (streaming on Showtime) made a terrible mistake.

Listen. To the first episode of the newly launched Radio Atlantic podcast with host Hanna Rosin, on whether the war in Ukraine can recapture the world’s attention at a crucial moment.

Play our daily crossword.

P.S.

This is my last Daily for the next week or so, as I am headed off for some sunshine and downtime, but senior editor Isabel Fattal and our colleagues at The Atlantic will keep things as lively here as ever. (This newsletter will be off on Monday for Memorial Day, so look for the next edition on Tuesday.)

With vacation on my mind, I want to recommend a gem of a movie about Las Vegas that has lived in the shadow of Martin Scorsese’s Casino (an undeniable masterpiece) for too long. Twenty years ago, William H. Macy, Maria Bello, and Alec Baldwin starred in The Cooler, one of the bleakest movies about Sin City since Leaving Las Vegas. Macy plays a “cooler,” a guy whose bad luck is so contagious that the casinos hire him to stand near people who win too much money at the tables.

It’s a love story and a crime story, but it’s also about old Vegas becoming a new (and sillier) Vegas. Back then, developers were making an inane attempt to transform an industry mostly devoted to gambling, booze, and sex into a theme park for families. Alec Baldwin—who was nominated for Best Supporting Actor—rails against it all in a rant about the Strip circa 2002: “You mean that Disneyland mook fest out there? Huh? That’s a fucking violation is what that is. Something that used to be beautiful, used to have class, like a gorgeous high-priced hooker with an exclusive clientele … It makes me want to cry, because I remember the way she used to be.”

I cheer him on every time. See you in a few weeks.

— Tom

Katherine Hu contributed to this newsletter.

If you are willing to lie very still in a giant metal tube for 16 hours and let magnets blast your brain as you listen, rapt, to hit podcasts, a computer just might be able to read your mind. Or at least its crude contours. Researchers from the University of Texas at Austin recently trained an AI model to decipher the gist of a limited range of sentences as individuals listened to them—gesturing toward a near future in which artificial intelligence might give us a deeper understanding of the human mind.

The program analyzed fMRI scans of people listening to, or even just recalling, sentences from three shows: Modern Love, The Moth Radio Hour, and The Anthropocene Reviewed. Then, it used that brain-imaging data to reconstruct the content of those sentences. For example, when one subject heard “I don’t have my driver’s license yet,” the program deciphered the person’s brain scans and returned “She has not even started to learn to drive yet”—not a word-for-word re-creation, but a close approximation of the idea expressed in the original sentence. The program was also able to look at fMRI data of people watching short films and write approximate summaries of the clips, suggesting the AI was capturing not individual words from the brain scans, but underlying meanings.

The findings, published in Nature Neuroscience earlier this month, add to a new field of research that flips the conventional understanding of AI on its head. For decades, researchers have applied concepts from the human brain to the development of intelligent machines. ChatGPT, hyperrealistic-image generators such as Midjourney, and recent voice-cloning programs are built on layers of synthetic “neurons”: a bunch of equations that, somewhat like nerve cells, send outputs to one another to achieve a desired result. Yet even as human cognition has long inspired the design of “intelligent” computer programs, much about the inner workings of our brains has remained a mystery. Now, in a reversal of that approach, scientists are hoping to learn more about the mind by using synthetic neural networks to study our biological ones. It’s “unquestionably leading to advances that we just couldn’t imagine a few years ago,” says Evelina Fedorenko, a cognitive scientist at MIT.

The AI program’s apparent proximity to mind reading has caused uproar on social and traditional media. But that aspect of the work is “more of a parlor trick,” Alexander Huth, a lead author of the Nature study and a neuroscientist at UT Austin, told me. The models were relatively imprecise and fine-tuned for every individual person who participated in the research, and most brain-scanning techniques provide very low-resolution data; we remain far, far away from a program that can plug into any person’s brain and understand what they’re thinking. The true value of this work lies in predicting which parts of the brain light up while listening to or imagining words, which could yield greater insights into the specific ways our neurons work together to create one of humanity’s defining attributes, language.

[Read: The difference between speaking and thinking]

Successfully building a program that can reconstruct the meaning of sentences, Huth said, primarily serves as “proof-of-principle that these models actually capture a lot about how the brain processes language.” Prior to this nascent AI revolution, neuroscientists and linguists relied on somewhat generalized verbal descriptions of the brain’s language network that were imprecise and hard to tie directly to observable brain activity. Hypotheses for exactly what aspects of language different brain regions are responsible for—or even the fundamental question of how the brain learns a language—were difficult or even impossible to test. (Perhaps one region recognizes sounds, another deals with syntax, and so on.) But now scientists could use AI models to better pinpoint what, precisely, those processes consist of. The benefits could extend beyond academic concerns—assisting people with certain disabilities, for example, according to Jerry Tang, the study’s other lead author and a computer scientist at UT Austin. “Our ultimate goal is to help restore communication to people who have lost the ability to speak,” he told me.

There has been some resistance to the idea that AI can help study the brain, especially among neuroscientists who study language. That’s because neural networks, which excel at finding statistical patterns, seem to lack basic elements of how humans process language, such as an understanding of what words mean. The difference between machine and human cognition is also intuitive: A program like GPT-4, which can write decent essays and excels at standardized tests, learns by processing terabytes of data from books and webpages, while children pick up a language with a fraction of 1 percent of that amount of words. “Teachers told us that artificial neural networks are really not the same as biological neural networks,” the neuroscientist Jean-Rémi King told me of his studies in the late 2000s. “This was just a metaphor.” Now leading research on the brain and AI at Meta, King is among many scientists refuting that old dogma. “We don’t think of this as a metaphor,” he told me. “We think of [AI] as a very useful model of how the brain processes information.”

In the past few years, scientists have shown that the inner workings of advanced AI programs offer a promising mathematical model of how our minds process language. When you type a sentence into ChatGPT or a similar program, its internal neural network represents that input as a set of numbers. When a person hears the same sentence, fMRI scans can capture how the neurons in their brain respond, and a computer is able to interpret those scans as basically another set of numbers. These processes repeat on many, many sentences to create two enormous data sets: one of how a machine represents language, and another for a human. Researchers can then map the relationship between these data sets using an algorithm known as an encoding model. Once that’s done, the encoding model can begin to extrapolate: How the AI responds to a sentence becomes the basis for predicting how neurons in the brain will fire in response to it, too.

New research using AI to study the brain’s language network seems to appear every few weeks. Each of these models could represent “a computationally precise hypothesis about what might be going on in the brain,” Nancy Kanwisher, a neuroscientist at MIT, told me. For instance, AI could help answer the open question of what exactly the human brain is aiming to do when it acquires a language—not just that a person is learning to communicate, but the specific neural mechanisms through which communication comes about. The idea is that if a computer model trained with a specific objective—such as learning to predict the next word in a sequence or judge a sentence’s grammatical coherence—proves best at predicting brain responses, then it’s possible the human mind shares that goal; maybe our minds, like GPT-4, work by determining what words are most likely to follow one another. The inner workings of a language model, then, become a computational theory of the brain.

[Read: ChatGPT is already obsolete]

These computational approaches are only a few years old, so there are many disagreements and competing theories. “There is no reason why the representation you learn from language models has to have anything to do with how the brain represents a sentence,” Francisco Pereira, the director of machine learning for the National Institute of Mental Health, told me. But that doesn’t mean a relationship cannot exist, and there are various ways to test whether it does. Unlike the brain, scientists can take apart, examine, and manipulate language models almost infinitely—so even if AI programs aren’t complete hypotheses of the brain, they are powerful tools for studying it. For instance, cognitive scientists can try to predict the responses of targeted brain regions, and test how different types of sentences elicit different types of brain responses, to figure out what those specific clusters of neurons do “and then step into territory that is unknown,” Greta Tuckute, who studies the brain and language at MIT, told me.

For now, the utility of AI may not be to precisely replicate that unknown neurological territory, but to devise heuristics for exploring it. “If you have a map that reproduces every little detail of the world, the map is useless because it’s the same size as the world,” Anna Ivanova, a cognitive scientist at MIT, told me, invoking a famous Borges parable. “And so you need abstraction.” It is by specifying and testing what to keep and jettison—choosing among streets and landmarks and buildings, then seeing how useful the resulting map is—that scientists are beginning to navigate the brain’s linguistic terrain.

This fall, millions of Americans might be lining up for yet another kind of COVID vaccine:  their first-ever dose that lacks the strain that ignited the pandemic more than three and a half years ago. Unlike the current, bivalent vaccine, which guards against two variants at once, the next one could, like the first version of the shot, have only one main ingredient—the spike protein of the XBB.1 lineage of the Omicron variant, the globe’s current dominant clade.

That plan isn’t yet set. The FDA still has to convene a panel of experts, then is expected to make a final call on autumn’s recipe next month. But several experts told me they hope the agency follows the recent recommendation of a World Health Organization advisory group and focuses the next vaccine only on the strains now circulating.

The switch in strategy—from two variants to one, from original SARS-CoV-2 plus Omicron to XBB.1 alone—would be momentous but wise, experts told me, reflecting the world’s updated understanding of the virus’s evolution and the immune system’s quirks. “It just makes a lot of sense,” said Melanie Ott, the director of the Gladstone Institute of Virology, in San Francisco. XBB.1 is the main coronavirus group circulating today; neither the original variant nor BA.5, the two coronavirus flavors in the bivalent shot, is meaningfully around anymore. And an XBB.1-focused vaccine may give the global population a particularly good shot at broadening immunity.

At the same time, COVID vaccines are still in a sort of beta-testing stage. In the past three-plus years, the virus has spawned countless iterations, many of which have been extremely good at outsmarting us; we humans, meanwhile, are only on our third-ish attempt at designing a vaccine that can keep pace with the pathogen’s evolutionary sprints. And we’re very much still learning about the coronavirus’s capacity for flexibility and change, says Rafi Ahmed, an immunologist at Emory University. By now, it’s long been clear that vaccines are essential for preventing severe disease and death, and that some cadence of boosting is probably necessary to keep the shots’ effectiveness high. But when the virus alters its evolutionary tactics, our vaccination strategy must follow—and experts are still puzzling out how to account for those changes as they select the shots for each year.

In the spring and summer of 2022, the last time the U.S. was mulling on a new vaccine formula, Omicron was still relatively new, and the coronavirus’s evolution seemed very much in flux. The pathogen had spent more than two years erratically slingshotting out Greek-letter variants without an obvious succession plan. Instead of accumulating genetic changes within a single lineage—a more iterative form of evolution, roughly akin to what flu strains do—the coronavirus produced a bunch of distantly related variants that jockeyed for control. Delta was not a direct descendant of Alpha; Omicron was not a Delta offshoot; no one could say with any certainty what would arise next, or when. “We didn’t understand the trajectory,” says Kanta Subbarao, the head of the WHO advisory group convened to make recommendations on COVID vaccines.

And so the experts played it safe. Including an Omicron variant in the shot felt essential, because of how much the virus had changed. But going all in on Omicron seemed too risky—some experts worried that “the virus would flip back,” Subbarao told me, to a variant more similar to Alpha or Delta or something else. As a compromise, several countries, including the United States, went with a combination: half original, half Omicron, in an attempt to reinvigorate OG immunity while laying down new defenses against the circulating strains du jour.

And those shots did bolster preexisting immunity, as boosters should. But they didn’t rouse a fresh set of responses against Omicron to the degree that some experts had hoped they would, Ott told me. Already trained on the ancestral version of the virus, people’s bodies seemed to have gotten a bit myopic—repeatedly reawakening defenses against past variants, at the expense of new ones that might have more potently attacked Omicron. The outcome was never thought to be damaging, Subbarao told me: The bivalent, for instance, still broadened people’s immune responses against SARS-CoV-2 compared with, say, another dose of the original-recipe shot, and was effective at tamping down hospitalization rates. But Ahmed told me that, in retrospect, he thinks an Omicron-only boost might have further revved that already powerful effect.

Going full bore on XBB.1 now could keep the world from falling into that same trap twice. People who get an updated shot with that strain alone would receive only the new, unfamiliar ingredient, allowing the immune system to focus on the fresh material and potentially break out of an ancestral-strain rut. XBB.1’s spike protein also would not be diluted with one from an older variant—a concern Ahmed has with the current bivalent shot. When researchers added Omicron to their vaccine recipes, they didn’t double the total amount of spike protein; they subbed out half of what was there before. That left vaccine recipients with just half the Omicron-focused mRNA they might have gotten had the shot been monovalent, and probably a more lackluster antibody response.

Recent work from the lab of Vineet Menachery, a virologist at the University of Texas Medical Branch, suggests another reason the Omicron half of the shot didn’t pack enough of an immunizing punch. Subvariants from this lineage, including BA.5 and XBB.1, carry at least one mutation that makes their spike protein unstable—to the point where it seems less likely than other versions of the spike protein to stick around for long enough to sufficiently school immune cells. In a bivalent vaccine, in particular, the immune response could end up biased toward non-Omicron ingredients, exacerbating the tendencies of already immunized people to focus their energy on the ancestral strain. For the same reason, a monovalent XBB.1, too, might not deliver the anticipated immunizing dose, Menachery told me. But if people take it (still a big if), and hospitalizations remain low among those up-to-date on their shots, a once-a-year total-strain switch-out might be the choice for next year’s vaccine too.

Dropping the ancestral strain from the vaccine isn’t without risk. The virus could still produce a variant totally different from XBB.1, though that does, at this point, seem unlikely. For a year and a half now, Omicron has endured, and it now has the longest tenure of a single Greek-letter variant since the pandemic’s start. Even the subvariants within the Omicron family seem to be sprouting off each other more predictably; after a long stint of inconsistency, the virus’s shape-shifting now seems “less jumpy,” says Leo Poon, a virologist at the University of Hong Kong. It may be a sign that humans and the virus have reached a détente now that the population is blanketed in a relatively stable layer of immunity. Plus, even if a stray Alpha or Delta descendant were to rise up, the world wouldn’t be caught entirely off guard: So many people have banked protection against those and other past variants that they’d probably still be well buffered against COVID’s worst acute outcomes. (That reassurance doesn’t hold, though, for people who still need primary-series shots, including the kids being born into the world every day. An XBB.1 boost might be a great option for people with preexisting immunity. But a bivalent that can offer more breadth might still be the more risk-averse choice for someone whose immunological slate is blank.)

More vaccination-strategy shifts will undoubtedly come. SARS-CoV-2 is still new to us; so are our shots. But the virus’s evolution, as of late, has been getting a shade more flu-like, and its transmission patterns a touch more seasonal. Regulators in the U.S. have already announced that COVID vaccines will probably be offered each year in the fall—as annual flu shots are. The viruses aren’t at all the same. But as the years progress, the comparison between COVID and flu shots could get more apt still—if, say, the coronavirus also starts to produce multiple, genetically distinct strains that simultaneously circulate. In that case, vaccinating against multiple versions of the virus at once might be the most effective defense.

Flu shots could be a useful template in another way: Although those shots have followed roughly the same guidelines for many years, with experts meeting twice a year to decide whether and how to update each autumn’s vaccine ingredients, they, too, have needed some flexibility. Until 2012, the vaccines were trivalent, containing ingredients that would immunize people against three separate strains at once; now many, including all of the U.S.’s, are quadrivalent—and soon, based on new evidence, researchers may push for those to return to a three-strain recipe. At the same time, flu and COVID vaccines share a major drawback. Our shots’ ingredients are still selected months ahead of when the injections actually reach us—leaving immune systems lagging behind a virus that has, in the interim, sprinted ahead. Until the world has something more universal, our vaccination strategies will have to be reactive, scrambling to play catch-up with these pathogens’ evolutionary whims.

As clocks across Washington, D.C., struck 1 on the morning of March 4, 1879, the Capitol bustled with activity. Sleepless tourists packed its halls; Cabinet secretaries stayed huddled in consultation with congressmen; diplomats and socialites remained shoulder-to-shoulder in the Senate viewing gallery, transfixed by the scene unfolding below them.

They were all witnessing a grimly fascinating event—one that few Americans had, until that moment, thought possible: Their government was about to run out of money. More startling, the reason for its insolvency was not some economic crisis, nor war, but a deliberate act of sabotage. For the first time, one party had decided to withhold federal funding in an attempt to extort policy change from the other.

Modern Americans have grown tragically accustomed to party politics interrupting the core functions of government. Federal shutdowns seem to come and go like bad-weather events. President Joe Biden and Speaker Kevin McCarthy are currently sparring over what it will take for Congress to raise the nation’s debt ceiling so that we don’t default on our debts. That is what makes the country’s first self-inflicted funding crisis so fascinating: In the events informing the almost-shutdown of 1879—and the force that eventually resolved it—are lessons that might help us snap out of what has become an awful national habit.

The possible 1879 shutdown was devised with a particularly nefarious policy goal in mind. The House was controlled by the Democratic Party, whose representatives wanted to force Republican President Rutherford Hayes to yield what remained of Black voting rights in the post-Reconstruction South. To achieve this, they attached “riders” to crucial funding bills in the spring of 1879—addendums explicitly banning federal troops from monitoring southern polling sites against violence or fraud. When Hayes refused to sign these, Congress adjourned on March 4 without having passed sufficient funds for the government to operate. The president was forced to immediately summon a special session.

The battle had been met, but already its outcome was essentially decided. The Democrats’ unprecedented attempt to use their budgetary influence to secure policy change was doomed to fail, for three reasons.

The first was the president’s refusal to come to the bargaining table. From the onset of the funding standoff, Hayes expressed outrage at both its goal (as a friend had explained to him: to help Democrats “kill with impunity so many negroes as … to frighten the survivors from the polls of the South”) and its brazenness. He ruled out any compromise, promising to veto any new funding bills containing the riders. “It will be a severe, perhaps a long contest,” he wrote. Still, Hayes continued, “I do not fear it. I do not even dread it.”  

The second reason for the shutdown’s futility presented itself after Hayes’s announcement. Now confident in White House support, House Republicans—led by future President James Garfield—developed an aggressive floor plan aimed at publicly confronting Democrats for gambling with the economic and social well-being of the country.

Garfield’s March 29 House speech launching this strategy shocked even Republicans with its vigor. Arms waving, the minority leader spent an hour accusing Democrats of treason for taking the government fiscally hostage. Garfield was a famously mild-mannered presence in Congress, but he could not contain his fury at the abuse of procedural power on display. He decried it as a potential deathblow to the country:

The House has today resolved to enter upon a revolution against the Constitution and government of the United States … the Democratic Representatives declare that, if they are not permitted to force upon the other house and upon the Executive, against their consent, the repeal of a law … this refusal will be considered sufficient ground for starving this government to death. That is the proposition which we denounce as revolution. On this ground we plant ourselves, and here we will stand to the end.

The effect was immediate. Garfield’s speech sent some Democrats scurrying to tell journalists that they didn’t support the shutdown. Others persisted in passing funding bills with the offensive riders attached, but President Hayes fulfilled his promise to veto these. Ultimately, though, the final and most important reason America’s first federal shutdown failed was that citizens were appalled by it.

Bankers publicly decried the impact of the crisis on “the business interests of the country.” Voters buried Democratic congressmen with letters and petitions demanding an end to the nonsense. Most devastating, America’s early comedians had a banner season; all through the spring, major papers ran joke columns about the partisan tail-chasing in Congress (“The dessert always reminds me of the veto, because it is the last thing on the bill”).   

Eventually, House Democrats got the message. A freshman from Texas joined their caucus in June. New colleagues asked whether voters had elected him to add “backbone” to the shutdown fight. No, he solemnly replied, the people wanted not backbone, “but brains” in Congress for a change.

Democrats caved by late June, passing funding bills that mostly contained only scaled-down, meaningless riders. These Hayes duly signed into law. “Was there ever anything more ridiculous?” the secretary of state harrumphed as things in Washington finally got back to normal.

Modern Americans can answer this question with an embarrassed “yes.” What was once dismissed as absurd has been normalized. Though the issues at stake have changed, Garfield’s warnings of a future wherein Congress can abuse its power of the purse to “starve” the rest of government for policy concessions have been validated. It is almost certainly a reason Americans mistrust government (and Congress in particular) more than ever.

So long as officeholders of either party continue to view budget standoffs as possible political boons, all Americans suffer. Fortunately, the parable of 1879 shows how this “new normal” might be reversed—if enough citizens commit themselves to leading the charge.

We certainly have more ways to do so than ever before. Business leaders can get on television to communicate the dire economic consequences of petty political fights—as they recently have. Through social media, average Americans can focus their frustration directly on fiscal saboteurs in the House. Humor—whether from late-night hosts or TikTok stars—can “go viral” in a way that 19th-century columnists would only marvel (and probably grimace) at.

In the long run, though, ending the politics of fiscal sabotage will still require Americans to take their dissatisfaction with it to the ballot box, as we have before. There is something comforting in that.