I should perhaps confess that on September 11 last, once I had experienced all the usual mammalian gamut of emotions, from rage to nausea, I also discovered that another sensation was contending for mastery. On examination, and to my own surprise and pleasure, it turned out be exhilaration. Here was the most frightful enemy–theocratic barbarism–in plain view… I realized that if the battle went on until the last day of my life, I would never get bored in prosecuting it to the utmost.
Christopher Hitchens made that ugly little confession. Today, safely on the other side of the government’s two week shutdown, I’m feeling a similar shame.
The embarrassing truth is that for those who work in and around politics, the shutdown was great. It was something to gossip about, write about, get indignant about. It was exciting! And it was good for business.
For the press, acknowledging this is easy enough: that discipline has had a lot of practice at explaining its responsibility to document travesties without averting them. Here’s Robert Costa making the transition from “guy who works with Jonah Goldberg” to “conservative press corp dean / less creepy reincarnation of Bob Novak.” He’s far from the only writer lamenting-the-shutdown-but-not-really:
Sigh. I miss the crisis already.— Josh Barro (@jbarro) October 16, 2013
Real talk: These wild demands from Congressional Republicans were great for Web traffic. The standoff will be missed.— Matt Yglesias (@mattyglesias) October 16, 2013
The effect exists outside of the media. The shutdown was good to those of us who occuppy ourselves watchdogging the government. Here’s my friend Josh Tauberer, who runs GovTrack.us:
Web traffic to the vote pages finally peaking, ending 16 days of profit.— Joshua Tauberer (@JoshData) October 17, 2013
I can sympathize. Sunlight’s blog saw a modest 10% boost in traffic during the shutdown relative to the two weeks preceding it. But our iOS and Android mobile apps, which provide information about Congress, saw usage spikes of 186% and 195%, respectively. We don’t sell ads, but our funders care about those numbers. And I’ve probably fielded more press calls in the last two weeks than the preceding six months (admittedly, many of these have been about healthcare.gov’s failures, not Congress’s, but I think that’s still in the neighborhood of profiting from human misery).
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the people most responsible for the shutdown have benefited from its effects, too. We’re still tallying the latest quarterly numbers, but anecdotal reports indicate that the crisis helped people like Ted Cruz raise a lot of money. Fundraising emails from both parties latched onto the shutdown as a moneymaker right from the start.
I spent the final days of the shutdown at a conference in San Francisco, where I gossipped with a fellow traveler about a shared acquaintance’s new-ish cable news show, and how a shutdown-prompted ratings boost had taken it safely off the bubble. And Twitter analytics tell me that I went from an average of 12.7 tweets per day to a manic 17.8 during the shutdown! Oh, the fun that I had!
This wasn’t true for many people who depend on a federal paycheck. Although my girlfriend was glad enough to have a nasty deadline moved by the shutdown, when I callously referred to “workers being paid for sitting around doing nothing” on an internal office listserv, I invited several deservedly angry replies from the spouses of feds. My friend Dave is a Capitol Hill staffer; for him this episode has meant incredibly-longer-than-usual work days and the possibility of a nonsensical pay cut (staffers are already badly underpaid).
And this is to say nothing of the cancer patients who had to delay treatment, or the people on SNAP and WIC who faced the very real prospect of going hungry because of Washington’s preening.
It’s not that I think we should be ashamed, exactly. I’m genuinely proud of the work that I and my colleagues did during the shutdown. People wanted the information we provided. We think it’s important, and we’d have been fools not to respond to a sudden surge of public interest in the mission we pursue every day. I think that every non-legislator mentioned above should be proud of the work they did, too. I was disgusted by this crisis, and I said so, but I couldn’t stop it–none of us could.
But it’s worth owning up to the fact that the incentives within the D.C. media-nonprofit-industrial complex are terrible. S&P says this escapade wasted $24 billion. We have to stop doing this. Removing these processes from the realm of human theatrics, gossip and competition will be a necessary component of that change. Mostly, that means getting rid of the debt ceiling and electing better legislators. But part of it might also be about having less fun.