Authoritarians worldwide have discovered how to exploit a weakness in democratic opposition: they weaponize our compassion against our principles. It’s a nasty tactic but an effective one. Create unbearable suffering. Wait for your opponents’ empathy to overwhelm their resolve. Then offer relief in exchange for political surrender.

The authoritarian doesn’t need to win arguments or offer genuine compromise. They need only inflict enough pain that resistance becomes morally unbearable.

Republicans understood this perfectly. They denied federal workers their pay and threatened food aid for millions—not to achieve any policy goal, but to demonstrate their willingness to hurt people indefinitely. The cruelty was the strategy. They were testing how much innocent suffering Democrats would tolerate before breaking.

To understand where this leads, study Viktor Orbán’s playbook in Hungary. When he returned to power in 2010, he manufactured crisis after crisis—economic emergency, migration panic, pandemic fear. Each time, opposition parties faced the same cruel calculus: resist and be blamed for deepening the crisis, or acquiesce and hope to fight another day.

Every surrender seemed rational. The crises were real. People suffered. The opposition couldn’t justify obstruction that would worsen immediate pain. So they voted for temporary emergency powers. They accepted limited executive authority. Orbán was teaching them to surrender. Each capitulation lowered the bar for the next. By the time they realized they needed to fight, they’d already given away the tools to resist. Hungarian democracy died through a series of reasonable-seeming surrenders to manufactured crises.

The shutdown deal represents precisely this kind of incremental collapse. Democrats secured nothing substantive, just a promise of a December vote on healthcare subsidies. Not actual policy. Not binding commitments. A vote that will almost certainly fail, leaving them in an identical position next month.