Luckily for Democrats, polls repeatedly showed that the American people backed their framing. A Public Policy Polling/Center for American Progress poll released Sunday found that 52 percent of Americans blamed President Trump and Republicans for the shutdown. It also found that 58 percent of Americans wanted to include Dreamers as part of a package deal to reopen the government. Forty-two percent of Americans, the poll says, would have strongly supported this.

The deal Democrats agreed to instead amounted to not much more than they were offered by the Republicans immediately before the shutdown: an extension of government funds until Feb. 8, a six-year extension of the needlessly beleaguered CHIP program, and a pinky promise from Mitch McConnell that a vote on a DACA fix will be held before the latest round of government funding expires. That assurance from McConnell was evidently solid enough to win over Democrats who, exactly a year ago, were moaning endlessly about his theft of Merrick Garland’s Supreme Court seat. Even assuming clean, pure, and virginal intent on McConnell’s part, it is not at all certain that the House will even take up a DACA fix not attached to a must-pass spending bill. This was, really, the point of the shutdown, which, after just three days of dithering from Democrats and nauseating lectures fromRepublicansabout the harms of “manufactured” crises, is already over.

There may well be another shutdown in the coming weeks. But an opportunity was blown Monday. In 2013, the last shutdown, triggered by Republicans demanding the delayed implementation of Obamacare and spending cuts, lasted over two weeks. Since 1990, shutdowns have lasted, on average, 11 days. What might a competent party have done with that time? The shutdown was perhaps the first action by congressional Democrats that can properly be called “resistance.” In an act more significant than simply voting against nominees or bills in routine procedure, they briefly called government under this deeply, widely, and justifiably reviled administration to a halt. They could have, over the course of two weeks or so, taken a moral stand for a moral immigration policy—pushing until the bitter end for a clean DACA solution and proclaiming, with high rhetoric and theater, that all of our nation’s immigrants are worth fighting for. Substantively, this intransigence might have extracted concessions. Or it might not have. Either way, the Democrats would have both lifted the morale of the DACA enrollees who’ve been kicked around by this process and galvanized an activist base eager to see its representatives match their outrage and energy.

Then again, it’s plausible that a drawn-out showdown would have been purely depressing—treating us to more indignities like Illinois Rep. Luis Gutierrez, perhaps the most outspoken immigration advocate in Congress, conceding funding for the wall in desperation. This is where we’re at. A project that will be either dubious or outright laughable in implementation—publicly called a symbol of pig-headed xenophobia and bigotry by nearly all prominent Democrats at the beginning of this administration—will very probably be funded at the end of all this with their support, if a deal is ultimately passed. The largest changes to the legal immigration system in decades, proposals that would have been called far-right a year ago, have also been put on the table by the Democratic Minority Whip, Dick Durbin, who on Monday called DACA “the civil rights issue of our time.” If that is so, then it is fitting that this civil rights issue, like others past, will likely be resolved with a slimy compromise to be challenged by activists who are none too pleased. “Dems failed to fight & use their leverage to protect immigrant youth,” United We Dream co-founder Cristina Jimenez tweeted. “A false promise to vote on immigration from Rs is not a strategy to win. We won’t be fooled.”

This is the voice of the Democratic Party to come. Leaders like Schumer and Durbin might not realize it, but the people most likely to be the party’s standard-bearers in 2020 clearly do. Every top-tier contender in the Senate—Cory Booker, Kirsten Gillibrand, Kamala Harris, Bernie Sanders, and Elizabeth Warren—voted against Monday’s resolution. There’s some hope for the near-future in that. But for now, in the present and a year into the Trump administration, the only thing more astonishing than the man in the White House and the demands he’s made on our national conscience is the fecklessness of the party opposing him.

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