The bipartisan compromise to end the recent federal shutdown struck by eight Senate Democratic caucus members should be celebrated for reasons that go beyond the obvious ones: reopening the government, restoring food stamps to 45 million poor and working-class households that rely on them, avoiding chaos in the nation’s air traffic system, unwinding layoffs and providing back pay to more than 1 million federal employees.

Just as important, the deal broke the stranglehold that “party unity” has over leaders, members and media at the Capitol, one that has turned Congress into a failed and dysfunctional institution unable and unwilling to address or resolve the most pressing problems facing the nation.  

Rather than being excoriated as “traitors” to their party, the senators ought to be hailed for the courage to try a different way of doing legislative business, one in which members of Congress put the interests of country and district over party and craft the kind of reasonable bipartisan compromises that a majority of Americans want or are willing to accept.

I find it rather hypocritical that Democrats who have repeatedly mocked and excoriated Republicans for their cowardice in caving to the bullying of their president and party leaders are now excoriating their colleagues who resisted considerable pressure to toe the party line. 

And it speaks volumes about the embarrassingly cramped view members have of their own role that several have called for the ouster of Charles E. Schumer as Senate Democratic leader because he failed to prevent the eight from defecting. 

These kind of criticisms flow from the misguided view, rampant in both parties, that in the existential battle for the soul of American democracy, the only thing that matters is winning, and that the only way to win is to stay united until the other side capitulates or is crushed in the next election. In this model, the job of party leaders is to enforce party unity and message discipline, with any compromises negotiated by party leaders. Members are reduced to chanting poll-tested talking points like members of the chorus in a Greek tragedy that never ends. 

The problem with the party unity model, of course, is that in our system of divided government, with an evenly divided electorate, it has led Congress down the path toward near-total dysfunction. Party unity is the problem, not the solution. 

Rather than criticizing the eight colleagues for their display of leadership, Democrats would do better to spend their time and energy working to pick off those moderate Republicans willing to support a reasonable extension of Affordable Care Act health insurance subsidies that Democrats adopted as their righteous cause. 

Let’s remember how Democrats got to this point.

It wasn’t that Democrats were so concerned about expiring insurance subsidies that they decided to make them their key demand for agreeing to fund the government this year.

In fact, you barely heard a word about the insurance subsidies in the months leading up to the shutdown from those Democrats now accusing their colleagues of unforgivable treason. Rather, Democrats were so furious with President Donald Trump’s unconstitutional power grabs that they had already decided to shut down the government, only then hitting upon the insurance subsidies as the most politically favorable issue to justify it.

Indeed, before those subsidies were increased to deal with the extraordinary economic and health threats of the pandemic, Democrats were rather proud of the original Obamacare formula of limiting premiums to somewhere between 2 percent and 10 percent of income for households with incomes up to 400 percent of poverty (roughly $125,000 for a family of four). But now that the pandemic has ended, some Democrats would have us believe that returning to the old formula and rolling back the pandemic add-ons — which amounted to $2,000 to $3,000 a year for a family of four — would mean the end of civilization as we know it.

Yes, the average premium is slated to increase by 114 percent. But that speaks as much to the generosity of the emergency aid and the high cost of health insurance as it does to the stinginess of the original subsidy formula. Surely there is room here for a partial, gradual phaseout at a time of runaway budget deficits. 

Could Democrats have won such a compromise if they had just stuck together and kept the shutdown going another week or two — or 10?

Weren’t Republicans on the ropes after crushing electoral losses in Virginia, New Jersey and California? 

Not according to the eight Democratic caucus members who were actually talking to the Republicans who would be most amenable to compromise. Indeed, based on those conversations, their judgment was that while those Republicans were unwilling to break ranks on the shutdown itself, they might be open to a reasonable compromise when faced with an up-or-down vote next month as higher premiums got closer to taking effect.  

Getting that guaranteed vote was not nothing.

If the Hang-Tough Democrats are right that Republicans were so scared by the election results that they were about to give ground on insurance subsidies, then by the same logic, the outcome of that vote on insurance subsidies cannot be a foregone conclusion.

A win would not only be a win for Democrats and millions of working-class households, but a win for giving members of Congress the political space to be independent legislators again, free of the suffocating demands of party unity. A loss would give Democrats a potent and credible issue to bring into the next election. 

The party that bills itself as the champion of democracy might want to exhibit a bit more faith in the democratic process.

Steven Pearlstein is director of the Fixing Congress Initiative at the University of Pennsylvania. He was a longtime writer and columnist for The Washington Post. He is also Robinson Professor of Public Affairs at George Mason University. The views expressed here are his own.