I was reading about the longest U.S. government shutdowns and they seem to all be from around the 1990s onwards. I don’t quite follow why this is the case: there was plenty of instances of extreme division in American governance throughout its history, far more extreme than the last few decades even. Why then is a government shutdown seemingly such a recent phenomenon?
Has the structure of government or party politics changed so drastically in the past few decades to allow for this new phenomenon? Or is it something else entirely? If anybody is able to chime in on why this is I’d love to find out.
The legal framework for them didn't exist until quite recently. There's no constitutional necessity for them and even with the passage of Antideficiency Act (The initial form of which dates to 1870 and which tried to prevent parts of the executive branch from playing chicken with Congress by spending excessively and effectively daring them to not appropriate more money) government agencies effectively presumed that Congress didn't really want them to suddenly stop spending money even if a strict reading of temporary funding gaps might suggest that.
In a functional sense shutdowns were invented by Benjamin Civiletti, then attorney general to the Carter administration, in a 1980 opinion on the Antideficiency Act. There were funding gaps in the late 70s before this which lead to partial shutdowns, but they didn't have the underlying legal demand that the 80s and onward had. The Carter administration's aggravation over Congress not passing appropriations bills on a regular basis was probably the underlying motivation behind the initially pretty stark reading of the Antideficiency Act.
So its been less than 40 years. Politics have changed substantially since then, but that's just an accelerant to the organic process of shutdowns becoming normalized. People get used to it as a normal tool of negotiation and not an aberrant horror which means they get used more often and trend longer in duration. Also there's been a lot of work around the edges making shutdowns minimally intrusive (if the president wants that, they have options to increase the aggravation factor for strategic reasons) which also encourages their use.