Uncle Sam has closed up shop.

The federal government shut down on Wednesday, as Congress failed to extend its annual appropriations. Now, food will go uninspected, Superfund sites uncleaned, and IRS helplines unanswered. Millions of Americans will suffer from disrupted government services, hundreds of thousands of federal workers are liable to miss paychecks, and economic growth will likely slow.

What explains our government’s latest act of self-sabotage? At first glance, the shutdown seems to be rooted in disputes about health care policy. Republicans back a bill that would maintain existing government funding levels for seven weeks while the two parties negotiate over a broader budget. Democrats, by contrast, say that any new spending bill must extend the Affordable Care Act’s enhanced health insurance subsidies — which are set to expire at year’s end — and reverse President Donald Trump’s Medicaid cuts.

But the shutdown is not really about health insurance. Democrats could have backed the GOP’s seven-week funding extension, while still holding out for their preferred health care policies in negotiations over a long-term budget. Put differently, forcing a shutdown right now was not actually necessary to save the ACA’s enhanced tax credits or reverse Trump’s Medicaid cuts. Yet Democrats chose to embrace procedural hardball, anyway.

In truth, the shutdown was born out of the interaction between three related, big-picture developments in American politics, none of which concern the details of fiscal policy:

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