Our long national nightmare is over, but the Democratic psychodrama isn’t.

The longest shutdown in U.S. history — with increasing pain points across the country, especially among travelers — is ending, while the Democratic recriminations are just getting started.

“It’s complete BS,” was a relatively mild take on the deal from one congressional progressive.

As a rule of thumb, government shutdowns are bootless exercises. They don’t work because the party that causes the shutdown, thinking that it will provide leverage, invariably gets blamed for the shutdown and then — surprise! — ends up in a worse position than where it began.

Democrats managed to escape the worst political fallout from their weeks-long refusal to fund the government. Otherwise, the tactic failed, and predictably so.

The shutdown was supposedly all about securing more Obamacare subsidies. This connection was entirely arbitrary, though.

At the beginning of the shutdown, the Democrats spun the wheel and the bouncing ball landed on “health care.”

They maintained it was so imperative that Republicans extend forever Obamacare subsidies first passed in 2021 and then re-upped in 2022 under Joe Biden — without a single Republican vote — that it was worth shutting down the government over.

Sure enough, the GOP held firm, and as the shutdown began to bite, Minority Leader Chuck Schumer reduced the ask to a one-year extension of the subsidies.

When that went nowhere, a band of relatively moderate Democratic senators broke ranks to support a deal for a Senate vote on continued subsidies. Not a guarantee of passage.

No, just a Senate vote that will probably fail.

No wonder progressives are livid, but isn’t that always the case? In the Trump years, to be progressive is to feel an implacable sense of impotence and rage.

On top of this, Schumer desperately wanted to appease the Democratic base. The aging New Yorker is so vulnerable to a potential primary challenge from progressive heartthrob Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez that he must look to her now like a wounded wildebeest does to a hungry lion.

Schumer had MSNBC viewers burning him in effigy earlier in the year when he refused to shut down the government. He didn’t want to make that mistake again, but the flaw was that it only meant delaying the inevitable.

Rather than infuriating their base by not shutting down the government, Democrats have infuriated their base by re-opening the government.

Most congressional Democrats realize that it would be unsustainable to continue to keep the government closed. Still, they aren’t going to let that get in the way of their posturing. They are both glad that people on their side are willing to do the right thing by voting to fund the government, and glad that these other people — not them — are taking the fall for it.

Notably, presumptive 2028 presidential hopefuls Gavin Newsom and Pete Buttigieg opposed the deal, knowing that maximal opposition to Trump is the price of entry in Democratic primary politics.

In short, the government shutdown may have been pointless and dumb, but there is much more where that came from.