“We, the people, are the boss, and we will get the kind of political leadership, be it good or bad, that we demand and deserve.”
JFK
Competent democratic governance requires checks and balances between elected officials and their constituents, a tacit understanding that compromise is what allows the system to function so basic needs are met and crises are not self-induced. Good citizens respect the parameters “making the trains run on time” places on the pursuit of more parochial concerns. Conversely, good lawmakers understand that sometimes they have to say no to even their most ardent supporters, while saying yes to the other side of the aisle; this is called leadership.
Ideally, politicians come to office having devoted some thought to the relationship between their role as community leaders and the electorate, whose aspirations toward a range of policy issues they promise to reflect. It is no coincidence that US history holds in the highest esteem politicians willing to swim against the popular currents of their times because realities on the ground forced them to look past expediency.
Lincoln could have been a lot more like his predecessor, James Buchanan, and played down the reckoning that was at his doorstep. He didn’t, and historians generally consider him our greatest President, Buchanan one of our worst. FDR could have catered to the isolationists as Britain stood alone against the Blitzkrieg; most in America would have praised him for it, as Brits had Neville Chamberlain when he returned from Munich a couple years earlier, freshly inked deal with Hitler in hand. FDR understood what had to be done. FDR’s fifth cousin, macho Teddy Roosevelt, took plenty of heat for his strong support of women’s suffrage. He’s on Mount Rushmore.
The range between pandering and leading is as vast as the gulf between democracy and authoritarianism, or a grass roots activist and a populist within the thrall of a demagogue. Such spectrums are directly related to how vibrant or how wanting our civic process is. An apathetic citizenry, indifferent to its own civic welfare, creates an environment favorable to rank opportunists and their pursuit of callow ambitions very often at odds with the public interest.
The recent debt ceiling drama is the inevitable product of just such circumstances. Held captive by a Lord of the Flies GOP, whose membership is comprised of either those who pander to Fox/AM’s nihilist sedition or those too cowardly to stand against them, our governing process continues its descent into the abyss of MAGA extremism.
It’s important to remember Biden began this saga declaring what was right and essential: raising the debt ceiling and negotiating the budget are two entirely different exercises. One merely facilitates payment of liabilities already accrued, the other creates a plan for incurring future obligations. Any other view accepts the validity of manufacturing a global crisis.
Of course, it takes little imagination to conjure how bad things could become if the world’s leading economy defaults on more than $31 trillion of debt. Even attempting to minimize that scenario deserves the loss of all credence. It’s like contending that we’d still get up and go to work if only Chicago and Miami were nuked.
Yet there we were last week, 72 hours from detonation, the Senate “hoping” to pass the hasty package sent to it by the House. Despite risking an economic apocalypse, the deal contained only modest adjustments to current spending, a sizable share at the expense of the poorest and most marginalized, symbolic cruelty and nothing much else. What about the biggies, the real drivers of our structural spending spree? Defense, entitlements, massive tax cuts passed during full employment for no other reason than to ensure “fantastic numbers” during Trump’s 2020 re-election campaign? Nothing.
GOP debt ceiling brinksmanship has happened before. In 2011, the Tea Party, MAGA’s OG incarnation, took the Obama Administration to a similar cliff, insisting on budget cuts to match the amount of new credit required to pay debt the US had already incurred. The resulting standoff ended when House Speaker John Boehner realized he was dragged into battle by a platoon of Gomer Pyles, nihilist neophytes, ignorant and unconcerned about the massive damage they could cause, and clueless as to what they even wished to achieve.
The Tea Party Caucus of 2011, which was chaired by Michelle Bachman and included Mike Pence, would soon metastasize into a higher stage malignancy, Jim Jordan’s Freedom Caucus. Boehner retired rather than suffer the indignities inherent in supervising Jordan’s ship of fools. Later, in his memoir, Boehner was outspoken in his assessment of Fox/AM House members:
“Most of these guys who poke their heads up in these crises and vote ‘no’ on every compromise and claim they’re doing it all for ‘conservative principles’ don’t actually give a s— about fiscal responsibility…It’s not really about the money. It’s not about principle. It’s about chaos…. The far-right knuckleheads would refuse to back the House leadership no matter what, but because they were “insurgents” they never had the responsibility of trying to actually fix things themselves… So they got to ‘burn it all down.”
Right now, just as when Biden was finally certified in the wee hours of January 6th, or when it became clear the mid-term elections were not going to be a “Red Tsunami,” it’s easy to breath a sigh of relief that we dodged another bullet. Yet and still, at the end of the day, this episode is just another slip down the slope of normalizing MAGA’s relentless sabotage of the nation’s ability to function as a democratic concern. Moving forward it’s business as usual for Republicans to threaten to destroy the existing global order based on the outlandish lie that they have always sought fiscal constraint (Trump’s Republican Party contributed $7.8 trillion in deficits over only four years.) Moreover, the MAGA bloc who impel such insanity will never accept whatever ransom is finally agreed to as adequate to satisfy their demands. That is how nihilists operate.
The reprieve Biden just signed runs out on New Year’s Day, 2025. Expect the issue to be front and center during the 2024 Presidential campaign. Each of the two GOP primary frontrunners – who together account for, oh, about 100% of poll respondent preferences – made clear defaulting on the US debt would lose them not a moment’s slumber. Biden, if his national address is any indication. appears content to limit his messaging on the whole trauma to its happy ending and his boundless faith in bipartisanship. Meanwhile, it’s doubtful most “undecideds” will have strong opinions one way or the other on the entire issue by then. Better pray gas prices are down and Old Joe stays on his feet. The ruin of normalizing nihilist chaos. BC