If you’ve been doom scrolling the news about the debt ceiling negotiations, you may be feeling a mix of disbelief, despair, and anger as it drags on. Republicans seem to shrug off the Jan. 6 insurrection, and now their attitude includes potentially setting the U.S. economy afire, and by extension the world’s economy, with what amounts to a seeming shrug. The world must be looking askance at us crazy Americans for whom a dalliance with self-imposed hardship seems to be treated as a sport of the privileged. If they can invent reasons, aka deflect, for everything from Clarence Thomas being railroaded, to claims the FBI is a liberal bastion whose wheels turn only to get Trump, then they can easily go in for any theater no matter the potential to rain misery.
Nothing shows a careless attitude better than what Colorado’s Republican Rep. Ken Buck had to say about the debt showdown.
I don’t think there’s a panic. We’ve done this so many times with the budget and the omnibus. People like drama," the Colorado Republican told CNN. "There's not a panic for me. And I don't hear that from any of my friends."
“People like drama.” Where can one even start. No, just no. Not me, thanks. They are playing at great risk, for the sake of prioritizing dollars into uber wealthy pockets that would never be missed, but would be so valued by the poor. The world does not necessarily like the kind of drama you can’t stream at will. When you are manufacturing a drama, it might be better to not involve the GDP, retirement accounts, or a reversal of economic gains. Who in their right mind would think otherwise? Not all of us go in for the MAGA, kamikaze way of handling things, even if it’s for self-aggrandizement. This process had been normalized under the outsize influence of rich donors who have the power to twist the untenable into the accepted.
The worst outcome of this “negotiation” should not even be a thing. It’s times like this my brain goes to its go to reactionary fantasy solutions: if women ran the “show” we would find a common ground, compromise, and we would know better than to put the world through such irresponsible risk, with games and brinkmanship which to my mind are of a decidedly alpha male variety disregarding anything in its path — not to say women don’t aid and abet. And so we wait while the “drama” continues on a channel we can’t change.
I’m so happy for Ken Buck that he isn’t in a panic. Maybe he knows something we don’t know. Yes, we have been to this dance before, several times. It always works out in the end, we’re told. But such a cavalier attitude is the mask under which something more sociopathic lay.
The human brain can know things but still not comprehend. We are under the influence of this little thing called denial. The craziness of the Republican party, led by its pathologist in chief who makes bullhorn obvious anything that might be a little under the surface, has shown us who they are and the lengths they are willing to go to prove it. If they throw the whole world under a bus, I guess we will finally know where their bottom is.
Is the media culpable in some of this? Have they somehow made the recurring issue of the debt ceiling debate nothing more than a ho hum, business as usual narrative? Should they have spoken up more and called it what it is- a ritual of mass psychosis? Could they be a better scold, shame the Republicans to sit out this game for the good of the country? Jason Linkins at TNR seems to think so.
A deal may not be possible; it won’t take but a handful of House Republicans to scuttle any sort of bipartisan offering. So it may be too early to say that Biden is breaking his vow not to repeat the mistakes his former boss made in 2011.
But this might be a good occasion to point out the other big mistakes that have brought us to this point. Namely, those of the political media, who can rightly be said to have spent the last decade botching their coverage of the debt ceiling, mainly by failing to speak one plain truth: We keep getting dragged to the brink of default because the GOP has become a gang of extremists. This is villainy—their villainy—and the media has let them off the hook by treating this psychosis as all part of the natural order.
The people voted for their President to do their bidding and spend as they saw fit. A budget which was approved is now being ransacked, dismantling what the people have made clear they wanted. Sounds familiar — the m.o. displayed at the insurrection. Your vote means nothing. And that is the most anti-democratic, authoritarian, pathological outcome of all.
They did do this to Obama, but in the Trump era, it’s 2011 on steroids. There is very little of a sense of cooperative obligation left in Congress.
It seems the nail biter in all of this is that Republicans might be willing to tank things to maintain their status quo at all costs: maintain cushiness for the rich, cut services for those in need. This is indeed unsettling.
However, what I view as most problematic is the sheer FARCE of it all. We don’t really know if they are bluffing. How can we have any certainty it’s mere strategy when we have seen what they are capable of? Can we be sure the extremists of the party aren’t capable of the worst thing? It’s not just Biden; we are all held hostage by the not knowing. We are in the dark with this game — that’s what generates a state of unease for so many, even more than other extreme behaviors. You kind of know where you stand with an insurrection.
At any rate, I know where I’d like them to put their manufactured chaos.