In time of panic and crisis, all sorts of crazy things happen. About two weeks ago, over twenty Republicans on Capitol Hill met with reporters and lustily proclaimed their willingness to destroy the nation's credit rating and economy if they did not get exactly what they wanted. Someone called them the “Deficit Caucus;” a better term would have been “economic death caucus.” Somehow they thought the nation would reborn in a form they liked if they could pull off its economic destruction. Senator Rand Paul said he hoped the nation went into default. After the debt ceiling was concluded, Representative Jason Chaffetz bragged that “We would have taken it down.” He was pleased that he and his kind possessed so much destructive power.
Several factors must be in place before a significant part of the citizenry starts talking about bringing down its own government. One is that there must be a significant erosion of the sense of mutual obligation and common purpose and solidarity. These things come about when a society has become disaggregated, which has been happening in the United States since the 1980s. The second necessary ingredient is the confluence of several crises which so threaten large numbers of people.
In the case of the United States, it is not just the Tea Baggers who seem deranged. There were many who were not technically Tea Baggers who were willing to hold the financial system hostage. For many, it was a willingness to see default before they would accept a higher personal tax bill. A surprising number of Republicans childishly overlooked the terrible consequences of loss of credit rating and simply hoped default meant government would still pay some bills but would no longer pay welfare or support programs to assist the poor. That is what was meant by their efforts to list what bills should be paid.
The alienation against the rest of America and our government goes well beyond the ranks of the Tea Baggers. It includes others who will threaten havoc to save their tax cuts, and it includes the legions who want to somehow head off the coming of pluralistic America.
If Governor Rick Perry enters the Republican primary, his following will provide some measure of how many people share his deep, destructive anger. He has talked about taking up arms against the United States, and has also discussed secession and nullification. Sane and responsible observers on his side of the aisle--as they say--- should be be pointing out that this sort of man has already disqualified himself for the presidency.
Fellow Republicans will not mention this because he speaks for so many. Respectable economists calculate that the budget and debt ceiling deals-negotiated through rule or ruin tactics-- will detract at least 1% from economic growth. The media talking heads dare not report this findingf because so many Americans saw nothing wrong with nearly destroying our financial system. The crisis is deeper than most think.
These people are totally alienated from the rest of American society and deeply hate "it" -- the United States government. They are an economically secure element that would rather bring down the government than pay one dollar more in taxes, especially to provide entitlements for people they think do not deserve them, minorities and the poor. Representative Mike Kelly saw the debt ceiling crisis as the first step toward slashing Social Security and Medicare.
American society had been heading toward a genuine crisis for some years. Since the 1980s, the position of the middle class has been in decline. Good-paying middle class jobs are becoming harder to find as more jobs are off-shored. To maintain a household's standard of living, more than one member has had to go to work. The middle class share of the nation's wealthy has declined while the share of the top 2% had grown larger and larger. Liberals have tried to address these problems but were effectively rebuffed with claims they were arousing class conflict. Today, the counter charge is that they are attacking “job creators.”
The problem runs deeper. Americans have a profound belief in the American Dream, the notion that any good person who is honest, diligent, hard working and sufficiently thrifty will climb the social ladder and prosper. It has become harder and harder to believe this; and many know at some level that their children and grandchildren may not enjoy the full fruits of the American dream. The American Dream is the fundamental social belief structure of almost all Americans. They want to hang on to it even though there remains little empirical evidence to support it.
The basic uneasiness about the future of the Middle Class is joined by uneasiness for out physical security, growing out of the terrible events of 9/11. Add to this the anxiety many feel about decaying family structures, single-parent households, and a host of similar problems. There has been growing concern that the United States is becoming a multicultural, pluralistic nation, and the election of an African American president ignited these concerns into raging fires. Extraordinary numbers of Americans were convinced Barack Obama was born in Africa and was some sort of African socialist. All these fears and threats were brought to boiling poinnts by the economic and financial crises of 2007-2009.
There are many frameworks with which to analyze this. The most useful that of Anthony Wallace's revitalization movement hypothesis. In its third stage—where we are now-- almost everyone sees that something or things are very wrong in the United States. Some people react by questioning what were basics: the American dream, the myth of unrestrained market capitalism, American exceptionalism, and even what they might call American imperialism.
Others, and they are far more numerous, respond by refusing to admit that common beliefs and notions have badly broken down. They redouble their belief in the American Dream and unrestrained market capitalism. Historically, those who want to keep things as they were or to return to imaginary purer state of the status quo come to be embrace intolerance, nativism, Social Darwinism, and sometimes violence. They find emotional comfort in hanging onto what they think is the sanctioned conventional wisdom, which cannot fail in the long-run. Their's is a political fundamentalism that is very powerful and can have a long duration.
Society will eventually move from this third, conflict ridden phase of revitalization, to the fourth stage, when some sort of synthesis will emerge. Older folks will have little influence on what emerges, except by that they try to tell people coming of age now. The latter are the most convinced that the existing order and its idea systems do not work. What will emerge will have some elements of the old order and traditional conventional wisdom. The elements that will be added can be worthwhile or malignant. What is added will contribute to some kind or order and stability. It could be something we progressives find undesirable, elements of a soft fascism. It is important now to contribute ideas and information that could eventually influence a paradigm shift that would be good for society. At the moment, the facts and ideas we contribute do not phase the right-wing extremists or most of our fellow citizens. In the long run, our contributions can have a positive effect.
The important thing now is not to buy into the foolish “cuts create jobs” narrative in hops of preserving some seats in Congress or even holding onto the presidency a bit longer.
This social science model best fits what is going on now. It may not be perfect. Theodor W. Adorno once wrote that when empirical science cannot be used to come up with explanations, one should resort to the most promising theoretical models.