The Republican Party is not so much in thrall to its tea party wing as it is in thrall to its continued existence as a minority party that still wields power. As that power declines in polling places and the court of public opinion, Republicans had two choices: Evolve, or begin practicing slash and burn politics.
The current Republican modus operandi greatly relies on a tactic the party brain trust observed in Cold War international politics. Republicans saw how the Soviet Union, despite its slow decline, managed to hang onto power and amplify itself through the frequent use what Secretary of State John Foster Dulles called "brinkmanship."
The debt ceiling standoff is only the latest example of that brinkmanship, and it's fast reaching a point where opponents may be forced to respond in kind, leading to complete political dysfunction or worse.
Much of the analysis of Republican Party intransigence both at the national and state levels concerns the apparent impact of the so-called tea party. Tea party Republicans allegedly are uninterested in compromise and thus drive the party's somewhat more moderate leadership to the right politically as those leaders attempt to placate their base. Or so goes conventional wisdom.
But while tea party Republicans clearly are very right of center and often demonstrably inflexible, there's a much more important factor at work here. The Republicans are now holding onto power mainly through the frequent and wide-reaching use of brinkmanship.
That word was conjured by President Dwight Eisenhower's secretary of state, John Foster Dulles, to describe the Soviet Union's approach to international policy during the Cold War of the 1950s. Brinkmanship was most evidently realized in a pair of international crises -- the Soviet blockade of West Berlin resulting in the US-led Berlin airlift campaign to resupply the city in 1948 and 1949, and the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, where US and Soviet military forces nearly came to blows over the USSR's emplacement of nuclear missiles on that island nation.
Brinkmanship tactics, by the Dulles understanding, involve threats that are continuously escalated -- sometimes just by one side, sometimes by all sides. The threats need to be credible if the aggressor is to have any chance of actually obtaining capitulation. The best defense against brinkmanship is to respond with similar escalating threats. It is a flawed and risky defense in that there is always the chance one side or another will not back down, forcing a final confrontation. Often, however, one side (the USSR, in both the above mentioned incidents) did back down and disaster was averted.
The Republican Party, which has seen support for its policy ideas diminishing over time and its hold on elected office increasingly tenuous, arguably has amplified its remaining power by resorting to brinkmanship of its own. This tactic has been used on a small scale, as when one elected Republican member of the US Senate threatens to prevent a vote on a Democratic president's judicial nominations unless other unrelated concessions are made; on a medium scale, as when Republicans refuse to reauthorize the Federal Aviation Administration, forcing a shutdown of some commercial air operations; and on a large scale, as in the current standoff over raising the national debt ceiling -- a move that was routine and frequent during Republican and Democratic rule in the past.
Again, the GOP forces in the House and Senate do not simply wish to negotiate the size of the debt ceiling or even for the most part to debate its value in principle. Rather, with the exception of some tea party members, the party's elected representatives insist that they will not allow the ceiling to be raised unless specific concessions are made by Democrats. These primarily involve deep cuts to discretionary federal spending.
When Democrats sought in exchange to find a compromise on the type and scope of fiscal concessions,, the game of brinkmanship began in earnest. President Barack Obama insisted that any spending cuts be accompanied by higher federal taxes on the wealthiest Americans and reductions in some tax credits and other loopholes in the tax code. Republicans promptly refused all such increases.
Both sides have now played the brinkmanship game, with progressive Democrats insisting that cuts in Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid benefits to lower and fixed income Americans are unacceptable. Thus there are now two hard sides to the battle, with the president still trying to find some compromise position in between.
The Republicans appear to have been winning the confrontation as the president has continued to move towards their stated demands. Republicans, in turn, have kept moving those demands further rightward away from Democratic positions, continuing their brinkmanship.
The danger, of course, is that Democrats finally will draw their own line in the sand (already happening, starting with progressive House members, then some senators, and finally perhaps even Obama himself). If the Republicans persist in their brinkmanship, therefore, their threat of refusing to lift the debt ceiling will be realized even though most of the key leaders in their party have now stated flatly that this would be a bad outcome.
However, as even some key Republicans have recognized in the past, brinkmanship carried out to its final outcome is a lose-lose proposition. For example, Republican and Democratic leaders alike profess to believe, that negotiating with terrorists or hostage takers is counterproductive in that it encourages more of the same behavior. Yet Republicans have not hesitated in the face of otherwise dwindling political power to to seek their goals using figurative hostage-taking, this time in the form of an impending international fiscal crisis.
Politics is understood as the art of making a deal and getting along, with necessarily involves compromise. This necessity rankles the most ideological of political players who opt of of the process of finding accord, especially when their side clearly has less influence in the traditional process. That is why despite polls showing a sizable majority of Americans do not support the GOP position on the debt ceiling and service cuts, the party continues its push toward a final reckoning.
At some point, no matter the cost, Democrats will have to not only draw a line in the sand, but build a firewall. Otherwise, GOP success in obtaining concessions in exchange for permission to continue the ordinary business of government will breed even more brinkmanship. Otherwise, the day is close when the federal government will become totally dysfunctional.
In international politics, brinkmanship was leavened by another term of art, "mutually assured destruction." If the USSR and the US did not find ways to work out their differences on a continuing if not permanent basis, then both sides knew that brinkmanship more likely could lead to nuclear war. Even so conservative a political figure as Ronald Reagan knew that he had to deal with the Soviets, and even work towards reductions in nuclear stockpiles.
The current breed of Republican thinking does not permit such cooperation or compromise with the other side, at least not on a wholesale basis. The party, rather than changing itself to accommodate changing times, has merely amplified its existing predilections. Like dinosaurs caught in tar pits, the party's ideological machinery is too weighty to escape the pull of destruction. Its only hope now is to get others to help it pull free, at their own peril. Some might now regard any cost as worth it if the party is left to slowly sink away.
