With Rise of American Fascism, Shutdown Politics 'Predictable'

Republican senator from Texas, Ted Cruz. (Photo: AP)

In the midst of the ongoing government shutdown—with the GOP still trying their darndest to kill Obamacare and the global financial markets now truly jittery over the quite real possibility of a US default—those five words, found in Paul Krugman's Monday New York Times column, don't say it all, but they begin to tell a story long in the making.

If the current situation in Washington is a consternation to many observers, why so predictable to progressives and others like Krugman? He writes:

It has been obvious for years that the modern Republican Party is no longer capable of thinking seriously about policy. Whether the issue is climate change or inflation, party members believe what they want to believe, and any contrary evidence is dismissed as a hoax, the product of vast liberal conspiracies.

For a while the party was able to compartmentalize, to remain savvy and realistic about politics even as it rejected objectivity everywhere else. But this wasn’t sustainable. Sooner or later, the party’s attitude toward policy — we listen only to people who tell us what we want to hear, and attack the bearers of uncomfortable news — was bound to infect political strategy, too.

In short, when an individual—or a political party—commits to a world view fundamentally insulated from reality, it is only a matter of time before the wheels will come off the rails. Like a pathological liar, the truth finally catches up. For a gambling addict, the house will ultimately call the game.

Over the weekend, the takeaway news was that Speaker of the House Rep. John Boehner (R-OH) was either "lying" or "incompetent" when he claimed on a Sunday talk show that he didn't have the votes to pass a "clean CR" (continuing resolution) that would end the shutdown by funding the government without GOP riders or demands. The problem, of course—as many reporters and observers documented—was that it just wasn't factually true.

As The Hill reports:

Democrats have repeatedly called on Boehner to allow a vote on a so-called "clean" Senate bill that would reopen the government for a short period of time, but not include Republican demands to delay or defund ObamaCare.

A whip count by The Washington Post found that 20 Republican representatives supported a so-called clean continuing resolution (CR), with another four counted as "leaning yes." If all 200 Democrats voted for the legislation, they would need just 17 Republicans to vote with them.

Boehner made the comment during an interview on ABC's "This Week," after host George Stephanopoulos asked him if he was "prepared to schedule a clean bill on government funding."

When Stephanopoulos pressed Boehner on whether it was true that the votes did not exist, the Speaker said that the American people expected leaders in Washington to "sit down and have a conversation."

So what's at stake? According to Bloomberg on Monday, a voluntary default by the U.S. on its debt obligations would be "catastrophic" and lead to worse consequences than when the collapse of Lehman Brothers helped facilitate the financial crisis that swept the globe in 2008. The business paper reports:

Failure by the world’s largest borrower to pay its debt — unprecedented in modern history — will devastate stock markets from Brazil to Zurich, halt a $5 trillion lending mechanism for investors who rely on Treasuries, blow up borrowing costs for billions of people and companies, ravage the dollar and throw the U.S. and world economies into a recession that probably would become a depression. Among the dozens of money managers, economists, bankers, traders and former government officials interviewed for this story, few view a U.S. default as anything but a financial apocalypse.

The $12 trillion of outstanding government debt is 23 times the $517 billion Lehman owed when it filed for bankruptcy on Sept. 15, 2008. As politicians butt heads over raising the debt ceiling, executives from Berkshire Hathaway Inc.’s Warren Buffett to Goldman Sachs Group Inc.’s Lloyd C. Blankfein have warned that going over the edge would be catastrophic.

If nothing else, that's a view of how the global capitalists see the situation. But what it also reveals is confirmation of the argument presented by many that the modern day Republican Party has become hostage to its most radical and destructive elements. Once beholden to serve the leaders of global capitalism, the new Republican Party, dominated by the branding and rhetoric of the Tea Party, has seemingly lost its ability to even know what that is.

Chris Hedges, a freelance journalist and author of the American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America, writes on Monday, the rise in prominence of Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas is the best example of how the 'Christian right' and its "anti-Enlightenment" word view has taken over the party and in its lust for power, sabotaged the country's ability to govern itself. On the ideology of Cruz and his followers, which he terms 'American fascism,' Hedges writes:

They live in a binary world of black and white. They feel they are victims, surrounded by sinister groups bent on their destruction. They have anointed themselves as agents of God who alone know God’s will. They sanctify their rage. This rage lies at the center of the ideology. It leaves them sputtering inanities about Barack Obama, his corporate-sponsored health care reform bill, his alleged mandated suicide counseling or “death panels” for seniors under the bill, his supposed secret alliance with radical Muslims, and “creeping socialism.” They see the government bureaucracy as being controlled by “secular humanists” who want to destroy the family and make war against the purity of their belief system. They seek total cultural and political domination.

All ideological, theological and political debates with the radical Christian right are useless. It cares nothing for rational thought and discussion. Its adherents are using the space within the open society to destroy the open society itself. Our naive attempts to placate a movement bent on our destruction, to prove to it that we too have “values,” only strengthen its supposed legitimacy and increase our own weakness.

It is a mixture of this religious politics, combined with the financial self-interest of billionaires and ideologues—like "the Koch brothers, the political arm of the Heritage Foundation and others" described by Krugman—that fuels the current crisis. And though many step back and call the whole thing "political theater," the final act has yet to begin.

What was "predictable," according to Krugman, was that the GOP would ultimately end up in such a position where their aversion to facts would make them victims of reality. What is not yet clear—though predictions abound—is how the current impasse ends and what impact it will have on U.S politics leading into the 2014 election season and beyond.

With the Democratic Party also guilty in propping up a political system that fails to deliver the transformative change demanded by a world awash in war, economic inequality, and on the precipice of runaway climate change, the prospects for a new progressive era originating in Washington, DC are not only dim, but non-existent.

As Charles P. Pierce writes at Esquire on Monday morning, both parties—despite all warnings by social activists, progressives and Keynesian economists—have already agreed on austerity as a cure for the ongoing recession.

"For all the talk about how Republican extremism is finally catching up with the party," writes Pierec, "one can argue just as well that Wall Street-friendly, deficit-hawk, DLC-onomics is finally catching up with the Democratic party." He continues:

After all, if the shutdown ended tomorrow, the sequester would still be in place. Austerity still would be the tacitly agreed upon program for both parties, and Paul Krugman likely still would be drinking before noon. The administration's brilliant eleventy-dimensional chess in 2010 looks more and more like a case of being too smart by half. It created a new reality in which both sides decided that what a country barely out of a devastating recession really needed was some belt-tightening and some fiscal discipline.

And Richard Eskow, from Campaign for America's Future, writes, "The Democrats have already made too many concessions." What's needed, he says, is "for the people to take their government back from the extremists, before their empire collapses and takes us all down with it."

And Eskow gets no quarrel from Hedges, who writes:

The rise of Christian fascism is aided by our complacency. The longer we fail to openly denounce and defy bankrupt liberalism, the longer we permit corporate power to plunder the nation and destroy the ecosystem, the longer we stand slack-jawed before the open gates of the city waiting meekly for the barbarians, the more we ensure their arrival.

For the moment, however, how this "impasse" ends—and what rises in its ugly wake—continues to be a guess.

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