james fallows on shutdown/debt-ceiling/ACA crises

[MBS]

http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2013/09/your-false-equivalence-guide-to-the-days-ahead/280062/

. . . please don't lose sight of these three essential points:

As a matter of substance, constant-shutdown, permanent-emergency governance is so destructive that no other serious country engages in or could tolerate it. . . .

As a matter of politics, this is different from anything we learned about in classrooms or expected until the past few years. . .
This time, the fight that matters is within the Republican party, and that fight is over whether compromise itself is legitimate.Outsiders to this struggle -- the president and his administration, Democratic legislators as a group, voters or "opinion leaders" outside the generally safe districts that elected the new House majority -- have essentially no leverage over the outcome. I can't recall any situation like this in my own experience, and the only even-approximate historic parallel (with obvious differences) is the inability of Northern/free-state opinion to affect the debate within the slave-state South from the 1840s onward. Nor is there a conceivable "compromise" the Democrats could offer that would placate the other side.

As a matter of journalism, any story that presents the disagreements as a "standoff," a "showdown," a "failure of leadership," a sign of "partisan gridlock," or any of the other usual terms for political disagreement, represents a failure of journalism . . . and an inability to see or describe what is going on. . . This isn't "gridlock." It is a ferocious struggle within one party, between its traditionalists and its radical factions, with results that unfortunately can harm all the rest of us -- and, should there be a debt default, could harm the rest of the world too.
. . .

In case the point is not clear yet: there is no post-Civil War precedent for what the House GOP is doing now. It is radical, and dangerous for the economy and our process of government, and its departure from past political disagreements can't be buffed away or ignored. If someone can think of a precedent after the era of John C. Calhoun, shown above in Mathew Brady's famous portrait, let me know.

The Civil War allusions particularly strike a chord. Another columnist this morning referred to the Tea Party et al as "the New Confederacy", which seems to me a sadly apt description of their essentially destructive, secessionist agenda: how better to describe a group of fanatics whose explicit aim is to shut down the government and to wreck our economy merely because they don't like a bill that was duly passed by proper democratic legislative processes?

[MBS]

1. the columnist who dubbed Tea Party "the new confederacy" . .

is Colbert King, in the Washington Post. It's a powerful piece:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/colbert-king-the-tea-party-resurrects-the-spirit-of-the-old-confederacy/2013/10/04/95b37f6e-2c7b-11e3-97a3-ff2758228523_story.html

A short excerpt:

The New Confederacy, as churlish toward President Obama as the Old Confederacy was to Lincoln, has accomplished what its predecessor could not: It has shut down the federal government, and without even firing a weapon or taking 620,000 lives, as did the Old Confederacy’s instigated Civil War. Not stopping there, however, the New Confederacy aims to destroy the full faith and credit of the United States, setting off economic calamity at home and abroad — all in the name of “fiscal sanity.” Its members are as extreme as their ideological forebears. It matters not to them, as it didn’t to the Old Confederacy, whether they ultimately go down in flames. So what? For the moment, they are getting what they want: a federal government in the ditch, restrained from seeking to create a more humane society that extends justice for all. . .

. . But don’t go looking for a group by the name of New Confederacy. They earned that handle from me because of their visceral animosity toward the federal government and their aversion to compassion for those unlike themselves. They respond, however, to the label “tea party.” By thought, word and deed, they must be making Jefferson Davis proud today.

[Liberal_Stalwart71]

2. I need to make a slight revision, since we're referring to The New Confederacy...

how better to describe a group of fanatics whose explicit aim is to shut down the government and to wreck our economy merely because they don't like the black man who was duly elected to serve in the White House as our nation's 44th president.

[MBS]

3. yeah, spot on.

unfortunately.