qotd: "A kind of politics we have not seen for more than 150 years"

[phantom power]

The details are complicated, but 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. The United States can afford it only because we are -- still -- so rich, with so much margin for waste and error. Details on this and other items below.*

As a matter of politics, this is different from anything we learned about in classrooms or expected until the past few years. We're used to thinking that the most important disagreements are between the major parties, not within one party; and that disagreements over policies, goals, tactics can be addressed by negotiation or compromise.

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 in this fight. 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. For instance: the "dig in their heels" headline you see below, which is from a proprietary newsletter I read this morning, and about which I am leaving off the identifying details.

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, harm the rest of the world too.

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

[Laelth]

1. k&r for the truth (or, at least part of it). n/t

-Laelth

[randome]

2. Very well written. The GOP is losing its grip on reality.

[hr][font color="blue"][center]You should never stop having childhood dreams.[/center][/font][hr]

[Warpy]

3. The party bosses are losing their grip on the party

and the article is correct in that 150+ years ago, we saw the demise of the Whigs over internal battles. They couldn't get it together to nominate their own incumbent president as their candidate. They sputtered on for a few years as a local party, but then they died out completely.

We might be seeing the same thing going on with the Republicans. The Whigs' deal with the devil was with the abolitionists. Those went on over to the fledgling Republican Party after the Whigs self destructed.

This time it's the radical reactionaries who will be stomping off in disgust and heaven help the country if they're ever fully in power.

[muriel_volestrangler]

4. From one of the links: calling this hostage-taking isn't fair - to hostage-takers

Calling what Congress is doing hostage-taking isn't really fair -- to hostage-takers, said Andrew Rudalevige, a government professor at Bowdoin College. That's because a criminal's job is to take things and get away, and hostages can be a means to that end, he explained. By contrast, Congress' main job "is making sure the government operates and is stable." Therefore, Rudalevige concluded: "Hostage-takers are doing their job, however perverse that is, while the Congress is not."

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dan-froomkin/government-shutdown-coverage_b_3988794.html