A World Power Paralyzes Itself

Nothing works in Washington any more. In an embarrassing performance, we are witnessing a world power paralyzing itself on the public stage. Day after day, the budget battle in which the U.S. is entangled produces one grotesquery after another. Next Monday, discussions over the Atlantic free trade zone were scheduled to resume, but the Americans had to tell the European Union it had to cancel. The American negotiators couldn’t travel to Brussels — at least not professionally. They, like 800,000 other government employees, had been furloughed without pay.

Since Oct. 1, the most powerful nation in the world has been closed for business until further notice. The U.S. Congress wasn’t able to come up with a budget by that deadline date. After Oct. 1, the shutters came down on government agencies. Shutdown. The United States shuts itself down if it hasn’t agreed on a new budget with which to pay its bills at the end of the fiscal year. Thereafter, only essential tasks are funded. A good one-third of the government workforce is currently off the job.

As befits a chief diplomat, John Kerry called the shutdown a “moment of political silliness” that would soon pass. That’s an understatement because some congressional representatives have been acting silly for months too long already. Over the past three years, Republicans have tried to overturn Obamacare, the president’s signature accomplishment, more than 40 times. In the meantime, they managed to lose elections and had the U.S. Supreme Court rule against them. But none of that dampened their fervor. They still refuse to pass a budget unless Democrats agree to put Obamacare into cold storage. Now Obama is fed up with that and has refused to cave in to their extortion, gambling on a theater of the absurd production on which the curtain just went up in front of an astonished audience.

It’s not the first shutdown in U.S. history. Statisticians tell us it is the 18th shutdown since 1976. They all ended within a few days. Memories of the most recent shutdown are still vivid in Democrats’ memories. Republicans shut the government down over the Christmas holidays in 1995 by not agreeing to sign Bill Clinton’s budget, an action for which they paid dearly in following elections.

That all plays a part in Obama’s political calculations. The longer the shutdown lasts, the more angered the public will probably get about Republican treatment of their weakened president who has been trying to get Congress to pass legislation. In the near future, the stakes in this budget poker game will be raised. By Oct. 17, Congress must raise the statutory debt limit. If it isn’t raised from the current limit of $16.7 billion, the United States will default on its debt. The global economy is likely to be adversely affected then as well.

America is experiencing more than just a “moment of silliness,” it appears to be stuck in an “era of silliness.” The polarization of American politics is dragging the country to the brink of indecisiveness. The Founding Fathers created a system of government that required compromise because they were aware that individuals are all different. That is now proving to be a flaw in the system because over the past decade, the art of compromise seems to have been lost. The middle class is shrinking and the tenor of the debate is now being set by ideologues like the tea party on the Republican fringe. They no longer consider the whole picture of what is best for the nation; they only consider their own ideology — and their own prospects when the next election rolls around.

That is the only real solution to the problem: Voters have to punish politicians unwilling to accept compromise. But that is hardly likely as long as an aggressive U.S. media provides an echo chamber for these abominable oversimplifiers.