The conservative “negotiating” principle that dare not say its name
by David Atkins
As a local activist I often find myself dealing with local Republicans and the talking points they get filtered down through the conservative media apparatus. The most frequent one over the last few days has been that Democrats “just won’t compromise.” It hardly needs to be spelled out how ridiculous that is, but Greg Sargent does a very good job today as the government shutdown appears to be careening toward both a shutdown and debt default crisis:
But what about Democrats? Aren’t they planning to use the debt limit as leverage, too?
Yes. But here again, the difference in how each side is using it as leverage again requires Dems not to give ground.
Republicans suggest — again, without saying so outright — that the debt limit gives them leverage because their refusal to raise it threatens a level of harm to the country that Dems will not be able to accept. They suggest (with varying degrees of candor) that because of this, Dems will make unilateral concessions to them that otherwise they wouldn’t have to make. (Remember: In agreeing to raise the debt ceiling — and enabling the U.S. to pay debts already incurred – Republicans would not be conceding anything; they agree it must happen to preserve the country’s full faith and credit.)
By contrast, Democrats say the debt limit gives them leverage in the sense that it will mean Republicans will ultimately have to drop their demand for unilateral Dem concessions. Because Republicans ultimately will not allow widespread harm to the country, goes this reasoning, they will in the end have no choice but to stop asking for a reward in exchange for averting it. Get the difference? One side is dangling the threat of widespread economic harm (again, without clarifying whether they’re actually willing to let it happen) to extract concessions from the other. The other side is evoking that awful prospect in order to rebuff efforts to use it to extract concessions from them.
I’m hardly the first to point out this basic imbalance. Jonathan Chait, Steve Benen, Brian Beutler, James Fallows, and others have all done so at length. And yet, no matter how many times it is outlined, Republicans and their sympathizers, and even some neutral commentators, refuse to acknowledge the basic dimensions of the situation. In the end, the only way to clarify it adequately may be for Dems to simply refuse to give in, no matter what the consequences.
What Republicans are doing isn’t negotiating: it’s hostage taking. Republicans know the government can’t stay shut down for long, and they know that America can’t default on its debt. If this is “negotiating”, it’s a new form of “negotiating” that is largely unprecedented going back to the American Civil War. As Digby noted today, it’s simply the latest in a long line of novel interpretations of political negotiating practiced by Republicans in recent decades.
But endless investigations into nothingburger “scandals” and impeachments over sexual acts are mere politics, if unnervingly brutal. Shutting down the government and defaulting on the full faith and credit of the United States in order to achieve legislative goals are something else entirely.
I hate to use the word because of its consequences, but it must be said that taking the government hostage in this way comes very close to bordering on treason. It’s not all that different from actually holding a gun to the President’s head and demanding legislative ransom. The Republicans would not hesitate to use that word if Democrats were holding the government hostage in order to achieve, say, gun control legislation or Eisenhower-era tax rates on the wealthy from a Republican president.
Again, that’s not to say we should start throwing out terms like this lightly. But it’s hard to fully explain the enormity of what the conservative establishment is doing here without using words that sound like hyperbolic exaggerations.
Republicans know that they cannot achieve their goals through standard democratic means. Their tactics have become more extreme with each passing year. Already “mainstream” pundits are coming to say the same things about the conservative establishment that only dirty hippie progressive bloggers were saying five to ten years ago.
If some of us are starting to use more and more alarmist words to describe what’s going on now, it’s because there’s serious cause for alarm. This isn’t politics as usual: it’s a revolutionary revanchist movement for which the ends clearly justify any means necessary. That sort of thinking is very, very dangerous not just to everyday people and to economies, but to democracy itself.
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