The 21st Century Ft. Sumter

Dennis G at Balloon Juice has a schtick, if you will.  He has written persuasively and at length about the modern GOP being essentially a neo-Confederate party.  Today, he wrote a very interesting and thorough piece about that.

He argues, accurately, that compromise is the basis of both American governance and progressive change.  All positive change in this country evolved over time through compromises.  Dennis sites a speech Obama made recently where he talked about Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation - a confusing, half-assed compromise if ever one existed - but how that eventually led to the 13th, 14th and 15th amendments.

Anyone with a basic understanding of American civics and history knows that this country is run on compromise.

And as Dennis points out in his piece, it really broke down only once before, almost exactly 150 years ago, with the election of "Black Lincoln".  At that moment, the slave holding South refused to accept a President elected without Southern votes and forced a showdown that ruptured the government and the nation.

The point of the piece obviously is that today we face a group of radicals who are willing to destroy the government - or at least its ability to function - rather than compromise with a President whose legitimacy they cannot accept.

Ezra Klein has a piece this morning where he notes that the Democrats are willing to accept a bad deal on the debt ceiling, because they desperately don't want the economy to implode.  The obvious, unsaid counterpoint is that the GOP really doesn't care if we plunge back into recession.

I cannot think of a time in American history where a political party in charge of something (as opposed to a minority party barking at the doors of power) has willfully embraced the possible collapse of the American economy for political reasons.  Even when Andrew Jackson killed the Second Bank of the US, he thought he was doing the right thing economically.

Today, the Tea Party caucus is proposing a House resolution demanding that should default occur, the President must fund creditors, the military and Social Security first.  That means everything else, from the FAA (already closed) to highway construction to the National Weather Service to national parks to the SEC to food inspections to farm subsidy payments to defense contracts to the FBI to... well, you get the idea... all of that would shut down.

For the first time, they seem to understand that maybe default WILL hurt.

And yet they welcome it just the same.  They are willing for the first time to default on our nation's debt, to ruin the credit worthiness of our country.  They are willing to do this despite an offer of $3T in spending cuts - including entitlements - and $1T in revenues (and no increase in marginal rates).

There is a strain of human thought that embraces chaos and disorder in the abstract.  Hence the popularity of Mad Max, zombie movies and other apocalyptic fare.  Everyone fancies himself John McClane.

But I have a hunch that when actually experienced, this becomes considerably less palatable.

That strain of thinking appears to motivate the Tea Party.  They seem to welcome the chaos and disorder that default will bring.

Just as the Fire Eaters of 1860 welcomed the chaos and disorder of civil war.

Keep that in mind as we tick down to the deadline.