Keller and Krugman

In “The Right Gets Its 60’s” Mr. Keller says we should just think of Ted Cruz as Abbie Hoffman and Obamacare as Vietnam.  I’ll let “Chris G” from the Boston area’s comment speak to his column:  “I’m not quite old enough to recall the 60’s but the history books suggest that SDS never had influence over the Democratic party as Tea Partiers have over the GOP today. (I’ll give you points for the plausible-sounding false equivalence though.)”  Prof. Krugman, in “Rebels Without a Clue,” says the Republicans are flirting with financial disaster.  Here’s Mr. Keller:

“Something’s happening here.
What it is ain’t exactly clear.”

— Stephen Stills, 1966

The right-wing campaign to sabotage the Affordable Care Act has driven a lot of normally temperate people past the edge of exasperation. Pundits have described the crusade as crazy, stupid, arrogant, dishonest, cynical, ridiculous and politically suicidal. And that’s not just liberals talking. Jennifer Rubin, who blogs from the right for The Washington Post, says of the defunding obsessives, they “have absolutely no idea what they are doing.” Fox News seems perplexed, and eyes are rolling at The Weekly Standard. Big Business is appalled. Elders of the Republican right, like Karl Rove, are harrumphing their disapproval.

And yet the zealots press on, threatening to hold the rest of the government hostage to kill a health care reform that (a) is the law and (b) shows every sign of being a good thing for the country.

What’s happening here ain’t exactly clear. But I have a notion: The Republicans are finally having their ’60s. Half a century after the American left experienced its days of rage, its repudiation of the political establishment, conservatives are having their own political catharsis. Ted Cruz is their spotlight-seeking Abbie Hoffman. (The Texas senator’s faux filibuster last week reminded me of Hoffman’s vow to “levitate” the Pentagon using psychic energy.) The Tea Party is their manifesto-brandishing Students for a Democratic Society. Threatening to blow up America’s credit rating is their version of civil disobedience. And Obamacare is their Vietnam.

To those of us who lived through the actual ’60s, the conservative sequel may seem more like an adolescent tantrum than a revolution. For obvious starters, their mobilizing cause is not putting an end to an indecent war that cost three million lives, but defunding a law that promises to save lives by expanding access to insurance. Printing up unofficial “Obamacare Cards” and urging people to burn them is a silly parody of the protest that raged 50 years ago. But bear with me.

At the heart of the ’60s radical zeitgeist was a sense that the government had forfeited its legitimacy, and that the liberal establishment had sold out or lost its nerve. At the heart of the right-wing uprising is a similar sense of betrayal: the president is not just an adversary but an alien; the Republican leadership has lost its principles; the old rules don’t apply.

Like the original ’60s, when revolutionary fervor coexisted with the celebration of free love and pharmaceutical bliss, the new ’60s has a growing libertarian flank. And just as the 1960s “movement” had its share of camp followers who showed up for the sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll, the Tea Party attracts political freeloaders drawn by the addictive drugs of power and television attention.

Both political upheavals occurred against a backdrop of cultural disorientation, in particular a new-media invasion and a shrinking zone of privacy. In the ’60s, the rise of national televised news disrupted the comfort of homogeneous communities. Issues that had been generally confined to a private sphere — especially issues of sexuality and women’s rights — burst into public debate. In the ’60s, as David Farber of Temple University has written, Americans saw “all of life’s chances as infiltrated and even determined by the binds of the political.” Today’s upheavals likewise take place in an unsettled time of dissolving boundaries, of ubiquitous media and diminishing privacy. Conditions are ripe for the rise of new leaders, some of whom will be demagogues and charlatans.

I tried out my theory on Todd Gitlin, a Columbia professor whose books include “The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage.” He pointed to one important similarity between then and now, and one significant divergence.

“The very strong parallel is the go-for-broke mood,” Gitlin said. The rules of order and civility of language go out the window because “you feel this is a matter of apocalyptic urgency.” Obamacare is not Vietnam, “but for them it is.” The health care law, the main components of which are just being implemented, embodies for the right an abuse of government power verging on tyranny, which justifies the most extravagant response.

The main difference, Gitlin said, “is that Abbie Hoffman never would have run for the Senate. The Tea Party, for all of its complaints, and the Republicans in general have a long history of taking their dissent within the party.”

Indeed, despite the caricatures disseminated by Republicans, the Democratic Party was never taken over by leftist insurgents. With some notable exceptions, the political left of the ’60s, hostile to hierarchy and compromise, spurned the Democratic Party and mainstream politics in general. Leftists of the ’60s migrated instead to single-issue causes, or to Hollywood and academia. The partisans of the right, instead, fought their way to influence at the Republican primary level. The right never got a foothold in the popular culture — it has produced no Bob Dylan or Neil Young, no Ken Kesey or Kurt Vonnegut — but it has become the tail that wags the House of Representatives.

The left scattered after the American withdrawal from Vietnam took away its most galvanizing cause, leaving the Democratic Party ultimately in the hands of Bill Clinton moderates. And, while the success of a ’60s leftist in the New York City mayoral primary has stirred some far-fetched talk of a “new new left,” the national party seems likely to stay closer to the center, where the votes are.

It’s interesting to contemplate what will become of the right’s wacko-birds, as John McCain calls them, after Obamacare is fully implemented and accepted as a popular component of the American safety net. (And even Ted Cruz, in a moment of goofy candor, admitted that that is likely.)

One possibility is that the public tires of them and they go away, disenchanted, perhaps having nudged the Republican Party in some new direction — more populist at home, less interventionist abroad.

My friend Frank Rich, appraising one of the new right’s emerging heroes, Senator Rand Paul, in New York magazine, offered a ’60s analogy. He speculated that Paul might be “kind of a Eugene McCarthy of the right, destined to shake things up without necessarily reaping the rewards for himself.”

McCarthy (for whom I got a haircut and campaigned in 1968) was a bit of a dilettante, who, after failing to get the presidential nomination, dropped out of the Senate at the height of the battle over Vietnam and drifted to the political margins. It’s hard for me to imagine the boundlessly ambitious and shrewd Senator Paul going off to write poetry, or defecting to third-party irrelevance. It seems more likely that he and his cadre stick around, find other hobbyhorses, and continue to drive their own establishment crazy. We’ll check back in 50 years.

Now here’s Prof. Krugman:

This may be the way the world ends — not with a bang but with a temper tantrum.

O.K., a temporary government shutdown — which became almost inevitable after Sunday’s House vote to provide government funding only on unacceptable conditions — wouldn’t be the end of the world. But a U.S. government default, which will happen unless Congress raises the debt ceiling soon, might cause financial catastrophe. Unfortunately, many Republicans either don’t understand this or don’t care.

Let’s talk first about the economics.

After the government shutdowns of 1995 and 1996 many observers concluded that such events, while clearly bad, aren’t catastrophes: essential services continue, and the result is a major nuisance but no lasting harm. That’s still partly true, but it’s important to note that the Clinton-era shutdowns took place against the background of a booming economy. Today we have a weak economy, with falling government spending one main cause of that weakness. A shutdown would amount to a further economic hit, which could become a big deal if the shutdown went on for a long time.

Still, a government shutdown looks benign compared with the possibility that Congress might refuse to raise the debt ceiling.

First of all, hitting the ceiling would force a huge, immediate spending cut, almost surely pushing America back into recession. Beyond that, failure to raise the ceiling would mean missed payments on existing U.S. government debt. And that might have terrifying consequences.

Why? Financial markets have long treated U.S. bonds as the ultimate safe asset; the assumption that America will always honor its debts is the bedrock on which the world financial system rests. In particular, Treasury bills — short-term U.S. bonds — are what investors demand when they want absolutely solid collateral against loans. Treasury bills are so essential for this role that in times of severe stress they sometimes pay slightly negative interest rates — that is, they’re treated as being better than cash.

Now suppose it became clear that U.S. bonds weren’t safe, that America couldn’t be counted on to honor its debts after all. Suddenly, the whole system would be disrupted. Maybe, if we were lucky, financial institutions would quickly cobble together alternative arrangements. But it looks quite possible that default would create a huge financial crisis, dwarfing the crisis set off by the failure of Lehman Brothers five years ago.

No sane political system would run this kind of risk. But we don’t have a sane political system; we have a system in which a substantial number of Republicans believe that they can force President Obama to cancel health reform by threatening a government shutdown, a debt default, or both, and in which Republican leaders who know better are afraid to level with the party’s delusional wing. For they are delusional, about both the economics and the politics.

On the economics: Republican radicals generally reject the scientific consensus on climate change; many of them reject the theory of evolution, too. So why expect them to believe expert warnings about the dangers of default? Sure enough, they don’t: the G.O.P. caucus contains a significant number of “default deniers,” who simply dismiss warnings about the dangers of failing to honor our debts.

Meanwhile, on the politics, reasonable people know that Mr. Obama can’t and won’t let himself be blackmailed in this way, and not just because health reform is his key policy legacy. After all, once he starts making concessions to people who threaten to blow up the world economy unless they get what they want, he might as well tear up the Constitution. But Republican radicals — and even some leaders — still insist that Mr. Obama will cave in to their demands.

So how does this end? The votes to fund the government and raise the debt ceiling are there, and always have been: every Democrat in the House would vote for the necessary measures, and so would enough Republicans. The problem is that G.O.P. leaders, fearing the wrath of the radicals, haven’t been willing to allow such votes. What would change their minds?

Ironically, considering who got us into our economic mess, the most plausible answer is that Wall Street will come to the rescue — that the big money will tell Republican leaders that they have to put an end to the nonsense.

But what if even the plutocrats lack the power to rein in the radicals? In that case, Mr. Obama will either let default happen or find some way of defying the blackmailers, trading a financial crisis for a constitutional crisis.

This all sounds crazy, because it is. But the craziness, ultimately, resides not in the situation but in the minds of our politicians and the people who vote for them. Default is not in our stars, but in ourselves.