Stupid’s Just Another Word For Nothing Left to Lose

That's all that Bobby left me

Busted flat in Baton Rouge, Louisiana’s conservative Republican Governor Bobby Jindal badly needs to take his own advice.  Last year, after the Republican Party’s second big election loss to Barack Obama, after losing the popular vote in five of the last six presidential elections, after losing Senate elections they easily could have won, after losing the nationwide popular vote for the House, the party began to wake up and reconsider its program, its message and its attitude.  Did they need to reach out to minorities?  Did they need to present themselves better?  Did they need better get-out-the-vote tactics and technologies?  Did they need – gasp! – to reconsider their priorities and principles?  At the time, Jindal made headlines by telling Republicans that they needed to “stop being the stupid party.”  But last week Jindal himself opened up the floodgates of stupid, publishing a truly bizarre column, inundating the nation and his party in a deluge of paranoia, resolute denial and utter foolishness.  Consider that according to Jindal, “the left wants: The government to explode; to pay everyone; to hire everyone; they believe that money grows on trees.”  And it goes on like that.  And on.  And on.  What has happened to Bobby Jindal?  Well the Republican Party and the conservative movement are in trouble and they don’t have a lot of options.  Is this how a frustrated true believer acts out when he’s got nothing left to lose?

Jindal’s winter criticism of the Republican Party was a little less substantive than usually portrayed in the media.  His use of the phrase “the stupid party” – borrowed from the characterization that the great 19^th century liberal theorist John Stuart Mill made of Britain’s conservatives – made his advice to Republicans seem more radical and more challenging than it actually was.  But this was a superficial understanding of largely superficial advice.  Jindal’s seven point plan from last November to refurbish conservatism consisted mostly of vague ideas about “modernizing, not moderating.”  That is, it was mostly about message, not content.  When it came to the stupid, he advised:

Stop being the stupid party. It's time for a new Republican party that talks like adults. It's time for us to articulate our plans and visions for America in real terms. We had a number of Republicans damage the brand this year with offensive and bizarre comments. Enough of that.

That is, Republicans didn’t need their Senate candidate from Missouri, Todd Akin, expounding his fascinating theories about “legitimate rape” and they didn’t need their Senate candidate from Indiana, Richard Mourdock, imagining that sometimes “God intends” for rape to result in pregnancy, and they didn’t need their Senate candidate from Pennsylvania, Tom Smith, comparing pregnancy from rape with out-of-wedlock birth, and they didn’t need their Senate candidate from Delaware, Christine O’Donnell, denying being a witch, and they didn’t need their Senate candidate from Nevada, Sharron Angle, talking about “Second Amendment remedies” to the continuing problem of liberal electoral success.  You get the idea.  But it doesn’t seem that Jindal was saying that conservatism needs to disown its loonier voices so much as muffle them.  It needs spokespeople who “talk like adults,” while selling the same old policies.

And he made sure that no one doubted his commitment to conservatism’s “core principles”: low taxes, low government spending and projections of strength abroad. Many of his other points were either uninspired (“stop looking backward”), tactically aggressive and uninspired (“going after every vote”), uninspired re-phrasing of conservative platitudes (“bottom-up government that fits the digital age”),  or even more uninspired re-phrasing of conservative platitudes (“treat all people as individuals rather than as members of special interest groups”).  And amidst all this sloganeering he protested that Republicans had to “stop reducing everything to mindless slogans and tag lines for 30-second ads.”  Well, maybe it’s not fair to criticize politicians for spouting thoughtless clichés; a creative politician is a rare creature indeed.

His plan, however, proposed one interesting change: conservatism should become more consistently “populist”; it should oppose all “big” institutions, including “big business, big banks, big Wall Street bailouts, big corporate loopholes, or big anything”.  The Republican Party “must not be the party that simply protects the well off so they can keep their toys.”  Instead it should grow and protect the middle class.  Actually, it should “make clear” that conservatism was never about bigness and it was always about helping the middle class.  It actually is quite radical in conservative circles to say anything remotely critical of the wealthy and how they got and keep their wealth.  What exactly was Jindal getting at here?  Is it possible he was criticizing the stridency with which conservative media and Republican Party leaders insist on keeping marginal income tax rates low?  Was he saying that such policy is not genuinely conservative?  Not likely.  In practice, Jindal has proposed lowering taxes on rich Louisianans and raising them on the lower orders.  He seems to be interested in merely giving conservatism a populist veneer.  Jindal’s populism sees government as the handmaiden of elitist, dishonest interests and it sees free markets as automatically benefiting everyone, not just the rich.  It’s not that he doesn’t want to let the rich keep their toys; it’s that letting them keep their toys must not be an end in itself; it must be seen as the means for letting everyone else get toys too.  But believing that what’s good for the top 1% is good for the rest of us is a rather odd version of populism.  If that’s all it amounts to, then, ultimately, this is (once again) more about changing the message than about changing the policy.

There wasn’t much real substance to Jindal’s winter criticism, but what it lacked in boldness it made up for in bland circumspection.  Who could disagree with sounding less stupid?  But with his recent column Jindal jumps on board the stupid train and runs it completely off the rails.  He enlightens us as to what liberals really want:

The government to explode; to pay everyone; to hire everyone; they believe that money grows on trees; the earth is flat; the industrial age, factory-style government is a cool new thing; debts don’t have to be repaid; people of faith are ignorant and uneducated; unborn babies don’t matter; pornography is fine; traditional marriage is discriminatory; 32 oz. sodas are evil; red meat should be rationed; rich people are evil unless they are from Hollywood or are liberal Democrats; the Israelis are unreasonable; trans-fat must be stopped; kids trapped in failing schools should be patient; wild weather is a new thing; moral standards are passé; government run health care is high quality; the IRS should violate our constitutional rights; reporters should be spied on; Benghazi was handled well; the Second Amendment is outdated; and the First one has some problems too.

What the what?  Will Todd Akin and Richard Mourdock now denounce Bobby Jindal for being stupid?  That’s quite a grab-bag of conservative crack-pottery, especially for an elected official, especially for a governor, especially for a potential presidential nominee.  His tirade includes McCarthyite paranoia (“they want the government to explode”), moralized gold-buggery (“money grows on trees”), simple crazy (“red meat should be rationed”), sexual constriction (“pornography is fine”), cultural populism (“people of faith are ignorant and uneducated”), blinkered cultural jingoism (“the Israelis are unreasonable”), deliberate obfuscations (“the Second Amendment is outdated”), extreme exaggerations (“32 oz. sodas are evil”), and damnable lies (“the IRS should violate our constitutional rights”).  This is just a wonderful exposition of the darkness lurking in the American conservative unconscious.  When the fever dream speaks, this is how it sounds.

And it confirms what we already knew: conservatives see themselves as fighting to protect American moral purity against liberal corruption; all issues are moral issues and they demand ironclad commitments to the right moral principles and the policies those principles express.  Liberals are bad because they don’t know what’s good.  That’s why they so foolishly support sexual corruptions such as gay marriage, pornography and abortion.  That’s why they oppose such obviously righteous policies like a balanced budget and a strong dollar.  And it’s moral blindness that delivers liberals to that ugly statism that so hungers to control our economics, our religion, our media, our guns, even our food!  Here we see the real source of that foolish, misguided, destructive philosophy called liberalism: liberals think “moral standards are passé,” that reason and individual choice can substitute for moral correctness.  But conservative misapprehension is understandable: to a simplistic moralist, letting people make independent moral judgments is indistinguishable from relativism.  But conservatives actually have a point here: liberal tolerance may prove to be only the half-way stopover between the starting point of conservative moralism and the final destination of post-modern relativism.  Once you begin emancipating individuals from external constraints it’s hard not to see the notion of objective morality itself as just one more arbitrary constraint.

OK, so liberals really, really suck.  What else has Jindal got?  Boatloads of denial.  The time for conservative self-reflection is definitely over.  The new Jindal rages against “excessive navel gazing”, that is, against the very sort of self-reflection the old Jindal advised.  He now says, “No more self-analysis; we’ve had our catharsis. The season for navel gazing has passed.”  Huh? Did anyone understand the need for conservative re-appraisal as merely therapeutic?  Wasn’t it meant to address the widespread perception of structural Republican failure?  Apparently not, because, according to Jindal there’s been little real failure:

Let’s remember a few things:

1) We have 30 Governors

2) We took control of the House in 2010 and held it in 2012

3) Obama ran a tremendous campaign in 2008, and our outgoing president was unpopular

4) The just completed presidential campaign strategy of playing it safe and assuming a poor economy would win it for us was an obvious mistake.

There is some truth in this analysis, of course; Republicans are not dead yet.  Yes, presently 30 governors are Republican (and actually govern roughly 60% of the population); Republicans did clobber the Democrats in the 2010 elections for the House of Representatives and they did hold the House in 2012; the 2008 Obama campaign was very good; Romney’s 2012 campaign was quite bad.  But there are unnerving responses to all these reassurances: Democrats won 52% of the votes cast in the 13 gubernatorial elections that took place in 2012 (only 4 of which took place in blue states); Democrats won about 1.4 million more votes nationwide in the 2012 House elections (Republicans won more House seats only because of skewed districting); the outgoing president in 2008 was indeed unpopular, but so was the party that faithfully supported him on his most egregious failures (Iraq, the deregulation of Wall Street that caused the recession); Obama is the only president to win re-election with the unemployment rate as high as it was.  Obviously, part of Jindal’s job is to spin.

But the GOP has real problems, and they boil down to one word: demographics.  Conservatism may not be dead, yet it withers before our eyes.  The current conservative movement is essentially the institutional vessel for all the cantankerous, old, straight, white, Christian, male prejudices and resentments that Jindal’s column so well expresses.  Meanwhile the country becomes younger, less sexually constricted, browner, more secular, tolerant and experimental, less patriarchal.  We become more liberal every day, more accepting of gay marriage and recreational marijuana, more open to government intervention in the economy, more open to non-traditional sex and religion.  But as the country moves, the conservative rump refuses to budge.  They isolate themselves and polarize the country.  Their passionate conviction, their natural and well-rehearsed cohesion, their ideological inflexibility – all these allow them to continue to exert influence beyond their numbers.  This is how they came to dominate American politics from the late 60’s till just a few years ago.

But the traits that served conservatives so well in their ascent now only hasten their fall.  They really only have two choices: change or double down.  And despite hopes to the contrary it’s pretty clear which path they have chosen for now.  Conservatism may not be dead, yet it decays before our eyes.  And Jindal has decided his job is to make sure no conservative perceives the decay.  He aims to stamp out conservative doubt.  And the putative political strengths of American conservatism – the passionate conviction, the natural and well-rehearsed cohesion, the ideological inflexibility – make Jindal’s job all too easy.  Those traits readily inhere in anyone who believes that all issues are moral issues, that all problems surrender to the stern application of clearheaded righteous force.  It’s such conviction that makes conservatives notoriously resistant to unwelcome facts and reasoning (consider the furor over the debt ceiling).  Conservative incapacity for self-doubt isn’t incidental, it’s of the essence.  In the past conservatism sometimes actually contributed to the American discourse: it proposed reasonable critiques of the welfare state, it provided fortitude for fighting the Cold War.  There used to be more to conservatism than just its id; there was intellect and even conscience.  Sadly, the latter have faded in recent years to irrelevance and ineffectuality.  They are utterly absent from Jindal’s angry discharge.  To Jindal and his audience, self-analysis, the reconsideration of received truths, self-doubt, etc. are not just inherently threatening to conservatism, they are vaguely un-American, even un-masculine!  “Stop the bedwetting,” scolds Jindal and “put on your big-boy pants.”  Yes, put on your pants and put on your blinders.  Self-doubt may be the prerequisite to self-awareness, but self-awareness is for liberals and sissies.

 
When a prominent conservative worries that conservatives are losing the religion, it’s noteworthy.  Jindal hates liberals – clearly! – but he’s disappointed in conservatives.  His rage is really directed at them.  And his rage has obscured his perception and his judgment; it has made him as stupid as the Akins and the Mourdocks.  Jindal comes home; now he endorses the stupid.  The problem for conservatives is that they’ve got nothing left to lose.  They thought they owned the soul of America, the “real America” as Sarah Palin called it.  For decades they won elections by portraying their opponents as enemies of American values and subverters of American prosperity and betrayers of American security.  But, inexplicably, those tactics have stopped working and the temptation is to turn up the volume even louder, to just shout the accusations that much more vehemently.  The country is changing under their feet, and they are in real trouble, but many of them seem incapable of doing much more than merely shouting louder and louder.  But now they’re not just shouting at liberals and independents and moderate Republicans; now they’re even shouting at themselves.

The Party of Raging Irresponsibility

Waiting for the monsters

A monster is haunting the Republican Party, the horrible monster of debt.  The recent history of Republican irresponsibility and irrationality on budgetary matters is deplorable, and most of it is wrapped up in fear and obsession over the large and increasing federal debt.  In the Republican nightmare, the debt monster devours our fortune and our future; it bleeds our economic strength; it threatens our children and our seniors, it even threatens our freedom.  But, strangely, the party furiously resists tax increases, even though such increases help control the debt.  It demands that President Obama make huge cuts to government spending in order to help reduce the debt, while it vigorously protests Obamacare cuts to Medicare.  And it demands that Obama, not Republicans themselves, specify which additional spending to cut!  It agonizes that debt has grown beyond our ability to pay and that a severe debt crisis is imminent, but its response is to threaten to hold down the current debt ceiling, which would place the United States in financial default and lead directly to the very kind of debt crisis they claim they wish to avoid.  Such a crisis would also vastly increase borrowing costs, leading to even bigger deficits and debt.  (And, incidentally, it would devastate the world economy.)  The party worries that tax increases and huge deficits generate “uncertainty” among investors and bond-holders, but it seems unconcerned that threatening government shutdown and default might themselves cause considerable uncertainty.  And it argues every point – even when that point blatantly contradicts the previous point – with the most passionate urgency.  When it comes to budgetary issues, the Republican Party has become the party of raging incoherence.  The degree and intensity of Republican nonsense and foolishness over the debt raises the genuine question: Is the Republican Party, in its present incarnation, capable of responsible governance?

It’s obvious that Republicans and conservatives are cynically using debt worry as an alibi for proceeding with their pre-existing project of underfunding and weakening the welfare state.  That’s why their abject horror over the debt demands dramatic spending cuts but abhors any tax increases.  If debt was their truest concern they would demand both spending cuts and tax increases, especially since taxes are at their lowest point (measured as a percentage of GDP) since the 1950’s, due largely to George W. Bush’s irresponsible tax cuts.  It’s equally obvious that much of their (let’s call it) inconsistency is simple pandering and demagoguery.  It’s easy to score cheap political points by attacking and misrepresenting Obama’s cuts to Medicare.  It doesn’t hurt, of course, that seniors are a dependably Republican constituency.  And the debt panic is suspiciously recent. Many Obama-era deficit saints were Bush-era deficit sinners.  All the current Congressional Republican leaders – Paul Ryan, Eric Cantor, John Boehner, Mitch McConnell – collaborated on George W. Bush’s long-term assaults on the budget: his huge tax cuts, his two unfunded wars and a his huge, unfunded expansion of Medicare.  It’s amazing the fiscal and moral Republican purification that a Democratic administration can bring.

It appears that many of the newer conservative members of Congress, particularly those on the Tea Party right, do honestly fear and hate the debt monster.  (Though, once again, steadfast contemporary conservative support for George W. Bush and his fiscal irresponsibility does bring into question the sincerity of that fear and hate.) But these same farther right reaches of the Republican Party are command central for present-day debt madness.  In fact, there seems to be a definite correlation between fear of the debt and the inability to coherently address it.  Apparently, the closer you study the monster the more he befuddles your mind.  And the larger and more evil he appears.  Before the rise of communism, right-wing Americans were convinced that the nexus of evil in this world was the Vatican.  After 1917 that nexus moved to the Kremlin.  For a while after 9/11 it seems to have moved to Mecca or Teheran, though hopes that it would be buried beneath the rubble of Baghdad seem to have been disappointed.  Now it is incarnated in the American social insurance state, safely ensconced in the west wing of the White House, well kept and fed by Barack Hussein Obama and his minions, while its bastard child, the voracious debt monster, roams the land, wreaking devastation and terrorizing good folk.

And conservative paranoia is intimately connected to conservative moralism.  If it’s dangerous for a family or a small business to be in debt, it must be dangerous for a government, too.  But it’s not just dangerous, it’s downright immoral.  We are stealing from our children!  We are profligate!  We are squandering our moral inheritance!  But, as Paul Krugman has said, “Economics is not a morality play.”  Government can borrow money (presently it can do so at extremely low rates) to stimulate the economy, it can print money, it can easily tolerate ongoing debt, it need not pay back its debt, it can address aggregate issues – like unemployment and decrepit infrastructure – that do not avail of moralistic solutions.  Let us accept that blinkered moralism and Puritan apocalypticism are not sound bases for fiscal policy.  Neither are cynicism, pandering and demagoguery; but these are unavoidable elements of democratic politics.  Simpleminded moralism and apocalyptic paranoia, on the other hand, seem to be unavoidable elements of American conservative politics specifically, particularly among the staunchest members of its populist base.  Indeed, the moralism seems essential.  Consider that during recent times of high unemployment, even when there was 1 job for every 5 unemployed workers, leading conservatives resolutely argued against extending unemployment benefits because doing so would reward and encourage indolence.  The paucity of jobs did not excuse anyone from taking all the responsibility for his or her economic situation.  Economic facts simply could not contend with the need for moral enforcement.

All these dark confusions obscure the truth about the debt, which though it is a real problem, is neither a deadly nor an insurmountable one (see Neil Irwin’s great summary).  The next twenty years will bring real budgetary challenges, mostly caused by rising medical costs and the retirement of the baby boomers; some relatively minor adjustments to social insurance programs may be needed, but nothing like the radical transformations such as those proposed by Paul Ryan’s Medicare voucher-ization plan.  Indeed, even though the current baseline predicts large deficits for years to come, the debt (as a percentage of GDP) seems to be stabilizing for the foreseeable future.  And contrary to conservative mythology, there has not been an Obama-directed spending surge.  And once the economy is back to full capacity, tax revenues will increase, while spending designed to ameliorate and cushion against recession – automatic stabilizers such as unemployment insurance and increased Medicaid – will discontinue.  In the mean time, investors are gobbling up US Treasury bonds – even 10 and 20 year bonds – at ridiculously low interest rates.  The world is practically begging us to take its money.  Absent self-inflicted wounds, such as forcing a debt crisis by failing to raise the debt ceiling, no debt crisis is imminent.  We are not turning into Greece, hysterics aside.

But there’s one more noteworthy component to the overwrought Republican debt terror: abject irresponsibility.  That is the deeper meaning behind the fight over the debt ceiling.  The Republican House has effectively just abandoned the debt ceiling as a bargaining chip by voting to suspend it until May 19, (a move some conservatives perceive as tantamount to abandoning conservative principles altogether!).  But for weeks past, just as in the summer of 2011, conservatives had threatened to not increase the debt ceiling, and their justifications reeked of irresponsibility.  Imagine the following scenario:

The Republican House and the Democratic Senate and President agree that for the current fiscal year the government should spend 3.8 trillion dollars and raise 2.9 trillion dollars in taxes.  The deficit – the missing 900 billion dollars – must be raised by the Treasury Department by borrowing from private investors.  But that deficit, that 900 billion, that new debt, will become part of the federal government’s ongoing debt, which is already at 16.3 trillion dollars, bringing the new total debt to 17.2 trillion.  But then imagine there is an obscure law, called the debt ceiling, which limits the total the government can borrow and which is currently set to 16.4 trillion.  And further imagine that the Republican House – the same Republican House that agreed to the 3.8 trillion in spending and 2.9 trillion in revenue! – threatens not to raise that debt ceiling unless the Democratic President agrees to spend substantially less than 3.8 trillion.

Well you don’t have to imagine that farcical fiscal scenario, it actually happened!  If that is not irresponsibility, then what is?  Obviously Republicans thought 3.8 trillion was too much, even when they voted for it.  It turns out they thought it was so dangerously excessive that they were willing to threaten the country with a default on its debt in order to force Obama to spend less this year and for years to come.  If they had made good on their threat not to raise the ceiling, they would have forced Obama to break one of two laws, either by not spending all the money the budget mandates (money he is legally obligated to spend) or by borrowing more money than the debt ceiling legally allows.  Is it irresponsible to pass two incompatible laws?  Without sufficient funds the Treasury Department would fail to pay all its bills, including redeeming existing debt and paying interest on that debt.  The U.S. government would default; it would become a deadbeat.  Not because no one wanted to lend it money, not because it simply ran out of options, but because part of the government – the only part controlled by Republicans – refused to abide by the implications of its own decisions and its own laws.  Republicans are terrified that we’re about to face a debt crisis, and there is a real danger of that actually happening, but only because of Republicans.  Behold the party of raging absurdity.

The consequences of the Republicans turning Uncle Sam into a deadbeat are too painful to imagine.  All over the country and the world investors, financial institutions and governments would be less willing to lend the government money.  Paul Krugman:

Failure to raise the debt limit – which would, among other things, disrupt payments on existing debt – could convince investors that the United States is no longer a serious, responsible country, with nasty consequences. Furthermore, nobody knows what a U.S. default would do to the world financial system, which is built on the presumption that U.S. government debt is the ultimate safe asset.

A default would also greatly increase our borrowing costs; that is, in order to lure more money from investors the government would be required to pay higher rates of interest.  Conservatives counter that limiting the government to spending only what it takes in would not necessarily lead to a default, since the Treasury could still pay debt costs and cut other spending.  But that’s probably not true, as Matt Yglesias explains: “At first blush it seems logical that the government could perhaps respond by simply choosing which bills to pay and which not to pay, but there’s no legal authority to do this either, and Treasury’s computers aren’t set up to do it.”  Instead, Treasury would probably simply pay every bill in the order it received them, which would almost certainly lead to a default.  There is no guarantee that on any given day the amount of revenue received would be enough to pay that day’s debt costs.  Some Republicans, like Senator Pat Toomey and the editors of National Review magazine, wanted to give the administration the very legal authority Yglesias mentions – i.e. the authority to pick and choose which bills to pay – as long as it always paid for the debt first and thereby avoided default.  But if Treasury could jump through hoops and prioritize debt payments – either on Congress’ authority or its own – it would still fail to pay a large proportion of the bills it is legally obligated to pay, i.e. the spending authorized by Congress.  This would, says Eric Posner, “also create a crisis – most people and institutions won’t want to do business with the government, or work for it, because they won’t trust it to do what it promises. This is a mess and a bad way to run a country.”  Would America be less of a deadbeat if we paid our debt bills but failed to pay defense contractors, government employees or Medicare providers?

And if maintaining the current debt ceiling would fail to cause a debt default then it loses much of its force as a bargaining chip; it becomes, in effect, merely a government shutdown.  (I say “merely”, because, per Krugman, even though a shutdown would mean big trouble, its destructiveness would pale in compared to a default.)  Some conservatives protest that not raising the debt ceiling focuses the national attention on the debt, even if there is no danger of a default.  But does anyone believe the nation would fail to notice a government shutdown?  Why then would Republicans resist a debt ceiling raise and not just bargain hard during normal budget negotiations?  Both require Republican acquiescence.  There is a difference and it’s a revealing difference: failure to raise the debt ceiling forces the president to unilaterally choose which spending to cut.  This is the key irresponsibility.  Failure to raise the debt ceiling would hand legislative budgetary responsibility from the legislative to the executive branch.  The Constitution envisions members of Congress haggling back and forth until they agree to specific spending; it does not imagine Congress handing a block grant to the President and saying, “Spend as you please.”  But the party of smaller government is also the party of older, white people, that is, people who really like receiving Social Security checks and having Medicare pay for their medical care.  Republicans do want to cut spending – and in the abstract so do their constituencies – but they don’t want the blame for what will certainly be terribly unpopular cuts.  And this is the deeper problem: their constituency is just as irresponsible as they are.  During the fiscal cliff negotiations last December, Republicans demanded that Obama propose deep spending cuts but they refused to specify what those cuts should be!  They’re just not willing to take responsibility for their policies, but they are willing to wiggle through a loophole in the Constitutional separation of powers – that’s what they’ve made of the debt ceiling – to avoid that responsibility.

There are even some conservatives who would actually welcome a default, who would refuse to raise the debt ceiling even though they concede such a refusal would cause a default, because the final result would be to shrink government.  As reported by Rachel Bade, “The fallout from a debt ceiling breach is the lesser of two evils, they say – the greater threat being Obama’s proposal to increase the debt ceiling without corresponding cuts and reforms.”  And as Megan McCardle put it during the debt ceiling crisis of 2011, “there is a sizeable faction on the right, and worse, in the GOP caucus, that is willing to default rather than make any deal at all.”  At least these people don’t offer up lame alibis about the debt ceiling not forcing a default.  At least they have the courage of their insanity.  As Ed Kilgore put it in 2011:

the debt limit issue has been elevated among conservative activists to the level of religious frenzy and absolutism. . .
Indeed lurking just beneath the surface of much of the conservative hard line on the debt limit is an ironclad conviction that all sorts of economic havoc, including a much deeper recession, might be preferable to the continuation of twentieth-century “welfare state” policies.

The debt monster and its foul progenitor, the American government, have so unhinged them that actually believe that anything – even economic Armageddon! – is justified to stop it.  They want to destroy America in order to save it.  The ones who want Obama to avoid a default by picking and choosing what to cut are merely evading their responsibility as legislators.  But the ones who want to actually force a default are evading their responsibility as Americans.

But it does appear that cooler heads have prevailed, though there are still holdouts.  It took the entire Washington Republican establishment plus leaders of the business community to convince enough congressional Republicans to abandon the threat of economic annihilation.  But through most of the summer of 2011 and for most of this last January the party, including its leaders and its supporters in the commentariat, vehemently presented the foolish and nonsensical arguments analyzed above.  Any party that can make such arguments and seriously consider such actions is a party which is not capable of properly running the government of the United States. We must hope the American people don’t return them to power before they have mended their ways.  But are they capable of mending their ways any time soon?  Republicans call themselves the party of family values, of traditional morality, but their actions in this matter have been empty of the self-reflection and accountability that are essential to genuine morality.  They crusade righteously onward, so convinced of their own moral purity that they feel justified in any action.  Here we see the most galling aspect of this whole embarrassing episode, and the most discouraging: They have no shame.

But Republicans have one more opportunity to act like grownups.  In order to prevent conservative purists from pulling the debt ceiling trigger, Republican leaders promised to present a budget that balances within ten years.  That would indeed be a responsible proposal (assuming one shared their inflated fear of the debt).  But, alas, it won’t happen, and that’s because it can’t happen, the math just won’t allow it.  As Jonathan Chait so well explains, if you won’t raise taxes and you won’t cut defense and you are politically incapable of cutting Social Security and Medicare you’d have to cut programs for the poor – Medicaid, food stamps, etc. – by something like 90%, which even Republicans would probably shrink from doing.  The last time Republicans presented a putatively balanced budget, Paul Ryan’s budget from 2012, they had to fudge the numbers to make it balance and even then it didn’t actually balance until 2040.  It’s quite likely that this new budget will contain at least as much sleight-of-hand.  Maybe it’s not entirely fair to judge a budget we haven’t seen yet, but (as Chait explains) it strains credulity to imagine they can honestly make something happen by 2023 that they couldn’t make happen by 2040.  Republicans are stuck between the rock of structural irresponsibility and the hard place of mathematical reality.  Even if they could overcome the allure of cynicism, demagoguery, pandering, moralism, paranoia and irresponsibility and made a good faith effort to honestly balance the budget they would still be stopped by the inexorability of simple arithmetic.  Conservative fiscal goals are simply incompatible with American political reality.  And it is conservative failure to honestly address that simple fact that is the real failure of responsibility.