It appears we have satisfied none but saved all with a debt ceiling deal which Republicans despise for not savaging enough spending while Democrats fret it does not allow current expenditures to keep up with inflation.
It is a relief as long as it passes. Wild-eyed purists on either far side of the political spectrum threaten to reject it when faced with affirming positions they have boxed themselves into rather uncomfortably over the past several years.
We are an amazingly able country when it comes to theatrics from our candidates yet time and again prove ourselves pretty centrist when it comes to governing. I realise that probably shocks many of you while seriously disheartening some. In the era of red hot branding—again on either and both sides of the political aisle—in the name of saving the country, it’s seductive to believe that radical views are what the country most wants.
The evidence is quite to the contrary over all. The hottest issue of 2022 was abortion by all indications. Literally a year ago today, Republicans were salivating at the prospects of picking up dozens of seats in the House of Representatives and potentially the Senate. President Biden’s many accomplishments—and he has had a great deal of success over the past two and a half years whether it’s on rebuilding infrastructure, COVID relief, or appointing judges to the bench—appeared irrelevant as the average voter feared inflation would continue rising along with Federal Reserve designated interest rates to kill that very inflation.
Then the Dobbs decision the last Friday in June unleashed that centrist backlash we know so well. It wasn’t just radical left women burning their bras on the library steps, to conjure up an old phrase from my youth, but the ladies of Kansas who mobilised to defeat a revision to the state constitution banning abortion. And those ladies decisively beat down that amendment.
I had an on-going reality check with someone in that region who had never been as exorcised about anything that I can remember. She was not going to see her daughter’s generation deprived of autonomy over their bodies by people being disingenuous about their campaign regarding that state constitution. My friend and her husband pointed out repeatedly that the anti-abortion referendum came face to face with words in the state constitution that said something different from what was being quoted. To say they—my female friend in particular—were satisfied after the vote understated it as these calm Midwesterners took Dobbs as a personal affront.
It’s clear from subsequent pressures emerging in the Republican states around the country that other are also fed up with pushing radical positions on the right on abortion, on immigration, on maintaining serious academic programs in schools, and other topics we can each name. Oh, and the losses Democrats feared a year ago were decidedly smaller than anyone expected.
The left is hardly unscathed in alienating the centrists, either. The idea of defunding police in most parts of the nation is a move too far. The rebuke against nearby District of Columbia’s actions to decriminalise a number of activities in a city with increasing violence was swift and largely bipartisan. An older, lifelong Democrat said to me recently that the District needs focus on fixing its residents’ behaviours within the law rather than worrying about Statehood as if that would solve its problems. We can debate this last point but the stark reality of crime rising draws many people back to the police as necessary in a complex society. The police need better resources to assure serious training and monitoring of carrying out their responsibilities but the idea of depriving them of funding simply does not appeal to most.
Countless other public policy questions fit this theme but none is as bizarre as the disconnect between a truly centrist country supporting at least minimal checks on gun ownership and a Congress congenitally incapable of approving anything the National Rifle Association smells as gun control. Last week on the first anniversary of the horror in Uvalde, I saw a statistic that we had 650 mass shootings in the 365 days after the massacre. I had to read the number three times because it is inexplicable that anyone would still questions background checks. Perhaps it’s that we have let it gun insanity persist too long but the statistics are well over 75% of the nation supports background checks to no avail. Obviously centrist views fail here.
We don’t act because of non-U.S. citizen views of our policies but I was discouraged about 7 years ago when a Vietnamese International Fellow I was sponsoring said he had seriously considered not coming ot hte United States because he was sure he would be killed by guns. When I asked why he said that at a luncheon welcoming the new students, he said everyone knows the United States allows people to be killed on public transportation by guntotting people. Wowsa, talk about a non-centrist perspective on us.
We will see whether the left, drastically disappointed by Biden negotiating, and the right, still populated by firebrands determined the deprive Biden of any possible credit on anything, will still push us over the fiscal brink. It’s not out of the realm of possibility because so many legislators today have no historical experience with national trauma nor do they seem to understand the basics of how government, the economy, and the international system work.
We also must see whether my hypothesis that we are centrists holds when we have our first national election after Dobbs and Uvalde. I may well be wrong but I suspect we will continue to cling to our centrist positions much as a car driving way too fast on a windy, dirt road tries to avoid the sheer mountain wall of granite on its left and the five thousand foot drop off on its right. The center is the only sustainable path, even if the driver gets overly concerned she must hurry to meet a train at the bottom of that long trek. She would do well to meet the train alive rather than hitting one of the perilous alternatives but slowing down to keep to the center doesn’t always appeal to our sense of confidence we can beat the odds.
The odds today are about whether democracy can survive. If people become complacent of successes or fearful to participate, we could lose what we have as an intricate nation of 340 million trying to get along. That could be a bad accident from which we might not recover. It is a plausble nightmare for us all.
The debt ceiling fiasco seems so small but is rather indicative of our current status. What will it tell us? FIN
I am not sure