What the US government shut-down tells us
- By Zhao Jinglun
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E-mail China.org.cn, October 8, 2013
There was really no debate, only recrimination. Senate majority leader Harry Reid said of the House Republicans, "They've lost their minds" and criticized House Speaker John Boehner's "banana-Republican mindset." In writing this, he was actually not too far off the mark.
In their 2012 book "It's Even Worse Than It Looks: How the American Constitutional System Collided with the New Politics of Extremism" (Basic Books), political scientists Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein had the following to say about the Republican Party:
"[It] has become an insurgent outlier – ideologically extreme; contemptuous of the inherited social and economic policy regime; scornful of compromise; un-persuaded by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition."
Mann and Ornstein were in fact referring to the core of Republican hardliners who are living in la la land. Speaker Boehner told Republican members of Congress they were "locked in an epic battle," a take-no-prisoners fight. He added that the U.S. is headed for default. If that were to happen, the consequences would be even more serious than those of the 2008 financial crisis.
Harvard Sociologist Daniel Bell in his 1975 article "The End of American Exceptionalism" said that Americans have "a unique history of constitutionalism and comity."
It now seems both are in abeyance. In the context of the current impasse, there is no trace of comity as defined by Richard Hafstadter in his "The Progressive Historians." That passage has become a classic. Let me quote it in full:
"Comity exists in a society to the degree that those enlisted in its contending interests have a basic minimal regard for each other; one party or interests seeks the defeat of an opposing interest on matters of policy, but at the same time seeks to avoid crushing the opposition, denying the legitimacy of its existence or its values, or inflicting upon it extreme and gratuitous humiliation beyond the substance of the gains that are being sought. The basic humanity is not forgotten; civility is not abandoned; the sense that a community life must be carried on after the acerbic issues of the moment have been fought over and won is seldom far out of mind; an awareness that the opposition will someday be the government is always present."
That kind of comity is obviously no longer there with the current partisan struggle. Therefore Mann and Ornsten have reached the conclusion: American politics and governance are utterly dysfunctional.
Losing constitutionalism and comity, America is becoming a different country.
The author is a columnist with China.org.cn. For more information please visit:
http://www.china.org.cn/opinion/zhaojinglun.htm
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