Clearly, we need our own crazy party. [View All]

Since crazy is apparently what gets things done in Washington.

It is a simple enough principle. Everyone who has raised a small child learns it. When the charming and lovable but undeniably also unreasonable and immature being in your care throws a tantrum, you do not, under any circumstances, give that child what he is demanding. Doing so merely ensures that you will see another tantrum really soon, probably at a moment when you are under tremendous social pressure to give in to the child and thus spare those around you the earsplitting howls. Give in often enough and you see a situation where the child is in charge and you the parent are merely trying to placate him. This is always bad for both parent and child because the child has no idea how to run its own life and the parents no longer have the power to implement their much more reasonable ideas about same. This scenario leads to something which is actually called, in the parenting books, "tyrannical behavior" on the part of the child. They don't have a phrase for the parental counterpart to this, but I suppose we could dub it "Congressional Democrat behavior."

The problem with this analogy, of course, is that a child does not have the power to crash the national economy.

This is why we go on caving in. The howling children who either don't understand the consequences of their own actions, or don't care who suffer because of those consequences, are willing to bring the country down in order to get what they want, and so they have to be soothed and rocked and given candy and boy am I sick of seeing it happen.

But of course there is another principle that all this demonstrates, which is that "compromise" is driven by fear of extremism. We're all supposed to be happy with this deal because it doesn't cut Social Security (yet) and because it promises "50/50" defense and non-defense spending cuts if the "trigger" has to be activated. We're supposed to be happy with this because what the Tea Party would have demanded is so much worse. And by Christ am I tired of that scenario too. Because it means that as the extreme wing of the Republican party has gotten more extreme, what counts as "reasonable" has been moving farther and farther right.

50/50. A bipartisan supercommittee. Sounds fair. Until you stop and think about the fact that this "trigger" mechanism institutionalizes the idea that everything has to be split "down the middle" and that each party is somehow now entitled to half of the budget. Regardless of which party is actually in power, or which party is supported by a larger section of the American people, or indeed which party wants what is good for the country as a whole or for the people living in it and which party merely wants to feed more cash to its cronies or to gratify its ideological itches.

We need more than two parties. This has been obvious for a long time. But the two-party system appears to have an unbreakable lock on the federal government. Other parties do exist, all along the ideological spectrum; but none of them have an effective presence in Congress.

Except, of course, the Tea Party. Which is not, technically, its own party--but which, during this past debacle, certainly functioned as a self-contained radical conclave whose support the Republican leadership could not take for granted and who were intransigent and unreasonable and had to be catered to. And they got--not everything they wanted, but way too much of it.

The right, in other words, has found a new way to work the two-party system. You sneak an extreme mini-party into on eof the big ones, and then it gets to work the levers and pull the strings and make shit happen.

All right. Well. Surely we on the left are crazy enough to do this. We've got plenty of crazy people who believe in crazy things like national health care and taxing the rich and reforming the school system in such a way that it would actually serve all the people who rely on it. What's to stop us from creating our own crazy party? Maybe instead of the Tea Party we could call it the Latte Party. And they could all run on this platform: We will fight for our ideological principles whether they're practical, reasonable, and feasible or not! We will refuse to negotiate! When asked to compromise for the sake of the greater good, we will instead throw gigantic super-destructive tantrums until we get our way!

It's so crazy it just might work.

It's not an attractive picture, is it. And indeed, this is the problem: most of us on the 'left' don't have much of a stomach for antics of this kind. But goddamn it, something has to be done, because I am tired of seeing everything go the way of the tantrum-throwers. And it is apparently too much to ask for the Democrats to stand up to tyrannical behavior. We could, for instance, have gone back at some point and said: We will put up a bill for raising the debt limit which does not link it to anything. This has to be done for the economy to keep functioning. You can vote for it or not vote for it. And if you do not vote for it, well, you can be the ones running next year with the slogan, "I Helped Destroy The Federal Government."

We could, in other words, have called their bluff. The results might not have been good, but it would be an interesting experiment to try.

Ah well. Another bipartisan "compromise" in which we lose a little more of the ground we are most half-heartedly holding. Hooray.

#@$!,

The Plaid Adder