The GOP's dangerous arrogance

An American default – or deliberate descent into another economic crisis – is unthinkable to most of global civil society. What great nation would do this to itself – or everyone else?

Nationally and globally, the economy is at a tipping point. The GOP, driven by invincible ignorance or cynical design – and perhaps both – is working overtime to trash the recovery with budget cuts that would drain demand from the economy – or a debt ceiling vote that could trigger a financial collapse equal to 2008, or perhaps unpredictably graver. For proof, all you had to do was listen to Mitt Romney's announcement speech today. In it, he made a smarmy attempt to blame Barack Obama for the economic pain actually caused by the dereliction of duty by George W. Bush & Co., pain that was then prolonged by the obstruction of congressional Republicans. Those legislators contrived successfully to limit the stimulus package, block a second one, and forthwith blame the stimulus that saved us from another Great Depression for the slow climb out of the Great Recession. Never, of course, did they mention that the America’s deep deficits were generated by the fraudulent Bush war in Iraq and the unfair Bush tax cuts, which were founded on the false premise that they would pay for themselves.

The same tawdry spectacle has played out for two years and more in America's capitol, a place that is still, despite recently fashionable worries about its destiny, the indispensible engine of the world economy. Indeed, the future of billions of human beings is determined by our elections, in which most of them have no vote. JFK once noted that the proudest boast of the ancient world was the boast of democratic citizenship: Civis Romanus sum: 'I am a Roman citizen.' The inescapable reality of the present world, for better or worse, is that people everywhere have to say, Civis Americanus sum. That's strikingly clear here in Europe, in good times and bad. President Obama is a more popular, hope-giving figure than the leaders he recently visited; he’s the counterpoint to Bush and the redeemer of an American image carelessly disfigured during the first decade of the century.

And now the GOP that has moved decidedly to the right of Bush would compound his errors. Congressional Republicans could shatter the restored credibility of the United States by refusing to protect its full faith and credit by raising the national debt ceiling or by holding that essential measure hostage to the repeal of the New Deal – something that never even occurred to Ronald Reagan or either Bush president. In those Oval Offices, they regularly signed debt-ceiling increases.

Republicans generally, from the newest tea-soaked member of Congress to the weak brew of presidential candidates, have also adopted and ritualistically invoked a notion of American exceptionalism that all but explicitly proclaims that we have a unique mandate – with the religious right, presumably our own Mandate of Heaven – to do whatever we want, wherever we want. In the name of strengthening the nation, they would weaken it, losing respect, fraying alliances, and forcing the United States to go it alone in a fateful time? Retreating to this notion would represent one of history’s more stunning examples of the triumph of arrogance over experience.

There is an American exceptionalism that, rightly understood, holds that we have something exceptional to share with others, not to impose upon them. The ideals that underlie our whole national life are, as Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln argued, life forces in the world that can inspire great change – and they have, from the France of 1789 to the Arab Spring today. You sometimes have to fight for those ideals; but above all, they are beliefs, not bullets or bullying. There is a self-defeating xenophobia in the impulse to exercise power without "a decent respect to the opinions of mankind," as the Declaration of Independence puts it. But the Republican hardliners, and they're indisputably the Republican Party now, repeatedly assail the president for "kowtowing" to foreigners simply because he's renewed America's standing by listening as well as leading. Supposedly this is soft; just ask Dick Cheney. But to the discomfort of the unilateralists, it was Obama not Bush who got Osama bin Laden.