As a price of gaining the support of far-right Republicans, newly-elected House speaker Kevin McCarthy has apparently promised to use the threat of a U.S. debt default to force draconian spending cuts in the federal budget. A debt default would have disastrous consequences for the U.S. and even world economy, destabilizing common faith in American financial stability, causing massive job losses, and catalyzing a recession. The fact that the Republicans would not only threaten this, but seem to be putting plans in place to advance an actual default, challenges all of us to stop, once and for all, looking through the Democratic-Republican conflict in Washington as politics as usual. This debt default brinksmanship, pushed by radical Republicans and supported by Speaker McCarthy, should rightly be seen as another aspect of the slow-motion insurrection the GOP has been waging ever since the events of January 6, in which all means are considered valid in an effort to overthrow American democracy and our free and open society.
A willingness to cause the U.S. to breach its debts is a direct attack on U.S. financial stability, on social cohesion, and on democratic governance. As we saw in 2011, when the Republicans pursued a similar path towards debt default in a showdown with the Obama administration, even the threat of a default can have perilous consequences, such as when the U.S. government’s credit rating ended up being downgraded as a consequence of the GOP’s failed gambit.
As nihilistic as this strategy might seem, there are in fact deeper purposes at play. Some Republicans doubtless see a damaged U.S. economy as key to taking back the White House in 2024, a situation of financial chaos and social dislocation they could exploit. But an appetite for deliberately harming millions of American in pursuit of political ends is not democratic politics in any meaningful sense, but more rightly described as authoritarian politics, in which the ends justify the means and citizens are reduced to objects and playthings of power.
There is a basic fact here that the Democrats seem not to fully face: the Republican Party is not simply not engaging in democratic, electoral politics in its pursuit of power. Rather, the GOP sees all possible tools as being at its disposal to gain and maintain power. And so, in the past several years, we have seen Republicans politicize a pandemic to score political points, embracing outrageous falsehoods about covid vaccines and the severity of the coronavirus, first in an effort to protect Donald Trump from the consequences of his incompetence, and later as a cynical effort to rile up Republican base voters against Democratic politicians. We have seen the GOP repeatedly embrace rhetoric and policies that excludes certain citizens from the American family, as in the demonization of LBGTQ people. Beyond rhetoric, the party has escalated into attacking democracy itself, with a Republican president attempting an actual coup to stay in office, and the party retroactively embracing that insurrectionary effort through efforts to deny the validity of the 2020 election and subvert future elections via voter suppression, gerrymandering, and continued propaganda about a supposedly rigged electoral system. Perhaps most damningly, the GOP has increasingly made clear that violence is just another tool in its toolbox: in its efforts to validate the objectives of the January insurrectionists, in its valorization of anti-civil rights vigilantism, in its incitement of violence against the gay community.
This damning history is the proper context in which to view the Republicans’ insane drive to force the country into a debt default. We are living through an uprising by one of America’s two major political parties against the nation itself, in service of a white supremacist, Christian nationalist vision of America. Feeling sanctified by God himself and freed of the mere laws and morals of man, this movement would destroy the nation itself in its perverted quest to save it.