It’s a little too perfect that an international balloon incident has led to a crisis of far too much hot air, but sometimes the universe feels obliged to show its support for the rightness of puns in ways no one can miss. Republicans and their right-wing media allies have spared neither overwrought hyperbole nor rifle-pointed-at-the-sky selfie to proclaim the migrant (!) Chinese airship a crisis of the first order, a challenge to American sovereignty, a declaration of war on unadulterated blue skies, and, of course and inexorably, a damning judgment on the presidency of one Joseph R. Biden, who should resign the presidency forthwith (this last demand brushing up uncomfortably against the right-wing fiction that Biden was not actually elected president, consistency not being their strong suit). The sky was literally the limit as conservative pundits suggested the high-flying airship might be seeding covid or worse over purple mountain majesties. Death could not come too soon or too harshly to the inanimate object, which meant its actual take-down had to be dismissed as too little, too late — even as it was reported that the U.S. military was able to jam the dirigible’s transmissions and that the over-ocean shootdown has given Navy divers a good chance at recovering valuable intelligence materials.
In other words, the Republican Party collectively demonstrated far less interest in defending America against actual danger (which did not exist), and far more in pursuing the party’s overriding project — undermining President Biden, and more broadly, breaking down American democracy using whatever blend of fiction, hysteria, and nonsense they could froth up. Baseless attempts to persuade Americans that they were in mortal danger, that the U.S. was demonstrating weakness that could be exploited by a nuclear power, and that danger loomed unless the president blew up (!!) the balloon RIGHT NOW share a common thread with previous GOP greatest hits that you may recall, such as Migrant Caravan, Ebola Virus, and Existence of Transgender People.
This last week brought a new low, though. This last week, we were encouraged to fear a balloon.
As absurd as it sounds, the playbook remains doggedly the same — a multi-pronged attempt to scare Americans into a state of irrational fear so that they might look more favorably on the party that offers a perfect solution to the illusion of danger — the illusion of safety. In the case of the balloon, the GOP stayed on brand, as it turned out that the way to protect America was through overwhelming violence against an abstract and badly defined non-threat. It did not matter that the balloon was not an actual danger. It did not matter that the Biden administration engaged a plan that essentially allowed the U.S. to flip the script on the Chinese government. All that mattered was that Americans be made to feel afraid and helpless. These are not the words and ideas of a democratic party, but of an authoritarian one.
And so it would be a mistake to see last week’s drama as somehow separate from the GOP’s anti-democratic slide that’s blossomed into full-scale authoritarianism over the last half decade and more, a movement that crescendo’d on January 6 and has since surged anew, from laws to subvert elections to schemes to cause financial chaos by forcing the federal government to default on its debts. The GOP is desperate to undermine Americans’ faith in their government and in their personal safety, to create an atmosphere of crisis and lies in which their assertions of violence and hate might seem to make sense to a disoriented populace. The attempts to whip up hysteria about a goddamn balloon are the latest manifestation of the same awful strategy.
That said, another important context that we shouldn’t ignore is the ongoing Russian invasion of Ukraine. In the Biden administration’s strong support of the defense of Ukraine — now including the transfer of battle tanks to that beleaguered nation — is a glaring repudiation of the idea that the president is somehow “weak on defense.” Rather, it’s the GOP that has major elements reluctant to support Ukraine, or who even express sympathy for the murderous Vladimir Putin (including their likely 2024 presidential candidate). So the China warmongering also aims to distract Americans from the party’s shaky support of doing the right thing in an actual, ongoing crisis — one that gives the lie to the idea that the GOP understands how to defend national security or defeat authoritarianism, whether it be of the Chinese, Russian, or domestic variety.