Trivial Pursuits

If anything captures the dysfunctional character of American politics, surely this must be it. Sane voices in the Republican Party have been drowned out by the drumbeats of Tea Party Neanderthals and right wing kooks like Glen Beck and Rush Limbaugh. Republican Party obstructionism and Democratic Party timidity have brought governing to a screeching halt. The Democrats are nominally in charge, but arcane Senate rules require a minimum of 60 senators, not just a majority 50, to advance any legislation, allowing Republicans to gummy up the federal government.

There are only two realistic paths out of the economic ditch that eight years of Republican mismanagement drove this country into: government-led economic stimulus plans, such as those promoted by the Obama administration, or severe financial belt tightening, which the Republicans propose, and the path the United Kingdom is pursuing under its new Prime Minister David Cameron. We have no way of knowing which, if either one of these paths, is better. Only time will tell. But what we do know is that a muddled standoff between the two competing theories, the rut in which the United States finds itself, is the worst possible alternative. The government has already spent almost a trillion dollars, but its economic leverage has been squandered as private businesses remain spooked by the political gridlock.

The upcoming Congressional elections will only make a bad situation worse. By all accounts, the Democrats are in for a drumming and will likely lose the House and possibly even the Senate. At the very minimum, their strong majorities in both chambers will be severely trimmed. We will then be looking at continuing political paralysis for another two years until the 2012 elections as both parties jockey for political leverage.

What is especially ironic about right wing obstructionism is that for long the Right has accused the Left of lacking patriotism and of undermining American interests, presidential legitimacy and constitutional order. But the Right’s crass disdain for Pres. Barack Obama and for religious freedom by not just expressing their opposition to the Muslim cultural center — which is their right — but by seeking to use governmental instruments and roadblocks to subvert the project, has laid bare the political opportunism and selfishness that drive these “America First” hucksters.

Policy analysts recognize that these are perilous times for America’s leadership in the world. The foreign policy analyst Fareed Zakaria gave us a window to the emerging new world order in his 2008 book The Post American World. Many of the tectonic shifts, such as the economic ascendancy of India and China, are outside America’s control. But many other wounds are self-inflicted, such as the country’s military adventurism in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the political infighting, which is stalling its economic recovery.

For centuries now, historians have argued over the reasons behind the fall of the Roman Empire in the 5th Century. In 1984 a German professor even published a compilation of 210 theories behind the empire’s decline, which occurred over a period of nearly three centuries. America’s decline will likely be spread over decades, not centuries. When the final history of that decline is written, we know well that George W Bush, preemptive wars and the global economic crisis of 2008 will all be significant early markers. But the trivial pursuits by Christian right wing zealots of Muslim cultural centers and mosques while the country burned will not have been inconsequential.