Debt ceiling ‘crisis’ ends in predictable capitulation

As ruefully anticipated in my prior columns on the fabricated debt ceiling crisis (the debt ceiling kabuki), this episode was another sad, deflated defeat by a political party that seems headed the way of the Whigs. The intellectual paralysis of the conventional DC Beltway mindset stunts the Democratic Party. It is such an ideological mish-mash that the average citizen has no clue what the party actually stands for beyond a vague cultural vibe. Democrats are wusses, and Republicans are jerks in the vernacular of pop meme politics.

Despite the Democrats’ comprehensive political incompetence, they are sustained in power by the fact that, yes, they represent the political instincts of about 2/3rds of American citizens. The primary driver of Democrats’ voting rates is the growing fear of an increasingly authoritarian, socially reactionary, and heavily armed Republican Party base. The ideological capture of both parties (with a few admirable exceptions) by the logic of capitalist realism makes these political contests less about the clash of ideas than competing narratives of citizenship.

The exercise of closely tracking the debt ceiling story over the last couple of months is like taking an ice sample of the decades of the modern Democratic Party to see the layers of political crises and capitulations that have led us to the current systemic political gridlock. It should not be this close. When the next election will likely reprise two octogenarians, Biden vs. Trump again, you know that time is a flat circle. This is our national purgatory for our civic sins.

After the hostage had given up a couple of fingers to his kidnappers, the mainstream media press was full of Democrat-brain freeze on display, trying to rationalize the fact that they just got mugged and were forced at gunpoint to empty all the cash in their ATM to hand over to the hostage-takers.

The Freedom Caucus pirates are now openly bragging about how they’ll be back in two years to finish the job. Do not listen to anyone who believes that this entire charade was necessary and that we somehow escaped with minimal damage. They are in a state of denial over their own powerlessness and inability to adequately defend their position.

The liberal enabler pundit class is in institutional stunlock, seeking to manufacture conventional wisdom coagulation to seal the political wound with the sap produced. In case you think that I’m not being fair to the Biden Administration, take it from the New York Times: ‘In Pursuit of Consensus, Did Biden Find the Reasonable Middle or Give Away Too Much?’ “… much to the chagrin of his allies, the bargaining of recent weeks was entirely on Republican terms. While details were still emerging this weekend, the final agreement included no new Biden fiscal initiatives like higher taxes on the wealthy or expanded discounts for insulin.” NYT May 28th

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Local land-use activist Fred Allebach and community organizer Mario Castillo have revived a long-dormant discussion on the necessity of uniting the valley and re-defining the city of Sonoma to include all the inhabitants of the Valley in one municipal network. That would accomplish two key tasks: #1 Accelerate the pace of infrastructure upgrades in the Springs area through greater revenue shares; #2 Create real politics which is not just an intramural sport played between contesting elites in the imaginal boundaries of the city of Sonoma as currently defined.

The annexation discussion brought to mind the mission of the newly formed Center for People Power. “The center will become a site for awareness raising, advocacy and direct intervention towards the ongoing efforts to truly decolonize Sonoma County,” Seth Donnelly, CPP member. Here’s a potential application of that mission: decolonizing  Sonoma Valley by finally giving the residents of the Springs the political representation and the share of the tax money it deserves. That’s a campaign that would put CPP on the map.