In a characteristic non sequitur in one of his novels, Donald Barthelme depicts the U.S. President sitting in the Oval Office, contemplating the falling of the Dow-Jones and the travails of the poor, and thinking to himself: "Great balls of river mud. [...] Is nothing going to go right?"
The words were written in 1967, but reading them today, one cannot help but picture Biden in this same tragic role. Not that it can truly be said that nothing has gone right in his presidency. He has survived political disasters before (the Afghan withdrawal, e.g.), only to rebound with unexpected successes (such as the climate bill).
Yet, where he sits now, the opposing party really does seem to have him in a bind. Either the country risks a catastrophic default that would upset the global economy and might undermine U.S. centrality to the world financial system for generations to come. Or he agrees to some pretty ugly conditions.
What are those conditions? Mostly: spending caps and more work requirements on programs for poor people. Now, I'm not necessarily opposed to trying to trim the federal budget in an age of inflation, when growth rates have remained high and fiscal stimulus is not imminently needed.
But the danger with proposed long-term spending caps is that they will bar the government from taking such stimulus action when it is needed. Now, for instance, would be the worst time to lock the government into such limits, as the Fed's interest rate campaign is starting to have measurable effects on employment and the financial system, and the economy might actually tip into recession.
If this were to happen, with legislative spending caps in place, it would effectively constitute a political trap. The economy would grind to a halt during the tenure of a Democratic president, and Congress would be ill-equipped to respond with any stimulus measures needed to jolt it back into life, for the duration of his presidency.
Then there is the problem of where Republicans plan to get these savings from. They aren't planning anytime soon to trim the fat from the thickest slices of the federal budget: defense, entitlements, etc. So that leaves taking it out on the politically powerless and marginalized: adding even more cumbersome restrictions to the pittances that poor people depend on as survival rations, such as food stamps.
"The falling Dow-Jones index and the screams of the poor," in Barthelme's words, are what haunt the president's thoughts in 1967... it seems the problems of the president haven't changed all that much since then. But what has changed is the alternative we face, if he fails to address these problems.
If such a legislative deal on the debt ceiling doesn't come together, as unsavory as it is, then overnight we get a global financial crisis. And even if the deal passes, but it hamstrings the government's ability to respond to a future recession stemming from interest rate increases, then that too is a loss for Biden. Republicans have set their diabolical trap well.
All of which would be less terror-inducing if the likely alternative to Biden in the next election were one we could live with. But, it is not. In case we had forgotten this, Trump duly appeared on CNN last week to remind us: he is still a fundamental threat to U.S. democracy, who refuses to accept the results of free elections—and now is bent on revenge.
All of which presents us with the horrifying possibility: what if Biden wasn't actually the president who saved us from our decline into autocracy and economic irrelevance as a nation—but rather a sort of last glint of the light over the horizon before the sun went down forever?
I remember, as do we all I'm sure, the relief I felt the night after the inauguration. A friend texted me to turn on the news: "something amazing is happening," he said. "You've got to see this." Lo and behold, there was the new administration's press team, interacting with reporters, fielding questions, and doing it all as reasonable and mature adults. The "grown-ups" had arrived.
But what if this was not actually the moment we were saved, but something more like a mirage of the memory such as the dying are supposed to feel just before the end. What if it was something like what Gogol describes, in a passage from Dead Souls. He has just been indelibly portraying an old miser—a rich landowner with what we would now dub "hoarder" tendencies—living in the far reaches of Russia's provinces. The miser has a brief warm recollection of an old friend, Gogol writes, but it soon passes:
Some warm ray suddenly passed over his wooden face, writes Gogol, expressing not a feeling, but some pale reflection of a feeling, a phenomenon similar to the sudden appearance of a drowning man on the surface, drawing a joyful shout from the crowd on the bank. But in vain do the rejoicing brothers and sisters throw a rope from the bank and wait for another glimpse of the back or the struggle-weary arms—that appearance was the last. Everything is desolate, and the stilled surface of the unresponding element is all the more terrible and deserted after that. (Pevear/Volokhonsky trans.)
Perhaps, then, the Biden administration was not actually the rescue of the drowning man of American democracy, but a final effort of that flailing system that gave us false hope, when the drowning democracy emerged briefly one last time above the waves. Perhaps that happy image that my friend called me to see—that first press conference that seemed so promising—was not really a sign of life, but a last gasp. Perhaps American democracy that night was "not waving but drowning," to quote the poet Stevie Smith.
And, as Gogol writes, it will be all the more terrible when it disappears under the waves again, having surrendered the brief struggle, and the cold and eternal ocean of autocracy closes over its head once more.
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