The Madman Theory and the threat of default

Just to be clear, a minority of Congressional Republicans have not yet defaulted on the U.S. debt — destroying 237 years of honorable trust, the banking system, and the global economy (including, you know, your job).

That’s what they’re trying to do, and there may be no way to stop them if they remain intent on doing it. But they still have at least nine days, maybe even a few weeks, in which they could change their mind and stop dragging the country over a cliff.

So what’s driving this suicidal push to destroy America’s economy? Is it just brinksmanship — the attempt to play hard-ball by threatening to kill us all if they don’t get their way? Is it just the economic equivalent of Richard Nixon’s old “Madman Theory” from the Cold War? Nixon thought America’s nuclear deterrent would be most effective only if America’s enemies were convinced that he was a “madman” who would be willing to destroy the entire world. It was a pose of insanity by a sane man shrewdly calculating that appearing self-destructive would keep his opponents off-balance.

I suspect, or hope, that this is some of what we’re seeing from leading congressional Republicans who have taken to suggesting that government default wouldn’t be a bad thing at all. If this is the Madman Theory in practice, they’re good at it — doing a credible impression of Peter Sellers discussing the “mineshaft gap” in Doctor Strangelove:

Maybe it’s a performance of “How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Global Economic Collapse.”

But I don’t think they’re acting. I think they’re actually inspired, like Strangelove himself, by “a spirit of bold curiosity for the adventure ahead.” Congressional Republicans like Ted Yoho, Joe Barton and Rand Paul seem to find calamity terribly exciting. And economic calamity is the only excitement left now that Iraq and Afghanistan have sapped all the fun out of starting wars.

“We have nothing to fear but fear itself,” President Franklin D. Roosevelt said when the nation was on the brink of an earlier economic calamity. The problem now is that Fear Itself is the agenda and ideology of the dominant faction of the party that controls the House of Representatives.