The Limits of the ‘Extremism’ Canard

By Noah Rothman

Tuesday, May 23, 2023

 

Who would have thought that the Democratic debt ceiling strategy – a plan of action that rejected the very concept of strategizing altogether – would come up short? Well, everything becomes clearer in hindsight, and that clarity has produced a lamentable conclusion among Democratic allies in media: the party in control of the White House is losing the debt ceiling fight.

 

Writing in the New Republic, staff writer Alex Shephard has penned an early postmortem analysis of what he sees as the Democratic Party’s terminally flawed tactical approach to debt ceiling negotiations:

 

Instead of raising the debt limit during the lame duck, when they still possessed a narrow advantage in both the House and the Senate, they made the strategic decision to do nothing. When the need to raise the debt limit approached in 2023, the thinking went, the Republicans now in control of the House would once again show their extremism, voters would recoil, and—voila—another Democratic masterstroke.

 

Whatever compromise deal congressional and White House negotiators hammer out – and it will be a deal, or it will be default – Shephard sees the fallout settling mostly on the Democratic Party. “Either way,” he concludes, “they will complain about the wreckage caused by Republican extremism, and hope voters see their side of it.” Probably. But the Democratic Party has over-invested in the idea that the GOP’s self-evident “extremism” will prove discrediting for years. It is a strategy that only works when Democrats are not themselves engaged in efforts to redefine the American social compact in ways voters find discomfiting.

 

The Republican Party’s asks – spending cuts to 2022 levels, paring back the giveaways and ancillary items in the so-called Inflation Reduction Act, work requirements for able-bodied and eligible federal benefits recipients, and so on – might have been branded wildly reactionary if they were not at root a response to Democratic efforts to push the envelope.

 

Using the cover of a once-in-a-lifetime emergency to borrow trillions of dollars to pursue progressive social engineering, the most observable effect of which was to hike the cost of daily necessities, is extreme. Rejecting the will of the voters who, in 2022, saw fit to hand control of the chamber of Congress from which appropriations bills must originate is extreme. Threatening at the last minute to rewrite the Constitution so the 14th Amendment’s prescription for servicing old debt somehow applies to establishing new debt is extreme.

 

When voters are dissatisfied with the status quo, as they are today, and they are confronted with two competing extremisms, the edge goes to the out-party by default. Democrats have deployed the “extremism” charge against Republicans for well over a decade, and the results are reliably mixed when the allegation fails to establish a contrast. If Democrats could see the extremism in their own agenda, maybe they could have avoided what could be an evitable embarrassment for the president’s party.