A salient feature of American "exceptionalism" is the belief that the United States can never be ordinary. If it is not the best, then it must be the worst. If it is not destined to dominate the world forever, then it is doomed to decline and decay.
This kind of thinking explains why much of the commentary in the US about the recent "shut-down" of the Government, and also about the impending default on the national debt (due on October 17), has started out hysterical and geared up to apocalyptic. Americans have lost the mandate of Heaven and it will soon be raining frogs and blood.
So everybody take your tranquiliser of choice and let's consider what is actually going on here. The US is the world's oldest democratic country, with an 18th-century constitution that is bound to be an awkward fit for 21st-century politics. But that hasn't stopped the US from becoming the world's biggest economy and its greatest power. Has something now gone fundamentally wrong? The problem lies in Congress, specifically in the House of Representatives, where the Republican majority is refusing to pass the Budget, and threatening not to raise the official debt ceiling either, unless President Barack Obama postpones the implementation of his bill extending medical care to all Americans.
The Affordable Care Act was passed by both houses of Congress and signed into law by Obama almost four years ago. Last year it passed scrutiny by the Supreme Court and was subsequently welcomed by a majority of the voters in the presidential election, so Obama is understandably refusing to yield to blackmail. But the House Republicans seem mysteriously unworried by the fact that the public blames them for the impending train wreck. Why?
Because 80 per cent of the Republicans in the House of Representatives don't have to worry about what the public thinks. They represent Congressional districts that have been so shamelessly gerrymandered by state legislatures that it is almost impossible for anybody who is a Republican to lose an election there. National public opinion is no threat to them, whereas the views of their extremist Tea Party colleagues are a potentially lethal danger.
