“What you’ve got to understand is this is an emotional issue, not a rational issue," says budget guru Stan Collender, a veteran of both House and Senate budget committees who puts the likelihood of a shutdown at 90 percent. “As far I can tell it has no theoretical economic underpinnings, which is why it’s so difficult for the budget these days to be discussed, because statistics don’t mean anything, equations don’t convince anybody. It is almost a religious belief.”
Perhaps more than “almost.” The tea party has a reputation for secularism, but in fact it’s deeply rooted in the religious right. The GOP’s tea party freshmen made their leanings clear by going after insurance coverage for abortion and funding for Planned Parenthood, but their faith informs their economic stance as well. “It's no coincidence that socialist Europe is post-Christian because the bigger the government gets the smaller God gets and vice versa,” Senator Jim DeMint, one of the Tea Party’s major Senate supporters, told the Christian Broadcasting Network last year.
Republican elites have encouraged this quasi-theological approach to economics. Last year, Arthur Brooks, president of the American Enterprise Institute, published The Battle: How the Fight Between Free Enterprise and Big Government Will Shape America’s Future, a book much discussed in right-wing circles. “America faces a new culture war,” Brooks argued. Instead of a fight over “guns, abortion, religion and gays,” it’s a struggle between American freedom and European statism.
Thus debt has come to replace homosexuality as a symbol for American decline, and the fervor of past culture wars is being deployed in budgetary battles. And things could soon get truly apocalyptic, given that some tea party-aligned Republicans are balking at raising the debt limit, which we'll reach later this spring. That would be far more serious than a government shutdown: Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner has warned of “catastrophic economic consequences, including default on U.S. debt and a suspension of Social Security payments.
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