Can the US survive a game of spoilers?

It's been nearly four years since Congress passed, and Donald Trump signed, a massive relief bill aimed at limiting the economic suffering caused by Covid-19. The Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act did its job. Although about 25 million Americans temporarily lost their jobs – the job losses were caused primarily by fear of contagion and not by officially declared closures – there was much less monetary pain than might have been expected, given the magnitude of the public health crisis.

In fact, according to a Federal Reserve survey, the percentage of Americans who were “at least doing well financially” was actually higher in July 2020 than before the pandemic, presumably because for many people, government aid, including one-time checks and greatly enhanced unemployment benefits, more than offset the loss of jobs and businesses.

What's more, fears that generous pandemic subsidies would undermine America's work ethic—that adults would drop out of the workforce and never return—turned out to be entirely unfounded. A new document from the San Francisco Federal Reserve is titled Why is the participation of the active population in the most productive age so high?. It notes that Americans between the ages of 25 and 54 are more likely to be in the workforce now than at any time since the turn of the century. So the CARES Act was a huge policy success. But given the latest political events, I've started thinking: what would have happened if the Democrats in 2020 had behaved like the Republicans in 2024?

Imagine an alternative narrative in which Joe Biden, already the overwhelming favorite to be the Democratic presidential candidate, had urged Democrats in Congress not to pass a relief bill—in the same way that Trump has bullied Republicans into voting against a border security bill—believing that reducing Americans' misery could help Trump get re-elected.

Imagine a story in which Nancy Pelosi, the Democratic Speaker of the House at the time, had behaved like Mike Johnson, the current Republican Speaker, and blocked a bill that attempted to address an urgent national priority from reaching the floor.

It seems clear that the CARES Act did, in fact, help Republicans politically. It is true that they lost the White House in 2020, but by a less decisive margin than many expected, and that, although Democrats gained control of the Senate, they did so by a slim margin. Republicans would have fared much worse if Trump had been presiding over a large-scale Covid-induced depression.

And the Republican Party continues to benefit from that covid aid package. Republicans constantly brag about how well the economy was doing under Trump, which is curious considering that Trump was the first president since Herbert Hoover to leave the White House with fewer employed Americans than when he moved in. The trick here is that they pretend 2020 never happened, a sleight of hand that only works because federal aid allowed so many Americans to emerge from the pandemic-induced recession in good financial shape.

Now, my imaginary story did not happen and could not have happened. For starters, Pelosi is not that kind of politician. He is partisan, of course, but never, to my knowledge, has he engaged in political extortion by holding the nation's well-being hostage. For example, in 2019, he shepherded a bipartisan agreement to suspend the debt ceiling, averting a potential financial crisis, with an agreement that even Trump himself acknowledged did not contain “any poison pills.” And even if Pelosi had wanted to engage in economic sabotage, his colleagues would almost certainly have refused to play along.

But Trump's Republicans (and recent events have confirmed that Trump really owns the Republican Party) are everything the 2020 Democrats were not. They have rejected a border security and foreign aid bill that they themselves demanded and subsequently negotiated, one that was much tougher than Democrats would have liked. And they don't even try to hide their blatant cynicism. They want to block a border deal, even one that gives them almost everything they want, because any deal could limit their ability to attack Biden on this issue. Oh, and a significant fraction of Republicans, Trump included, would prefer to block aid to Ukraine because Vladimir Putin is clearly their kind of guy and they are happy to see him crush their democratic neighbor.

It's clear that Biden intends to make Republican sabotage a major issue in the 2024 campaign—like when Harry Truman ran against the “do-nothing Congress” in 1948—with the added bonus that, this time, Republicans more or less openly try to undermine American interests for political gain. It remains to be seen whether this strategy will work. But even if it works, and Biden wins, even if the Democrats regain full control of Congress, I worry about the future. One of the two main political parties in the United States is now dedicated to trying to achieve power at all costs and will try to make the nation ungovernable if a Democrat sits in the White House. How long can our democracy survive under these conditions?

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