Can America survive a game of spoilers?

It’s been nearly four years since Congress passed e Donald Trump signed a massive relief bill aimed at limiting financial hardship created by the COVID-19 pandemic.

The CARES Act did its job.

Even if around 25 million Americans have temporarily lost their jobs – caused primarily by fear of contagion rather than officially ordered closures – the economic pain has been much less painful than one might expect, given the scale 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 those one-off checks and the dramatic improvement in unemployment benefits more than offset the loss of jobs and businesses.

Diagnostics

Furthermore, fears that generous pandemic relief would undermine the American work ethic – that adults would drop out of the workforce and never return – turned out to be dead wrong.

A new paper from the San Francisco Federal Reserve is titled “Why Is Early Childhood Labor Force Participation So High?”

It finds that Americans between the ages of 25 and 54 are more likely to be in the workforce now than at any time since the early 2000s.

So the CARES Act was a huge political success.

But given recent political events, I started thinking:

What would have happened if Democrats in 2020 had behaved like Republicans in 2024?

Let’s imagine an alternative history in which Joe Bidenwho at that point was already the heavy favorite to win the Democratic presidential nomination, would urge congressional Democrats not to pass a relief bill, the same way Trump intimidated Republicans into voting against a border security bill– because he believed that reducing American poverty could help Trump get re-elected.

Let’s imagine a story in which Nancy Pelosithen the Democratic Speaker of the House, would behave like Mike Johnson, the current Republican President, and prevent a bill that attempted to address an urgent national priority from reaching the House floor.

Electoral effect

It seems clear that the CARES Act, in fact, helped Republicans politically.

It’s true that they lost the White House in 2020, but by a margin less decisive than many expected and that, although Democrats gained control of the Senate, they did so by the narrowest of margins possible.

Republicans certainly would have fared much worse if Trump had been in power. a depression COVID-induced on a large scale.

And the GOP continues, to this day, to benefit from the 2020 COVID relief package. Republicans constantly brag about how good the economy was under Trump, which is strange, given that Trump has been the first president since then. Herbert Hoover leaving the White House with fewer Americans employed than when he moved there.

The trick here is that they fake it 2020 never happened — a sleight of hand that only works because federal aid has allowed so many Americans to emerge from the pandemic depression in good financial shape.

Now, my fictional story didn’t happen and couldn’t have happened.

For starters, Pelosi is not that kind of politician.

She is partisan, of course, but, as far as I know, she has never engaged in political extortion while holding the nation’s well-being hostage.

For example, in 2019, he led a bipartisan deal to suspend the debt ceiling, averting a potential financial crisis, in a deal that Trump himself admitted contained no “poison pills.”

Even if Pelosi herself had wanted to carry out economic sabotage, her colleagues would almost certainly have refused.

But Trump’s Republicans (and recent events have confirmed that Trump does indeed own the Republican Party) are everything the 2020 Democrats were not.

They rejected a border security and foreign aid bill that they themselves had requested and then negotiated, a bill that was much tougher than Democrats would have liked.

And they don’t even try to hide their naked 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 portion of Republicans, including Trump, would prefer to block aid to Ukraine because, apparently, Vladimir Putin He is their kind of man 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, campaign style Harry Trumann against the “Congress of Nothing” of 1948 – with the added advantage that this time the Republicans are more or less openly trying to damage 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 Democrats regain full control of Congress – I worry about the future.

One of the two major political parties in the United States is now committed to achieving power at all costs and will try to make the nation ungovernable when a Democrat sits in the White House.

How long can our democracy survive under these conditions?

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