In love with the abyss

President Obama has admitted that the United States was on the brink of the abyss during negotiations over the new debt ceiling — and the rest of the world followed in its wake. Although the US political class finally managed to avoid a default, the sessions in the House of Representatives underscored the vulnerability of the world economic system, which, as seen in the case of Spanish and Italian debt, continues to feel the ill effects of the political turbulence in Washington.

Unlike the threat posed by speculative movements against the sovereign debt of certain economies, the recent challenge mounted by the Tea Party is guided by a fanaticism that does not hesitate to choose a collective catastrophe that nobody will benefit from over a reconsideration of its clumsy ideological positions. This movement not only managed to take the Republican Party hostage, but also did the same with the Democrats, by becoming the extravagant arbiter of a situation that requires, above all, pragmatism and a sense of responsibility.

Obama had to initially give up on the most socially oriented component of his program, alienating himself from his party's progressive wing and adding new difficulties to his re-election. But Republicans were unable to transform this change, soon corrected by Obama, into a victory: their manifest dependency on the Tea Party made them look like a force that is incapable of putting its own house in order. Republicanism will have to choose between its traditional credentials and the thrill-seeking demonstrated by the lovers of the abyss that the party negotiated with in order to wrest control of the House away from Obama.

The next US presidential campaign is riding on that option, although what's at stake is the recovery of the world economy. Until now, the main powers have favored reducing the deficit at the expense of reactivating the economy, but they must not lose sight of the high costs of that strategy. The Tea Party, meanwhile, thinks it is defending a miracle cure when, in reality, all it did was set the wheels in motion that could make the world economy go up in flames.

The Tea Party's extremism has its own characteristics that make it hard to draw an exact parallel with the kind of extremism that is proliferating in Europe, in the form of xenophobic populism. But both currents share a common origin: a blind faith in certain tenets that, once restored, will magically resolve the serious problems facing the international community. The fanaticism that drives this belief, closer to superstition than to good governance, is contaminating democratic forces on both sides of the Atlantic. Every concession made to the Tea Party or to populism for electoral reasons becomes a new weakness in the system — the democratic system but also the economic system, as has become plain to see in recent days.