Department of Bad Ideas: Polly Toynbee Writes About American Politics

Surprise! Polly Toynbee’s column on the Tea Party today is a mess. You wouldn’t expect La Doyenne to agree with the Tea Party’s thirst for deficit reduction, nor with its willingness to take the United States to the edge of a technical default. That’s fine. Equally, there’s certainly a strain of conservative thinking immune to logic or reason. But much the same could be said of certain classes of Guardian readers too.

This, however, is dreadful or, at best, simply lazy:

The founding fathers built a constitution of checks and balances believing reasonable men would agree; how could they foresee Sarah Palin, Michele Bachmann or Glenn Beck? To the British eye, America was always dangerously prone to waves of populism and McCarthyite panics. The country has reached a deadlock that may set it on a faster road to decline as absolute intransigence creates a constitution that no longer functions. Why bother with the great show of presidential elections when presidents are denied the power to match their pomp? The politics of miasma, where words matter more than facts and actions, lets the Tea Party demand the impossible – debt reduction with tax cuts, spending cuts without touching the gargantuan defence budget.