Shutdown not about health care, it's about health of our democracy

The New York Times’ Tom Friedman has written a typically thought-provoking column about Washington's shutdown showdown in which he reaches this conclusion: The fight is not about health care, it’s about the health of our democracy.

Friedman argues that the outsized influence of the hard-right tea party House members has created a dangerous path toward political “hostage taking” and minority rule.

“And this is the really scary part: The lawmakers doing this can do so with high confidence that they personally will not be politically punished, and may, in fact, be rewarded,” Friedman wrote. “When extremists feel that insulated from playing by the traditional rules of our system, if we do not defend those rules — namely majority rule and the fact that if you don’t like a policy passed by Congress, signed by the president and affirmed by the Supreme Court then you have to go out and win an election to overturn it; you can’t just put a fiscal gun to the country’s head — then our democracy is imperiled.”

Friedman amply makes the case that our politics has been twisted by three structural changes: extreme gerrymandering of congressional districts that allows Republicans to pander to their most conservative constituents and ignore the rest; the ability of a single multimillionaire to influence a congressional or even a presidential election, thanks to the Supreme Court ruling in the Citizens United case; and the rise of separate universes of voters created by right-wing (and left-wing) commentators who spew their strident views on TV, radio and online.

In other words, the fringies on the right have somehow taken hold of the congressional agenda.

Friedman writes that the openly biased media outlets have “created another gravity-free zone, where there is no punishment for extreme behavior, but there’s 1,000 lashes on Twitter if you deviate from the hard-line and great coverage to those who are most extreme. When politicians only operate inside these bubbles, they lose the habit of persuasion and opt only for coercion. After all, they must be right. Rush Limbaugh told them so.”