To which the other "side" to the dispute replies: Who cares! We don't like you or your programs, and to prove it we're willing to risk a default on the national debt.

If you describe the "disagreement" the first way, no one's really to blame. It's just politics, a sign of the symmetrical dysfunction that plagues us all.

If you describe it the second way, then one side is sticking to historic norms and practices -- and the other is deliberately bringing on a showdown, with the all consequent risks for the domestic and international economies, via demands and threats out of scale with what previous Congresses have done. This second version is what's happening.

Maybe you could argue that such drastic threats are sensible. You wouldn't convince me, but you could make the case. What you shouldn't do is pretend that this is a normal "agree to disagree" difference of perspective. It's not; it's nihilistic; and to reduce it to gridlock amounts to "defining deviancy down." We're hearing that phrase, of Daniel Patrick Moynihan's, a lot these days in honor of Anthony Weiner. But it applies to current debt-ceiling threats as well.

What's going on now is more like the 1970s-era hijackers Brendan Koerner describes in his recent book, who would threaten to blow up the plane unless they got the ride to Cuba they wanted. Or, if you want a less violent analogy, it's like me walking into a restaurant, ordering and enjoying a meal, and then when I finished just tearing up the check and saying that I was "digging in my heels" about whether I should pay.

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Through these past 10 days out of the country and the long flight back just now, I have nearly finished an actual beginning-to-end reading of Democracy in America -- all 700 tiny-print pages, often cited, rarely read. Don't worry, I am not going to start rolling out Tocqueville aphorisms. But there is a lot in there that bears directly on threats like those we're hearing over the debt ceiling, among other items (including Trayvon Martin) in the recent news. I'm now up to page 580; when I get these last 120 pages under the belt, watch out!

* For a while the GOP and Fox News argued that the Obama Administration itself was ignoring this same principle in delaying the phase-in of some Obamacare transitions. That's a phony complaint, as Simon Lazarus has explained.