As the potential grows for a euro-quake that could well send a financial tidal wave racing toward America, and the U.S. heads toward a "fiscal cliff" of its own, created by Congress, you'd think political leaders here would be uniting urgently to preserve the fragile economic recovery taking place.

But that of course would assume rational politics, grounded in reality, and a determination to protect the nation from another financial nightmare.

And that is just about the opposite of how Washington works these days. Which is why the public holds Congress in about the same regard as ambulance-chasing shysters.

Consider the so-called fiscal cliff.

Last summer, Tea Party Republicans made it clear — and it turned out they were serious — that they would force the nation into default, with all the disastrous consequences that would entail, rather than raise the national debt limit to accommodate more borrowing to pay for government programs mandated by Congress itself. (Raising the limit was routine in the past.)

As the brinkmanship tore away at the economy, both parties eventually agreed to strike a committee to examine how the colossal deficit can be reduced.

But they also built in a sort of dead-man's switch: automatic, across-the-board spending cuts would be triggered at the end of this year if committee members could not agree on what to do.

Naturally, they could not agree.

The Democrats were willing to compromise, and accept Republican-sponsored spending cuts if tax increases on the wealthiest Americans were also implemented.

Republicans insisted on spending cuts as the entire solution. They refused to even consider forcing the rich to pay more.

Now, as a result of Congress's failure to act, automatic spending cuts of $65 billion loom in seven months, at the end of 2012, scant weeks after the November elections.

At the same time, tax cuts implemented by both the George W. Bush and Barack Obama administrations will simultaneously expire, as they were originally meant to.

The combined impact would just about cut the deficit in half.

It would also shrink the U.S. economy by nearly $600 billion or between four and five per cent of GDP, which, according to an opinion published this week by the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office, would provoke a recession.

The 'new politics of extremism'

A self-induced fiscal shock on this scale is of course lunacy.

Republican Senator Jeff Sessions reads a copy of U.S. President Barack Obama's Fiscal Year 2013 budget in February 2012 with a piece of paper written on it that says 'Debt on Arrival.' (Larry Downing/Reuters)

But in writing about such a contentious subject, any conventional journalist, me included, usually starts treading carefully at this point.

The ingrained impulse is to look for sins by both parties and, even if the evidence is clearly asymmetrical, assert that the blame lies equally with Republicans and Democrats, liberals and conservatives, etc., etc.

But American politics has descended to such extremes, say public policy experts Norman Ornstein and Thomas Mann, that such traditional striving for balance obfuscates reality and misleads the public on issues of huge importance.

Ornstein (a Winnipegger originally) works at the right-leaning American Enterprise Institute, Mann for the more centrist Brookings Institution.

Both espouse liberal views but their scholarship has always been beyond question and the title of their newest book, sparked by the debt-ceiling debacle last summer, neatly summarizes their thesis: It's Even Worse Than It Looks: How the American Constitutional System Collided With the New Politics of Extremism.

Scornful of compromise

"In our past writings," the authors observe, "we have criticized both parties when we believed it was warranted. Today, however, we have no choice but to acknowledge that the core of the problem lies with the Republican Party."

What's more, they argue, it is time to recognize that "however awkward it may be for the traditional press and nonpartisan analysts to acknowledge … the Republican Party has become an insurgent outlier — ideologically extreme; contemptuous of the inherited social and economic policy regime; scornful of compromise; unpersuaded by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition."

For example, in the case of the debt-ceiling debate, Ornstein and Mann point out that as the deadline approached, the Republican leadership endorsed a bipartisan proposal for a deficit-reduction task force with teeth.

Norman Ornstein, resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. (American Enterprise Institute)

"This plan would force us to get debt and spending under control," Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell declared on the Senate floor. "It deserves support from both sides of the aisle."

But when the committee's plan came up for a vote some time later, Republicans filibustered and killed the resolution.

Why? "Because President Barack Obama was for it," write Ornstein and Mann, "and its passage might gain him political credit."

On the one hand

Reading the book, I found myself wincing several times.

Journalists like to see themselves as fearlessly speaking truth to power.

Though we often tend to do that only when it's safe, as in deciding who was the principal villain in the civil war in the former Yugoslavia, or whether the invasion of Iraq, in hindsight, was foolish.

Most of the time, we go with the on-the-one-hand/on-the-other-hand thing, as we have been trained to do.

And when faced with political or ethno-nationalist activists who understand how to exploit the system, we often bend over backward to dilute or hedge the obvious, lest we face an organized campaign accusing us of lacking balance.

In this case, the fact is that if Ronald Reagan was the great communicator, Barack Obama has been the great compromiser. So much so that he's infuriated many in his own party.

But to describe the Republican leadership as partners in any kind of national compromise would be ridiculous.

Here is what longtime Republican Senator Richard Lugar of Indiana said about his own party after losing his re-nomination to a Tea Party candidate this month: "Republicans cannot admit to any nuance in policy on climate change. Republican members are now expected to take pledges against any tax increases.

"For two consecutive election cycles, GOP candidates competed with one another to express the most strident anti-immigration view, even at the risk of alienating a huge voting bloc."

You can add to this that, as America heads toward its fiscal cliff, Republican leaders have changed their mind on the automatic cuts they originally agreed to. Insisted upon, in fact.

They now want to exempt the Pentagon and shift the cuts to things like food stamps, Medicaid, and other programs meant to help needier Americans.

What's more, they argue, the existing tax cuts must not be allowed to expire. In a country with the lowest taxes in the Western world, even the wealthiest one per cent must not be forced to pay any more.

Today, the national debt is once again close to the ceiling re-set by Congress last summer and Republican House Speaker John Boehner has confirmed, as recently as a few days ago, that there is absolutely no possibility of raising the ceiling again.

What that means is that if the "fiscal cliff" issue isn't solved, the U.S. could begin defaulting on its debt. Here we go again.

Of course, the real debate will take place after the general and presidential elections in November.

What we are really talking about here, though, is the health of the entire U.S. economy. Ongoing debilitating debates like last summer's debt-ceiling debacle injure the nation's faith and credit, almost whatever the outcome.

So it'll be interesting to see who puts the national good first.