BY MICHAEL S. JOHNSON

Righteousness.

There is no word that better explains the intractable nature of our government’s dysfunction, particularly now in the throes of frozen federal appropriations and a looming debt ceiling crisis.

Righteousness is a noun that describes an attitude that results in behavior “arising out of an outraged sense of justice or morality” (the appropo Webster definition). It is a behavior rooted in a sense of such uprightness that it is essentially free of guilt or sin. The righteous feel absolved from any need for self-judgment or self-reflection.

Can I have an amen?

We have heard President Obama again and again refuse to negotiate and Treasury Secretary Jack Lew warning of Armageddon if no one acts. We have listened to Senators Ted Cruz and Mike Lee pontificate about the immorality of compromise, and we have heard the same refrain from dozens of Members of Congress from Justin Amash of Michigan to Paul Broun of Georgia, from Steve Southerland of Florida to Raul Labrador of Idaho. Congressman Ted Yoho, with his feet up on his desk, told an interviewer he knows best because his Florida Veterinary business is so much like the Federal government.

We have heard Senator Majority Leader Harry Reid describe his colleagues as terrorists and anarchists, and Senator Rand Paul disavow the consequences of a debt ceiling default. The Vice President has called Republican House members neanderthals.

We have seen Democrats and Republicans, of the right and the left rise up in various degrees of indignant righteousness, without forethought, and regrettably, without afterthought.

We have seen worse from the ideologically-rigid interest groups and media pundits at both ends of the spectrum whose motivations may be profit–driven above all else, but righteous just the same. (Shepherd Smith of Fox deserves an Emmy for best performance in a tragic comedy).

The result of all of this obstinacy, nostril flaring, and moral outrage? Trouble, my friends, right here in River City and the four corners of the earth. Yes, trouble, for pensioners, laborers, infants, teachers, government workers, the sick, the young and the old. And they don’t even get the satisfaction of understanding why or when they will get their promised tickets to passage on the Cruz to better times.

Righteousness.

It is that conviction among the righteous that the feelings they harbor, the words they utter, the demands they make are not the product of political discernment but are morally endowed truths. To them they are truths that transcend normal civil discourse with all its flawed dependence on hypotheses, conjecture, speculation, perceptions, public debate, diversity, division, and, God forbid, compromise. They consider them truths too noble for Washington and its politics-as-usual establishmentarianism. The righteous believe they practice politics in its purest form, or maybe they believe it is not politics at all, but true religion.

“A puritan,” said the English writer Gilbert Chesterton, “is a person who pours righteous indignation into the wrong things.”

That is how President Obama can refuse to negotiate even though he does so at the helm of a governmental system in which its founders made negotiation and compromise absolutely mandatory. He claims the debt ceiling crisis is of such gravity, its fate cannot be negotiated. Odd. The very first time the Federal Government assumed public debt and paid it, the process was the result of negotiation among Hamilton, Jefferson, and Madison, as the Washington Times reminded us over the weekend. The negotiated compromise resulted in the payment of the states’ debts and an agreement to carve the nation’s capital out of a small parcel of land in Virginia. And as the wonderful book, Founding Brothers related, the deal was done over dinner.

By the same token, how can Senator Ted Cruz filibuster the Senate, cripple the government, disrupt the lives of millions of his countrymen, turn people against one another, have absolutely nothing constructive to show for it in the end and still be unmoved and unrepentant, unwilling to compromise? That is not the behavior of the pragmatist. It is not just presidential politics. It is righteous indignation.

Today’s righteousness is a rigid form of itself, driving politics, the media, and small but influential pockets of the citizenry, too. Good, sincere Americans from South Carolina to Kansas are consumed by it. It has quite the allure. It allows them to be selective in what you hear, what you read and what you watch, and frees them from being bothered by or frustrated with contrary points of view or contradictory facts and information.

The righteous in the debt ceiling debate, for example, have simply declared that not increasing the debt ceiling is of no significant consequence. When you’re right, you can simply decide those things. Senator Paul claims there’s no problem because the government really does not have to default on its debts if the debt ceiling is not raised. Since the Treasury takes in $250 billion in revenue each month, it is more than enough to pay the interest on our bond debt, which averages only $20 billion. To borrow from the intriguing movie, Absence of Malice, the statement is accurate, but not true.

Anyone with a credit card knows better. You can get away with playing the float for a short time, but disaster lurks down road when other bills come due. For the government those include Social Security and Medicare payments, among hundreds of billions in other essential and critical national obligations, ranging from food stamps, to housing subsidies, to Veterans’ payments.

At some point, the $250 billion a month isn’t enough and the government must begin “defaulting” on other obligations. This, according to the experts and anyone with an ounce of common sense, would have a pronounced impact on our fiscal stability and reputation.

The economy could spiral back into recession. None other than Christine LaGarde, Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund has warned us of that over and over again (from a report in Politico): “[I]f there was a combination of the government shutdown for a period of time and, more seriously, more damaging, if the debt ceiling was not lifted… that would bring about so much uncertainty, so much risk of disruption, that the standing of the U.S. economy would, again, be at risk and the [L]ack of trust in the U.S. signature … would mean massive disruption the world over…”

Senator Paul is apparently willing to take his chances with our lives. I was reminded by Frank Hill writing in Telemachus about the mythology of General George Armstrong Custer’s famous last words at the Little Big Horn: “There are no Indians over the ridge. Trust me, boys.”

The risks inherent in the Senator’s position are significant and poorly grounded in practical considerations. They are too great to be explained away by politics or posturing. It is only in the righteousness of his politics that such risk can be taken.

Exacerbating the problem with righteousness, is the lack of an equally-weighted counterbalance. The reasoned and the responsible who are left to force the process into consensus once the level of crisis becomes unbearable, are too few, too weak and too isolated to make a difference before the damage has been done.

The country may be changing, however. Survey research indicates the emergence of a fed-up citizenry that may now reflect a majority of Americans from many political perspectives, “just waiting to be discovered,” according to a new study.

This modern-day struggle between irresistible forces and immovable objects in our politics is primed at the pump by righteousness. However, it is driven as well by a host of other powerful dynamics from gerrymandered congressional districts to a divided populace, excessive partisanship, powerful interest groups and a persnickety press.

It is the righteousness, however, that is the primary distinction between today and the circumstances of the 1980s when a House majority of the opposite party of the President and a Senate majority of the same party as the President, tangled on equally difficult issues. Those leaders did, however, produce a far different outcome. They governed.

That era offered good lessons that need to be relearned, even if author Chris Matthews profits from it in book sales.

President Ronald Reagan was a principled California conservative who shared – yes, shared – power with House Speaker Tip O’Neill, a principled Massachusetts liberal. Reagan was allied with gifted pragmatic legislators in House Minority Leader Bob Michel and Republican Senate Leader Howard Baker; O’Neill with the legendary Robert C. Byrd of West Virginia in the Senate.

The politics then wasn’t any less dramatic or passionate. The public policy wasn’t any less compelling. In fact, the stakes may have been higher. But the atmosphere was controlled by respectable behavior and decorum, in an imposed atmosphere of civility and civil discourse that produced results not brinkmanship.

Back then, even the most righteous never feigned infallibility. Reagan Chief of Staff and Treasury Secretary James Baker in a recent Washington Times op-ed best described the difference: “Things are different in today’s highly charged political atmosphere. Name calling has become the norm, gridlock reigns supreme and the President has taken the uniquely obstinate stance that he won’t negotiate…” because “Republicans gravely miscalculated when they thought they could defund Obamacare by refusing to keep the government open.”

“This is a very sad state of affairs,” he wrote.

Yes, indeed.

Editor’s Note: Mike Johnson is a former journalist, who worked on the Ford White House staff and served as press secretary and chief of staff to House Republican Leader Bob Michel, prior to entering the private sector. He is co-author of a book, Surviving Congress, a guide for congressional staff. He is currently a principal with the OB-C Group.