FOR a change, the rest of the world gets to laugh at the United States for having a good-for-nothing government.

Of course a government shutdown is not necessarily the same thing as a government not actually having the capacity or will to perform. Yet, the fact that US government offices remain closed more than a week after they first shut confirms that American politics can be just as dysfunctional as politics anywhere else in the world.

It is instructive, I believe, to analyse exactly how the impasse in Washington has come to pass, and not only because we stand to learn something about the American political system but also about the contemporary state of politics, economics and ideology around the world.

In a nutshell, the Republican party-controlled elected lower house has been demanding a cut in government spending, and more specifically for a repeal of the (modest) healthcare legislation — the Affordable Care Act (ACA) — that is President Barack Obama’s political baby.

Obama’s original healthcare plan was far more ambitious and wide-ranging than the quite limited bill that he eventually signed into law. The ACA does nevertheless call to account the previously all-powerful health insurance companies that have run riot in the US for almost 50 years (the incumbent health care system — Medicaid — was instituted in 1965).

It is the fact that the president and his Democratic party colleagues have legislated to extend healthcare coverage and make it less dependent on the ability to pay that has led to Republican sloganeering — spearheaded by the so-called Tea Party faction of the party — that ‘Obamacare’ is the first step in a full-fledged conspiracy to push the US towards socialism.

Yes, that’s correct. The Republican party actually claims that Obama has socialist leanings, which is as preposterous a proposition as any. This was a refrain that first reared its head during Obama’s first presidential campaign, and is amazingly still doing the rounds, even though six years of Obama in power have proved just how ridiculous the hypothesis is.

The Republicans have been raising a hue and cry about state welfare provisions ever since Ronald Reagan came to power in 1980 and initiated a ‘rollback of the state’ that had worldwide ramifications. Even before Reaganism, however, the American right has consistently rallied against ‘big government’.

More generally, the Republican party has championed conservative ideas in all spheres of social life. Perhaps most infamously, Republican senator John McCarthy triggered a political witch-hunt in the early 1950s against any and all individuals and groups that were considered ‘national security threats’. All such suspects were labelled ‘communists’ and subjected to intense political repression.

Almost all countries benefiting from Washington’s largesse adopted McCarthyism with a vengeance. The Cold War was arguably as much a propaganda battle as anything else, and the effects of anti-communist propaganda remain evident to this very day. While ‘terrorism’ has replaced ‘communism’ as the greatest threat to ‘freedom’ and ‘democracy’ everywhere, entire generations of people in America and elsewhere still cling to their caricatures of ‘communists’.

In Pakistan a communist is simply a kafir. In the US a black president who legislates healthcare reform is a closet socialist. Even in Venezuela and Bolivia, where leftist leaders have secured electoral majorities, the media and intelligentsia decry the handing over of government to Castro’s spies (in reference to the Castro brothers that have been at the forefront of Cuban politics for more than 60 years).

When name-calling becomes an end in itself, we lose sight of what government is actually doing. There is a design to this paradox; it would indeed be greatly problematic for the powers-that-be if ordinary people actually started to hold their governments to account instead of being caught up in paranoia about the conspiracies of so-called ‘enemies of the people’.

By all objective accounts, ordinary Americans are disgusted with the government shutdown, and the Republican party itself is suffering from intense internal discord. This suggests that working people in the US can easily distinguish between truth and fiction. The tragedy, as ever, is that the alternative to the fictional world of the Republicans is the slightly less fictional world of the Democrats.

It is the same in this country. We have a government in power that has on the one hand attempted to depict itself as no-nonsense and unburdened by ideological hang-ups. Cue an emphasis on long-term rehabilitation of the economy, replete with the signing of a plethora of development cooperation agreements with anyone and everyone that is willing.

But this same government has started to resort to the same tired slogans about the ‘foreign hand’ and Pakistan as the impregnable fortress of Islam. Even its supposed developmental priorities are guided by an intense ideological commitment to neo-liberal orthodoxy, justified through the standard refrain of the ‘greater national interest’.

I believe that working people in this country are just as able to distinguish between truth and fiction as in the US, but that they are stumped by the lack of real choice. In countries such as the US this results in extreme alienation from politics, whereas in contexts such as ours ordinary people turn to options outside the mainstream.

And these options are of many different shades and colours, even if governments criminalise them in all too familiar ways. In India, for instance, large numbers of so-called ‘tribal’ communities have thrown in their lot with the Naxalites which Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has called the single greatest national security threat facing the state. In Sri Lanka it was the Tamil Tigers, in the Philippines and Nepal it is Maoist guerrillas.

Even when ordinary people are devastated by natural calamities, the imperatives of ‘national security’ determine the government’s response, as is the case in Balochistan at present. When economics, politics and just about everything else is at the service of ideology, the actions of governments are anathema to the interests of the people in whose name they rule.

The writer teaches at Quaid-i-Azam University, Islamabad.