Ezra Klein is Worried about America

The latest prominent person to freak out about the state of America is blogger and liberal activist Ezra Klein. Klein has lately been giving interviewers in which he frets that the political system is completely broken, and writing posts like this one, in which he notes that the credit rating of the US government may be cut:

And why shouldn’t it be? How many times should the American political system be permitted to fail to accomplish its stated aims before we begin concluding that there’s something structurally wrong in American politics that needs to be priced into our predictions of how well Washington will manage its budget going forward? How many times should one party in Congress be permitted to threaten that it will force the country to default on debts that it could pay before investors begin wondering whether the United States is as responsible a borrower as they believed it was prior to this kind of continuous brinksmanship?

And so on.

I wonder about this. Part of my mind says that paranoid, alarmist, xenophobic political parties have come and gone several times in America, yet we've only had one Civil War. Are people like John Boehner and Eric Cantor really so dangerous? Are they really prepared to bring down the US government, and are voters prepared to back them? Or is this just a bit of a tantrum from a faction that feels ignored, easily soothed with a few billion in targeted tax breaks and some junkets to Israel?

I can't make up my mind. I suppose we will learn a lot from how January's "fiscal cliff" is handled. But honestly I am a lot more worried about war with Iran than I am about a budget impasse.