Republicans on Tuesday blocked a Democratic move in the Senate to raise the debt limit for the second time in as many days. Across the Capitol, House progressives lined up to defy Speaker Nancy Pelosi by opposing a bipartisan infrastructure bill scheduled for a vote Thursday, potentially endangering Biden’s economic agenda. To cap off the day, the stock market’s benchmark S&P 500 closed down 2%, its worst slide since May.

The longer the deadlock drags on, the greater the risk a narrative of a broken nation and hapless president takes hold. Biden, despite plenty of closed-door meetings and phone calls, has been largely absent from the public battle over his own economic plan…

At the same time, U.S. consumer confidence dropped in September for a third straight month, suggesting concerns over the delta variant of the virus and higher prices continue to dampen sentiment. The economy is showing signs of a sharp slowdown over the past six weeks, with the Atlanta Federal Reserve’s GDPNow estimate of economic growth based on real-time data dropping from a 6.2% annual pace in late August to 3.2% as of Monday.

The situation has eerie echoes of the malaise of the late 1970s. It is playing out after a Trump presidency that sowed national division and undermined democratic values, a parallel to the period after Richard Nixon’s presidency, the Vietnam War protests and the Watergate scandal.