Follow this authorPerry Bacon Jr.'s opinions

The bad news is that a lot of people are likely to walk away from this process thinking everything is generally fine. It is not. Four months of debate about whether the country will have a catastrophic economic event was something that rightly made people afraid. And because little actually changed, this is four months that the nation’s political leaders could have spent on other things.

McCarthy and other Republicans didn’t gain much from this fight, but they didn’t lose anything. So Republicans are likely to use the debt ceiling as a bargaining chip again — and perhaps more effectively next time.

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Biden is likely to emerge from this deal even more confident that being bipartisan and optimistic is the way forward. That would be true if the state of U.S. politics was measured solely by how many votes from both parties major bills in Congress get. But the Republican Party doesn’t need legislation in Washington to accomplish its priorities and weaken Biden. Working largely through the courts and state legislatures, Republican officials are severely curtailing the reproductive freedom of women, the political power of Black Americans, the very existence of transgender Americans and everyone’s safety from gun violence.

Matt Bai: Biden won on the debt ceiling. Why doesn’t he want it to look that way?

I worry that, perhaps worst of all, the deal encourages America’s leaders and institutions to continue sleepwalking through the huge crisis we are in. We have an increasingly antidemocratic Republican Party that is pushing the nation toward a cold civil war. Red states and blue states have divergent policies, and the officials in red ones keep curbing the rights and powers of people who don’t agree with them. But many business leaders, media executives and others desperately want to duck the radicalism of the Republican Party. They suggest there is a sensible center that each party should aim for, and they cast left-leaning figures such as Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) as equally........

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