President Barack Obama should not succumb to Republican blackmail as the executive and legislative branches struggle to resolve their budget differences.

The Obama administration has set in motion plans to shut the government down on Friday if Republicans and Democrats in Congress cannot agree on a budget plan for the remaining months of the current budget year. It is plain that the Republicans are using the threat of a shutdown to exact a maximum of concessions from Obama and the Democrats. The Republican leadership, driven by the anti-government clamor of newly elected Tea Party members, has continued to spurn compromise.

The Republican leadership in the House revealed its true colors this week. As Congress wrestles with the financing for the current year, Rep. Paul Ryan, the chairman of the House Budget Committee, unveiled a budget plan for next year that makes plain the ideological motivations driving his party.

One of the most revealing of Ryan’s proposals is his plan to privatize Medicare for those under 55. We ought to think back to the unsuccessful crusade mounted by President George W. Bush in 2005 to privatize Social Security. It was an effort to let Wall Street grab hold of the retirement accounts of America’s senior citizens. We can only imagine what would have happened to our seniors’ retirement money during the economic collapse that Wall Street engineered.

Now Ryan wants to put the health of the nation’s senior citizens in the hands of the insurance industry, reviving the conservative myth that what health care needs is a dose of market forces. Market forces are what allow insurance companies to deny people care in the name of profits.

Efforts to resolve the current year’s budget crisis have run aground because Republicans are using the threat of a shutdown to gain ever more in the way of cuts. They are pretending that they are motivated by the need to curtail the deficit. And yet the slice of the budget that is taking the whacks during this round of cuts amounts to only one-eighth of federal spending. To slash spending on education, health care, environmental protection, financial regulation and other programs does virtually nothing to curb the deficit; it does much to advance the conservative agenda.

Republicans claim to be representing the will of the people. If they have the people behind them, why don’t they propose gutting the Environmental Protection Agency on its merits? Instead, they seek to push forward Draconian cuts through the coercive means of a threatened shutdown. If they want to slash health care for children, let them propose to do so as a stand-alone measure. Let the American people weigh in on whether they think it’s a good idea.

Obama has compromised plenty already. Now he needs to stand his ground, even if a shutdown is the result. The bullying tactics of the Republicans will not be stopped until their bluff is called. Let them reap the scorn of the people who are awaiting income tax refund checks or who had planned a trip to the Smithsonian or who had hoped to obtain a passport.

The election of Obama did not mean the demise of the political forces pushing a nihilistic anti-government agenda on the Republican Party. There are major interests who would like to cripple the government because its regulations get in the way of their profits. Obama has made only the most tentative steps toward financial and environmental regulation to rein in the companies that have wrecked the economy and despoiled the environment, and yet those companies have used a Tea Party movement of people genuinely concerned about economic decline as a tool to hobble government.

If House Speaker John Boehner wants to align the Republican Party with the most extreme element of anti-government activists, Obama ought to let him. Already the people are answering back against right-wing extremists. In an election in Wisconsin this week disgusted voters were within a hair of defeating a Supreme Court justice who had backed the anti-union campaign of Gov. Scott Walker. Polls suggest the American people are nowhere near as extreme ideologically as the anti-health care, anti-environment, pro-Wall Street contingent riding high within the Republican Party.