The conventional media narrative of House Republicans’ dumping Speaker Kevin McCarthy tells us that the act represented
disarray and dysfunction
within the House GOP, just as its ever-changing list of legislative
demands prior to the threatened government shutdown was supposed to be a
sign that Republicans didn’t even know what they wanted.
Confusion, incompetence, and blundering ideological zeal offer a superficially convincing explanation. The truth is worse.
It was not disarray and dysfunction in the GOP Conference, but a
logical succeeding chapter to January 6. When the destruction of
constitutional government could not be accomplished by violence, the
leading element of the Republican Party resolved to accomplish it by
paralyzing government, a goal now achieved. The deposing of the speaker
makes shutting down the government and giving a boost to ideological
soul mate Vladimir Putin (
by withholding aid to Ukraine) more likely, an outcome that has always been the goal of the only faction of the GOP that matters.
McCarthy was the surrogate target to appease their simmering
frustration with “politics as usual”—meaning constitutional democracy.
After the vote to eject McCarthy from the speaker’s
chair, there was the inevitable grousing from House Republicans about
Matt Gaetz, the lead instigator of the coup. Rep. Don Bacon (R-Neb.) said,
“I’d love to have him out of the conference. He shouldn’t be in the
Republican Party.” Rep. Garret Graves (R-La.) said potential measures
against Gaetz would be “pursued in the conference.”
That the majority of the House GOP dislikes Matt Gaetz and his allies
is irrelevant. They could have shut him down through expulsion or other
sanctions before the fact had they chosen, but they didn’t because they
are passive collaborators at minimum. They resemble the French gendarmes
who did nothing to obstruct the deportation of Jews or the arrest of
résistantes in World War II, but instead meekly went along with the
Nazis. The after-the-fact grumbling from these human nullities counts
for nothing.
The media’s
concentration on Republicans’ pique with Gaetz
dodges the deeper question: What, if anything, separates the majority
of the House GOP from the insurgents who defenestrated McCarthy? Nancy
Mace (R-S.C.), was one of the insurgents. She is a woman who makes
theatrical gestures in the direction of abortion rights, thus earning
her the title of “moderate,” a term the establishment press is desperate
to bestow on any Republican who doesn’t advocate turning Yosemite
National Park into a toxic waste dump. She claimed that McCarthy broke his word to her about moderating the House position on abortion.
The argument doesn’t wash. What could have possibly made her think that
McCarthy would—or even could—restrain all 221 House Republican members
on the one issue that for 40 years has been the party’s sick obsession,
in order to mollify a single member? And even less plausible, what made
her think that Jim (“
Gym”) Jordan or any other likely successor as speaker would lift a finger on her behalf?
On the other hand, Paul Gosar (R-Ariaz.) did not vote to dump McCarthy,
but the fact that he has publicly, in a constituent newsletter,
called for the execution of General Mark Milley,
the outgoing chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, tells you all you
need to know about the moderation of those Republicans who sided with
the now-former speaker.
It was always unclear exactly what policies the insurgents wanted
McCarthy to follow to retain his speakership, just as it was uncertain, a
week earlier, exactly what hostages House Republicans wanted in order
to avert a shutdown. First, they demanded draconian cuts throughout the
federal government, and, when that would not fly, proposed massive
spending on border security (the incongruity of shutting down the
government, which would entail either laying off the Border Patrol or
making them work without pay, in order to improve border security should
be obvious).
In the end, a
solid majority of House Republicans supported the continuing resolution to keep funding the government. So why did McCarthy have to go?
All the apparent turmoil and confusion over spending levels and other
stuff of traditional American politics were mere window-dressing in the
eyes of the new core of the Republican Party. What they really want—and
what required McCarthy’s biblical sacrifice to temporarily appease their
frustration over not getting it—is something that cannot be
accommodated within the Constitution or the traditional give-and-take of
politics.
What they want is a radical reordering of society: the takeover or
suppression of an independent press, arrests of political enemies, the
stripping of rights from various minorities and outgroups, mass
deportation of migrants and others considered undesirable, the purging
of non-supporters at all levels of government, even extrajudicial
killings—all of it accompanied by vigilantes and private militias
roaming at large to enforce the new order.
This is a vision that Republican officeholders obviously cannot openly
express, because it would give the game away. It accounts for their
frustration and apparent vacillation when they are forced to play the
inside game of conventional politics. I suspect it accounts for
McCarthy’s demise: He was the surrogate target to appease their
simmering frustration with “politics as usual”—meaning constitutional
democracy.
But in influential corners of the extreme right that are less visible to the public at large, in places like
Hillsdale College or the Claremont Institute (January 6 codefendant John Eastman’s source of wingnut welfare), in books by conservative intellectual wannabes, or in manifestos
that have taken up where the Turner Diaries have left off in the goal
of dismantling democracy, that vision stands out vivid and stark. It is
the same authoritarian, fascist vision that has intermittently cursed
the planet since the end of World War I.
The supposed “moderates” could stop this determined move towards
populist dictatorship, but the odds are overwhelming that they won’t.
Reps. Bacon and Mace, for all their whining about the crazies in their
party,
opted not to impeach Donald Trump
in the second impeachment vote, even as the shattered glass from the
violent insurrection that he incited was still being swept up at the
Capitol.
When future historians trace the Republican descent into madness, they may depict Kevin McCarthy as the
Alexander Kerensky
of the American right-wing revolutionary movement. Like Kerensky, he
was opposed to the established order, and was suitable as an interim
figure. But he lacked the decisiveness of the Bolshevik faction of the
Russian socialist movement, and only lasted roughly as long as McCarthy
did.
Like the hard core of the Bolsheviks and like the leading elements of
violent revolutionary parties everywhere, the Republican extremists,
even if they are a minority, constitute the vanguard of right-wing
extremism in America. That vanguard, as Lenin taught, consists of people
sufficiently decisive, ruthless, and unscrupulous to dictate events
while the mass of party members obediently follows along. The
procrastinators and temporizers find themselves in
the dustbin of history.
It is little wonder that Steve Bannon, one of the architects of the
movement that was to assault the Capitol and depose McCarthy,
said,
“I’m a Leninist. Lenin wanted to destroy the state, and that’s my goal
too. I want to bring everything crashing down, and destroy all of
today’s establishment.”