The Insurrectionists Finally Took the House

McCarthy is speaker. The extremists won. The Republican Party is getting worse.

A historic week in the House ended around midnight on the second anniversary of the January 6 assault on the Capitol with some remarkable scenes. First, newly-elected speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy took a selfie, all smiles, with Christian nationalist extremist Marjorie Taylor Greene. Then, in his first speech in his new role, McCarthy railed against the “woke indoctrination in our schools,” going all in on the reactionary moral panic that has swept the nation. Finally, in his first encounter with reporters, McCarthy praised none other than the Insurrectionist-in-Chief Donald Trump for his support and emphasized that nobody should “doubt his influence” – basically saying: Donald, look, we finally did it! The shamelessness was shocking (though probably not surprising).

Exactly two years after an unprecedented, violent assault on democratic self-government, the same anti-democratic, anti-government forces managed to capture the House from within. The insurrectionists finally took the House.

Did we learn anything new from this outrageous spectacle? Probably not. But it should serve as a crucial reminder of what American democracy is up against, what the GOP has become, and what we must expect from Republicans going forward.

A bunch of clowns and buffoons might still bring democracy down

It might be tempting to look at the fact that Republicans needed 15 tries to elect a speaker, at the chaotic infighting on display, and conclude that these people, no matter their intentions, will ultimately be stopped by their own incompetence: How could their inability to get anything done not undo whatever nefarious plans they may hatch? But chaos might be all that is needed to sabotage the country and tank the world economy when the debt ceiling needs to be raised in the fall; and some of the most extreme members of a caucus that’s largely comprised of people who used to be considered fringe not that long ago are being elevated to influential positions.

It's true that Republicans in the House are unlikely to ever gel into an effective governing machine. But the past week also showed them at their least cohesive. Hardly anyone in this caucus has a proper legislative agenda or a discernible interest in tackling the country’s most urgent problems via public policy. Most of these people are all too happy to paralyze the government. As a matter of fact, that’s usually something of a perverse superpower Republicans can use: They make functional governance in Washington impossible and then turn around and tell the American people: “See, we told you, Washington is bad and government doesn’t work.” The one thing that binds the different factions on the Right together is their shared paranoia of “the Left.” But the speaker election offered very little in terms of anti-Left cohesion, as it was purely an internal matter. Things will be different when the leftist threat can be mobilized to get members onto the same page. Just look at the number of sham investigations Republicans are itching to get underway: That’s the kind of thing Marjorie Taylor Greene needs Congress for, and there is going to be a lot less infighting over such anti-Left propaganda stunts.

None of this changes the fact that many of the protagonists of last week’s speaker drama are fundamentally unserious people – like Matt Gaetz, the guy who ended up being the final holdout McCarthy needed to flip, who was so visibly proud of himself for voting for Donald Trump in several prior rounds. The problem is – and I remember also writing this after the Trump-Kanye-Fuentes-Clown-Summit at Mar-a-Lago – that there is no law of nature that says democracy can’t be brought down by a bunch of clowns and grifters with enough support from people, parties, and institutions who enable them. Gaetz and the many provocateurs like him are not just rightwing trolls, but Republican elected officials in good standing with the rest of their party. Ignoring them won’t work: These people are - evidently! - in positions of influence, fully intent on using their power. They are trolls. But that doesn’t mean they are harmless, or that the forces and energies behind their rise won’t be able to sweep democracy away if they get a chance. The clownishness, the ridiculousness of it all will not protect democracy. Some of history’s most successful authoritarians were considered goons and buffoons by their contemporaries - until they became goons and buffoons in power.

The problem isn’t confined to a few “radicals”

The speaker chaos was also a painful reminder that the mainstream media will always apply a framework that conceptualizes the conflict as a confrontation between a few “radicals” and the vast majority of more “moderate” (or reasonable) Republicans. If there was ever a constellation that should have gotten observers to resist such empty labeling, it was this one. If you draw the lines in a way that puts Marjorie Taylor Greene in the “moderate” camp, it is time to do some serious re-thinking. Let’s not normalize everyone who wasn’t part of the rebellious group of 19: There were plenty of hard-right extremists in the McCarthy camp who marked the rightwing fringe of the party not all that long ago; just because someone more extreme, more reckless has since come along doesn’t mean the former fringe is not extreme anymore – it just means they are no longer fringe. In this sense, what we witnessed last week was, first and foremost, indicative of how far the Republican Party has moved to the Right. It has done so along a trajectory on which the GOP has been for decades; but the process has also accelerated more recently, specifically in the Obama era and then once again after the anti-racist mobilization of civil society in the wake of the George Floyd murder in the summer of 2020. Republican elites have been all too willing to fuel this radicalization for decades, always trying – but never succeeding – to harness and control the far-right populist energies on the base. As a result, incoming classes of Republican lawmakers have displayed an ever-greater lust for recklessness and radicalism, both on an ideological and on a procedural level.

As Kevin McCarthy made sure to remind everyone, Donald Trump is still a massive problem. But the main problem is not Trump. It’s the party that elevated him in the first place, the party that embraces and elevates far-right extremists like Marjorie Taylor Greene and Matt Gaetz. The forces that led to Trump’s rise rose with him and keep rising with or without him. There is not going to be a return to “normalcy” now that the spectacle is over. At least not in the sense of moderation and a focus on constructive governance. Because this *is* the new normal in the Republican Party, it’s all there is: Pure white reactionary grievance politics.

And the new speaker? Kevin McCarthy represents the Republican establishment. That doesn’t mean he’s a “moderate.” It means the GOP establishment is fully embracing the extremism as the party has moved so far to the right that yesterday’s radical fringe is now firmly in the center of conservative politics. The next two years are going to be a wild ride.