Insurrection Caucus knocks J6 anniversary off front pages
Leaders of the GOP’s House Insurrection Caucus are heavily invested in screen time. Not on their smart phones. On your television and social media feeds. Governing is not what they are in Washington, D.C. to do. Accruing power is.
Interviews on Fox News and other outlets (even MSNBC these days) builds a national profile, grows online followers, and expands fundraising opportunities. Personal fame, acquired through political performance, is a more rapid, more certain path to power than the drudge work of crafting sound legislation and shepherding it through Congress. The Insurrection Caucus came to be influencers, not legislators.
Donald Trump brought celebrity with him to the job of politics. But the 2020 loser is sidelined in Mar-a-Lago awaiting indictments. Republicans lacking his preternatural skills at self-promotion have discovered that keeping the press focused on themselves involves being destructively and performatively anti-establishment. Sex and drugs and rock and roll was for liberals. Trashing hotel rooms does not get press coverage. Trashing Congress does. Either from the outside, as insurrectionists did two years ago today, or from the inside, as the Insurrection Caucus has this week in the GOP’s internecine battle over electing a speaker. It’s political punk rock with guns.
They reject technical ability and virtuosity the way rock critic Robert Christgau said the early punks “scornfully rejected the political idealism and Californian flower-power silliness of hippie myth.” The GOP’s political punks reject the give-and-take of democracy for the “nihilistic swagger” of performative norm-breaking (New York Times):
“It’s not about policies, it’s about the fight,” said Doug Heye, a former aide to Representative Eric Cantor, the onetime majority leader who lost his seat in a stunning 2014 upset by a far-right challenger, David Brat. “The more you hear the word ‘fight’ or ‘fighter,’ the less you hear about a strategy for winning that fight.”
That’s because winning is no more their goal than governing is.
Chris Stirewalt, a former editor at Fox News, said that “what happens online, on talk radio and on Fox prime time has been and will continue to be the harbinger of what House Republicans will do.” He added that the representatives and congressional aides he was speaking with were “all talking about how their positions were playing with the different hosts and sites.”
It’s better to burn out than to fade away. They’re working harder at burning bright than at doing right. The question is how many Americans are willing to have them burn down the country with the rest of us in it.