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Tracking the fallout

Published by Tom Sullivan on October 5, 2023

What Republicans did and what it really means

All gone.

A lot of Republicans on Capitol Hill have no use for Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz and the seven others from the Republican caucus whose votes the other day sank Kevin McCarthy’s speakership. MAGA reactionaries lobbing grenades at Democrats is one thing. Lobbing them into the Republican caucus is quite another.

As predicted, Republicans are trying to pin McCarthy’s ouster on Democrats. Reality check: It was Gaetz’s resolution. His alone. For reasons including his initiating an impeachment inquiry against President Biden and his reversal on condemning Donald Trump for precipitating a violent insurrection, Democrats saw no benefit in bailing out McCarthy.

Now comes the aftermath. Giving McCarthy the boot is not a good look either for Republicans or for the U.S.A. as a whole. After a quick review of the week’s events and Donald Trump’s “burn-the-house-down” antics at his New York trial, Peter Baker (take with a grain of salt) writes that the foundations of our democracy appear shaky both to scholars and average Americans. Also, foreign adversaries are watching closely:

Robert M. Gates, the longtime Republican national security official who served as defense secretary for both President George W. Bush and President Barack Obama, warned in an essay in Foreign Affairs magazine last week titled “The Dysfunctional Superpower” that both Mr. Putin and President Xi Jinping of China were interpreting America’s troubles in perilous ways.

Both leaders, he wrote, are convinced that democracies like the United States “are past their prime and have entered an irreversible decline,” evident in their growing isolationism, political polarization and domestic conflict. “Dysfunction has made American power erratic and unreliable,” Mr. Gates wrote, “practically inviting risk-prone autocrats to place dangerous bets — with potentially catastrophic effects.”

And that was before the meltdown in the House of the past few days. In an email on Wednesday, Mr. Gates wrote, “The events of the last couple of days have only underscored how real is the dysfunction.”

Washington Post:

“If you want to know what it looks like when democracy is in trouble, this is what it looks like,” Daniel Ziblatt, professor of government at Harvard University tells the Washington Post. “It should set off alarm bells that something is not right.”

Congress arrived at this point for myriad reasons, all of which build on one another, scholars say: Social media and cable news incentivized politicians to perform for the camera, not for their constituents. Aggressive gerrymandering created deeply partisan districts where representation is decided in primary contests, not general elections. Weakened political parties became captive to their loudest and most extreme members.

Taken together, those factors handed a small number of lawmakers the power to throw one of the three branches of government into disarray and, for now, paralysis.

The eight GOP members behind McCarthy’s loss (all from safely drawn GOP districts) represent just 1.8% of the country and an extreme minority. Yet here we are. The House can conduct no business until a replacement is elected. And another funding deadline looms.

“If American democracy is already suffering and weak from various maladies, this unruly crisis in the House is just going to kick it a little further in that direction,” said Alex Keyssar, a professor of history and social policy at the Harvard Kennedy School. “You are taking a set of institutions and you are weakening them and then pointing to their weakness.”

That has been the conservative playbook for decades. Brand democratic governance as dysfunctional, get elected, then set about proving it through legislative sabotage. The rise of multicultural democracy has further incentivized sabotage by reactionaries who see their democratic routes to power narrowing. Facing an unfavorable strategic position, their inclination is to throw over the chess board.

As disconcerting as the events of the past few weeks have been, more worrying is what might come next. History has shown that government dysfunction can be a prelude to the erasure of democracy altogether, with authoritarianism rising in its place, said Harvard’s Ziblatt [“Tyranny of the Minority”].

“What precedes a democratic breakdown is political stalemate and extreme dysfunction where there’s a sense that nothing can get done,” Ziblatt said. “When governments can’t respond in genuine crises, it has a delegitimizing effect, and it reinforces the sense among citizens that we have to resort to other means.”

MAGAs resorted once on Jan. 6. If Trump sees the inside of a jail cell or rages himself red-faced into a coronary (like Andrew Breitbart), they’ll resort again.

“THESE are the times that try men’s souls,” Thomas Paine wrote in the winter of 1776. May God help us get through this one.

Published inUncategorized