At this writing – in October 2023 – the US House of Representatives is without a Speaker.
This situation was realized in the course of an astonishing series of events, summarized below. It occurred despite a proliferation of alternate courses. It is unprecedented, and has resulted in a level of chaos and turmoil unmatched in living memory. It has left not just Congress but the entire US governmental apparatus in precarious paralysis, at a time when crises at home and abroad are rising in intensity and potential consequence. The thing is...
We were always headed here. We were always going to end up like this.
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Kevin McCarthy, seated in the Speaker’s chair in January 2023, was a marked man from the get-go. Elected after 15 excruciating votes, forced into a plethora of unhealthy and ultimately self-destructive concessions to right-wing extremists to secure their votes, he was already reduced to the weakest Speaker in living memory when he first grasped the gavel.
McCarthy is a craven opportunist who has pursued power for its own sake and who lacks any real convictions about anything. But he recognized the gravity of his post and, saddled with a razor-thin GOP majority in the House, was willing to work with President Biden on the debt ceiling problem in May 2023. This angered his extremist monitors, Florida Representative Matt Gaetz in particular, who refocused on finding an opportunity to remove him – having negotiated the provision that a single member could call for his ousting on the floor as a condition of his speakership.
That opportunity came in September, a mere nine months after he took the chair, when McCarthy reached across the aisle to Democrats to avert a government shutdown. Gaetz wasted no time punishing him for it, calling for his removal almost immediately. And this is where we find ourselves now – with a Speaker-less House and a chaotic, non-functioning government, as Ukraine faces a lapse in US support and war is erupting in the Middle East.
McCarthy’s sin is the one unpardonable transgression that the current GOP refuses to tolerate in its members: cooperation with Democrats. Reaching across the aisle is no longer a responsible, adult mode of governance; it is a tacit rejection of the GOP’s longstanding embrace of social dominance as the only worthy practice.
The irony, of course, is that bipartisan cooperation was the productive, healthy, middle-class-building norm in Congress for decades, from 1955 through 1995 – a 40-year-period during which Democrats held an unbroken majority in the House, presided over by a Democratic Speaker. During this period, bipartisan cooperation was the norm, resulting in such federal undertakings as the interstate highway system, the advancement of civil rights, and the space program. Economic expansion and prosperity were also the norm, at least through the ascension of Ronald Reagan in 1981 and the subsequent rising of neoliberalism.
With the seating of Newt Gingrich in the Speaker’s chair in 1995, two generations of bipartisan cooperation and progress in Congress came to a screeching halt – and underwent an angry, bitter reversal. Gingrich rallied the GOP conference around the premise that its cooperation with Democrats was holding conservatives back from the power that was their due, and that the agenda of the right could only move forward if it overtly eschewed bipartisan cooperation – which he recast as weakness – and went to war with the left.
Where did he get such a destructive idea, and why did it set such deep roots in the American political zeitgeist? I wrote about that last year, in an essay titled “Now That the Dog Has Caught the Car”:
In 2018, Atlantic journalist McKay Coppins interviewed Gingrich at the Philadelphia Zoo, where the ex-Speaker metaphorically revealed the core of the political philosophy he imposed upon the nation so long ago, a philosophy that has motivated all of his political activity since 1958.
When he arrived in Washington as a fresh-faced Congressman, “Gingrich had a plan,” wrote Coppins. “The way he saw it, Republicans would never be able to take back the House as long as they kept compromising with the Democrats out of some high-minded civic desire to keep congressional business humming along. His strategy was to blow up the bipartisan coalitions that were essential to legislating, and then seize on the resulting dysfunction to wage a populist crusade against the institution of Congress itself.”
At the time, “lawmakers had largely coalesced around a stabilizing set of norms and traditions,” wrote Coppins. “Entrenched committee chairs may have dabbled in petty corruption, and Democratic leaders may have pushed around the Republican minority when they were in a pinch, but as a rule, comity reigned. ‘Most members still believed in the idea that the Framers had in mind,’ says Thomas Mann, a scholar who studies Congress. ‘They believed in genuine deliberation and compromise... and they had institutional loyalty.’”
They also saw legislating as their primary function. They were, after all, lawmakers. Gingrich and the colleagues he gathered around his cause had no interest at all in legislating.
“Gradually, [Congress] went from legislating, to the weaponization of legislating, to the permanent campaign, to the permanent war,” Mann said. “It’s like he took a wrecking ball to the most powerful and influential legislature in the world.”
The model of Republican dysfunction, in Gingrich’s mind, was GOP minority leader Bob Michel, who believed “the best way to serve conservatism, and his country, was by working honestly with Democratic leaders – pulling legislation inch by inch to the right when he could, and protecting the good faith that made aisle-crossing possible,” according to Coppins.
“He represented a culture which had been defeated consistently,” Gingrich commented. He was happy to do all he could to destroy that conciliatory culture.
He would do it, he had long since decided, by replacing the processes in place at the time of his arrival – processes personified by Michel – with the Law of the Jungle. Taking his cue from primatologist Frans de Waal – whose work Gingrich grossly misinterprets – he adopted the thesis that politics is (and should be a haven for brutality and ugliness, as in the chimpanzee world, “part of an evolutionary heritage we share with our close relatives,” in de Waal’s words.
To that end, he picked up the mimicry of chimpanzee feces-throwing, recruiting a dozen Congressmen to “stalk the halls of Capitol Hill, searching for trouble and TV cameras,” according to Coppins. These 12, the “Conservative Opportunity Society”, became the backbone of Gingrich’s congressional revolution. The idea was to learn from the animal kingdom and apply its lessons, to see it for what it is - “a very competitive, challenging world, at every level.”
Coppins challenged him, questioning the viciousness of this mindset. “It’s not viciousness,” Gingrich objected. “It’s natural.”
That viciousness came to define Gingrich-style politics.
“During his two decades in Congress, he pioneered a style of partisan combat — replete with name-calling, conspiracy theories, and strategic obstructionism — that poisoned America’s political culture and plunged Washington into permanent dysfunction,” wrote Coppins.
That viciousness – of which Gingrich is proud – long preceded his congressional tenure. It is present in a speech he gave in 1978 to the College Republicans in Atlanta:
“One of the great problems we have in the Republican Party is that we don’t encourage you to be nasty,” he said. “We encourage you to be neat, obedient, and loyal, and faithful, and all those Boy Scout words, which would be great around the campfire but are lousy in politics.”
He admonished them, as the generation to come, to “raise hell,” to abandon being “nice,” and to realize that politics is, at its core, a “war for power,” in Coppins’ reporting.
That war expanded to include the demonization, not only of all Democrats, but of moderate Republicans. It became a core tenet of Gingrich conservatism that moderate Republicans weren’t Republicans at all, and had no place in his new order. And today, of course, they are all but extinct.
Another tenet is one he may have taken from Donald Trump, who would mark the apogee of the Gingrich movement – grab the microphone 24/7 and keep the cameras on you at all times.
“If you’re not in The Washington Post every day, you might as well not exist,” he once said. His secret to capturing headlines was simple, per Coppins: “The No. 1 fact about the news media is they love fights … When you give them confrontations, you get attention; when you get attention, you can educate.”
In hindsight, “Noise became a proxy for status,” he told Coppins, and it’s easy to see that Trump has validated the premise in spades.
Decades later, he’s utterly pleased with the result:
“Twenty-five years after engineering the Republican Revolution, Gingrich can draw a direct line from his work in Congress to the upheaval now taking place around the globe,” Coppins wrote. “But as he surveys the wreckage of the modern political landscape, he is not regretful. He’s gleeful.”
“Gingrich’s career can perhaps be best understood as a grand exercise in devolution—an effort to strip American politics of the civilizing traits it had developed over time and return it to its most primal essence,” wrote Coppins, and this best summarizes what the Gingrich revolution has done to the modern world. We have devolved; by eschewing cooperation for competition, we have taken a giant step backward, millions of years in time, to the landscape of kill-or-be-killed. All the progress we’d made during civilization’s tenure – culminating in the American Experiment – is discarded, in Gingrich’s twisted model.
“Competition is the law of the jungle, but cooperation is the law of civilization,” said the Russian philosopher/historian Peter Kropotkin. And that’s exactly right (it’s also what we learn from Frans de Waal, when we read his work non-selectively).
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Gingrich fostered within the GOP Congress a culture of confrontation. It was distinctly partisan, but did not eschew deal-making; he himself worked with President Clinton and House Democrats on a number of legislative issues, notably the 1997 Taxpayer Relief Act. Ironically, his conference hard-liners considered this an act of betrayal; this and other missteps led to his stepping down after a mere four years of gavel-wielding, despite the persistent GOP House majority, for which he himself could claim the lion’s share of credit.
Gingrich had been confrontational, and had instilled that trait in his conference (and, by extension, the Republican Party as a whole); but his successors took it to an entirely new level. House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, for instance, had been a force behind Gingrich’s ousting, and earned the nickname “The Hammer” for his merciless bullying of his own conference into unwavering fealty to the far-right agenda. His motto - “No Retreat, No Surrender” - was his rallying cry for the “100-Year Majority” he envisioned (and pursued) for the GOP. In the end, he went to prison for financial crimes, but his legacy lived on in the Republican House.
Of DeLay and his cohorts, we can at least say they had an interest in legislating. A decade and a half on, post-Trump, the GOP House conference has abandoned even that. Most moderates have been chased out of the Republican Party, but there is at least a handful of GOP representatives who still think lawmaking comes with the job. They are not, however, a majority within the conference by any means.
So here we are. The Gingrich Doctrine of non-cooperation not only remains firmly in place, reinforced 24/7 by Fox News and other right-wing opinion platforms; it has degenerated into something much worse, a faux rage and loathing that has drowned out the best and most noble efforts of those who would restore cooperation, productivity, and order. It flies in the face of the desires of the American public, which went on record in recent polls by NPR and PBS as favoring a return to bipartisan cooperation in federal government as 74% in favor.
What goes unsaid in the discussion of Gingrich and legacy – but which shines through in his too-transparent interview with Coppins – is that his doctrine, and that of DeLay and other successors, is one of social dominance: the overt imposition of one’s will upon others, by any means effective. Rallying all Republican lawmakers into a single voice, shouting down and demonizing all opposition, is not just un-democratic; it’s an intentional regression from the civilized progress humankind has diligently hashed out over the past few centuries, and which the grand social experiment of the United States was very intentionally crafted to embody. It is an emphatic rejection of democracy, one that the GOP House conference is scarcely bothering to disguise anymore.
The problem may be self-correcting; the House GOP’s current dysfunction, shockingly paraded daily across news feeds the world over, has laid bare the glaring miscalculation in Gingrich’s doctrine, one that has led to the conference’s embarrassing self-destruction. Put simply, if you dial up all your people to win at all costs, allowing no truce and no quarter, then they will, upon vanquishing their opponents, inevitably turn on one another.
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