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Eight years ago Will Saletan said, “The GOP is a failed state. Donald Trump is its warlord.” There’s probably no short summary, phrase or aphorism I’ve repeated more times on TPM. Because it’s that good. Today we’re seeing another permutation and illustration of that enduring reality.
Yesterday and today the GOP went back to the well to find a completely new set of Speaker candidates and, they hoped, a new Speaker designee. After multiple rounds, Rep. Tom Emmer of Minnesota was elected as the caucus’s choice. He then asked for a roll call of who would actually vote for him on the House floor. He came up more than twenty votes short.
Was there a writers’ strike on this new episode of the Caucus series? Because this sounds like a crib from an episode that ran the weekend before last when just the same thing happened to Steve Scalise. Sure enough within an hour or so we’re now hearing chatter that only Rep. Mike Johnson (LA), the guy who lost in the final vote, could get to 217. So only the guy who just lost can hope to win. Got it? Again, it’s a script cribbed from ten days ago.
What we see here is the same core message of the last three weeks and in many ways the last dozen years. The only way to get to 217, the hold outs argue, is a coalition of the rule-breakers and the rule-followers. For years the latter group has mostly gone along with that. What happened last week is that a section of the rule-followers rebelled and wouldn’t have it.
This is more basic than a fractured caucus or any of the personalities involved. It is the logical end result of a party and political movement based on rule-breaking, as a central value and mode of operation. When rule-breaking becomes the norm, organizations and polities fall apart … without a strongman. For eight years Donald Trump has been that strongman. It’s Trump’s general indifference to the House Speaker debacle and perhaps focus on his unfolding legal woes that has allowed the chaos to drag on.
This is always the relationship between civic democracies and the broken states where strongmen thrive and dominate. Civic democracy operates through an organized competition between different stakeholders in society. It requires a consensus to litigate disagreements through a prescribed set of rules. The breakdown of those rules creates an opening for strongmen who traffic in raw power and sell their ability to impose order. It is both the cause and result of the species of civic and moral degeneracy we see as the mother’s milk of Trumpism.
Chaos and strongmanism aren’t opposites by two sides of the same coin. One needs and breeds the other. As big a comedy as the House GOP Speaker debacle is it illustrates the same basic challenges and choices we face as a society and perhaps more broadly abroad: distributed power, agreed upon rules on the one hand or chaos and domination on the other. That’s the civic democracy and authoritarianism question and it’s playing out before us in the House GOP caucus dark comedy.