He simply never made the case for being consequential. Needless to say, there are many Republicans who are now hunting for him.Īnd, yet, in the nihilistic spirit of the age, it is worth asking of these intraparty feuds: Who cares? Certainly, in McCarthy’s case, it is far from obvious that anyone should care that much. He wanted McCarthy’s antlers on the wall of his rec room, and he got them. In the case of Gaetz, the ringleader, it is clear the dispute is primarily about personal animus, not ideology. The GOP dissenters who joined Democrats in evicting McCarthy professed to be concerned about controlling spending, and some surely are genuine about that. The politics of contempt so skillfully exploited by Donald Trump is turned inward on hapless would-be leaders like McCarthy with no less ferocity than it is turned outward on liberals and the media. A party that used to have an instinctual orientation toward authority and order - Democrats fall in love, went the old chestnut, while Republicans fall in line - is now animated by something akin to nihilism. McCarthy’s ouster is dramatic evidence, if redundant, about the state of the modern GOP. But a pattern was set that has endured long past Gingrich.

He was shooed from the speakership four years later by GOP colleagues who had grown tired of his rap and mounting evidence that voters felt the same way. It’s a line that travels from Newt Gingrich to Dennis Hastert to John Boehner to Paul Ryan to McCarthy.Ī lot about the times in general, and the GOP in particular, has changed in the decades since Gingrich and his self-proclaimed “revolutionaries” roared into power in the 1994 elections. For a quarter-century, every Republican to ascend to the speakership has descended from it with his standing diminished. The main consolation is that he has plenty of company.

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