McCarthy and the GOP's Spiral of Radicalization

What happens to enablers when lawless energies gain momentum

It was always going to come to this. He was always destined to fail. He had barely been elected Speaker of the House in the first place—15 rounds of voting had been necessary. Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) served Trump dutifully, but he lacked that fiery and loud fanaticism that the most extreme wing of MAGA requires. He was also an inconsistent propagandist, with an irritating habit of occasionally telling the truth.

Replacing McCarthy had long been the aim of hardcore MAGA lawmakers and their Fascist mentor, Stephen Bannon, and the deal McCarthy made with Democrats to avoid a government shutdown provided the immediate excuse to unseat him. "Chaos is Speaker McCarthy. Chaos is somebody who we cannot trust with their word," said self-described "Bannonite tribalist" Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL), who initiated the motion to vacate. "KABOOM," Bannon texted a reporter, proud of his pupil.

Kevin McCarthy after his ouster as House Speaker, Oct. 4, 2023. J. Scott Applewhite/AP.

Thus was "the happy warrior of the [Trump] age," as McCarthy was called in the New York Times in Jan. 2020, summarily removed from office. The Fox website, in recording his removal by "Democrats and GOP rebels," noted that McCarthy looked down at his lap as the humiliation unfolded.

When you yoke yourself to an extremist, justifying his threats, his corruption, and even his attempt to overthrow the government, you can't be too surprised when the violent and lawless energies unleashed by that extremist take on momentum. That is what has happened with the GOP, which is in the midst of a spiral of radicalization.

McCarthy enabled that radicalization by denying the 2020 election results, seeking to obstruct the investigation into the Jan. 6 coup attempt, and then apparently blaming Democrats for the destruction. "What they did to this institution, what they did to this building, was so wrong," he declared the other day.

And yet men such as McCarthy always think they will be the exception: they will be the ones who survive because they have pleased the Leader enough to have earned protection from their enemies in the Party. McCarthy had likely believed that his loyalty performances over the past seven years had cancelled out his habit of expressing doubts about Trump (from a 2016 speculation to then-Speaker of the House Paul Ryan that Trump was on Putin's payroll, to a 2023 CNBC interview in which he said that Trump was not the "strongest" 2024 candidate).

Having studied the behaviors of generations of autocratic enablers in various states of grace and disgrace with the leader, McCarthy's activities were familiar as he scurried around to make amends with his. He sought to appeal to Trump's greed and vanity, throwing a lavish party at Trump International Hotel (Trump did not attend), and he demonstrated his loyalty in Congress by voting 97.3% of the time in accord with Trump’s wishes.

None of this sufficed to save McCarthy, nor to shield him from the wrath of Bannon, who seems to view McCarthy as a Democrat in Republican clothing and certainly not the kind of relentless information warrior and violence inciter needed to see through the authoritarian takeover to the end.  

As the search for a new speaker begins, we may see GOP politicians audition for the role by putting forth their extremist credentials. Rep. Steve Scalise (R-LA) has a head start in that regard. His remark, made some years ago, that he is "David Duke without the baggage," (Duke being a Ku Klux Klan leader) fits in nicely, although Scalise's claim is not entirely true: attending a White supremacist conference organized by Duke, as Scalise did in 2002, counts as baggage, as does his Jan. 6 vote against certifying election results.

In the meantime, the AP reported that the swift removal of McCarthy "shocked lawmakers of both parties and left them wondering what the future will bring." It's not hard to imagine the future of a party that has internalized the philosophy and methods of the Jan. 6 coup, from violence to election denial, defrauding the public, and death threats for disloyalty to the leader.

We have only to look at authoritarianism past and present to see the future of the GOP. When far-right extremists gain power, they gradually push out anyone who cannot fully embrace their nihilistic and destructive vision of politics. That is where Gaetz, Trump, and Bannon want to take us. McCarthy has been useful on this journey, but in the year of the "final battle" to wreck democracy, as Trump calls it, it's time for someone more ruthless and resolute.