Mythical Monoliths

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Well, now they’ve done it. The Republicans unseated, for the first time in the nation’s history, the Speaker of the House. The short-term result is a combination of chaos (bad) and gridlock (good), since nothing can get done by Congress absent a Speaker. The GOP plans, as of now, to try and seat a new Speaker in a week.

This was political sausage-making at its finest - a challenge from a “rogue” Party member, a calculated gamble by Speaker Kevin McCarthy, and a big decision by the minority party as to whether they’d be better off rescuing McCarthy, who has shown some willingness to work with the Democrats, or stay out of the GOP’s internecine fight, and risk getting a more intractable Speaker in his place.

That willingness to compromise was what prompted Rep. Matt Gaetz’s move against McCarthy, and it illustrates both the power and the peril of razor-thin party majorities. If the GOP had a ten seat majority in the House, rather than four, I figure none of this would have happened, or even been discussed. When you are one of a couple hundred, your vote means very little, and any efforts to buck the Party are, absent support from a large enough bloc, doomed. If, on the other hand, your vote is made significant because your party’s majority is whisker-thin, you suddenly have leverage.

Some are angry with Gaetz for throwing a giant monkey wrench into the party’s gears at a rather critical time. Others are happy that he “acted like a conservative” in demanding someone who’d cut spending harder and compromise less with the spendthrifts on the other side of the aisle.

I’m eating popcorn.

With only one half of Congress and the White House controlled by the other team, the GOP can only do so much in pursuit of a conservative agenda. But, even there, the “conservative agenda” is more myth than reality, because we’ve seen, time and again, how the GOP spends like, well, Democrats when it has the power to do so. Seeing a stand against the compromise that kept the government running is nice in a way, but it’s also a bit of a head-scratcher, since we are at the front end of election season, and the only path to real change is by winning the Senate and the White House. Chaos, especially chaos that can be spun by a left-leaning Press, may work against the GOP.

Or it may not. Many have questioned McCarthy’s effectiveness, rightly or wrongly, and if a new Speaker that’s more able to keep the party monolithic emerges, this might possibly work in the Republicans’ favor.

For it is the party leadership’s job to maintain that monolith, in both appearance and practice.

As this episode illustrates, however, political parties are not monoliths. When you elect a representative, you may feel you are adding to the vote tally for your preferred party, so that it can, via majorities, enact legislation you like. But, what if the leadership wants to take the party in a direction you don’t like? We see that the GOP has an internal conflict between traditional conservative and populist. We also see that the Democrats have their own internal conflict, between the moderates and the socialists.

People are inclined to call for unity and for rogues to fall in line when “their” party is doing what they want. People applaud the rogues and support their “standing on principle” when their party isn’t. Thanks to the nature of our political system, the binary push-pull is an inevitability, and it has the unfortunate tendency to make us think of parties as singular, homogeneous entities with consistent and coordinated agendas.

They’re not.

They are collections of individuals with some commonality of agenda. Those individuals are elected to serve their constituents, not the Party as a whole. Where there is common cause, it makes sense for them to vote with their party. But, even then, individual concessions can be wrangled. And, when a representative feels the rest of the party is going contrary to the reasons he or she was elected, it’s political calculus time.

As we’ve just seen.

It’s convenient shorthand to refer to “The Republicans” or “The Democrats” or “we” or “they,” but we mustn’t fall into the trap of presuming that any of these shorthands refer to single entities or single minds. Congress is a passel of herded cats, not two chess players staring across a board.