Alex Brandon/AP Photo
Temporary House leader Rep. Patrick McHenry (R-NC), left, talks with Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) as Republicans try to elect Jordan in a second ballot to be the new House Speaker, at the Capitol in Washington, October 18, 2023.
In what sense are today’s Republicans still a political party? Parties, after all, are premised on sharing some commonalities, be they beliefs or interests. Today’s House Republicans, however, have few beliefs that can be stated aloud to a general audience, and an abundance of inherently divergent interests.
For many of the Freedom Caucus members, their interests are self-promotion through the performative outrageousness that the party’s base has been conditioned to applaud by both Donald Trump and Rupert Murdoch. As to their beliefs, their philosophy of government and governance, well, that’s at best a secondary concern.
In his 16 years in Congress, for instance, Speaker wannabe Jim Jordan has never authored a bill that was enacted into law (which is an absurdly low bar to clear, since all you have to do is author a bill that names a post office after somebody). Or, for another instance, consider what the party as a whole did at its 2020 national convention—or, more accurately, what it didn’t do. It didn’t pass, or even consider, a platform. Platform, schmatform. Who needs policies? If most Republicans believe in anything at all, it seems to be the transactional narcissism of Donald Trump, which apparently gratifies his followers by enabling them to identify with his hate-suffused words and actions against people and forces that they hate, too.
I suppose that doesn’t fit the narrow definition of nihilism, but operationally, that fits it to a tee. Among many Republican electeds, it obviates any need to use government to positively address public concerns; and it permits them to focus instead on performative, and more than performative, rage (see: Ron DeSantis et al.). Adding to all of this is the Republicans’ growing awareness that many of their core beliefs on issues like affordable health care, unions, the minimum wage, and abortion are wildly unpopular. They can’t exactly repudiate those beliefs, but given the way that Trump and Murdoch have narrowed the bounds of Republican discourse, they can go through a typical workday or Fox News interview without having to discuss them at all.
There have been two instances in American history where major national political parties fell apart. Both the Whigs and the Democrats in the years preceding the Civil War failed to reconcile their Northern and Southern wings on the issue of slavery’s expansion. The Whigs simply went out of business, with most of their Northern members joining the new Republican Party, while the Democrats split into two camps that each nominated a presidential candidate of their own in 1860, enabling the Republicans (guy named Lincoln) to win that election.
Nothing so clean or neat or, in a sense, rational divides the House Republican delegation today. Instead, it’s home to just enough Jordan-Trump-Murdoch nihilists and just enough anti-Jordan-Trump-Murdoch nihilists to paralyze it. It’s by no means clear that there’s any House Republican whom his or her fellow House Republicans can unite behind to elect as Speaker. Dysfunction like this, mixing the ostensibly doctrinal with the personal, often besets small political or religious sects (Trotskyists, evangelical storefront churches, etc.), but previously has not afflicted a major American political party.
Until the advent of today’s Republicans. It would be funny if nihilism weren’t a major precondition for and component of fascism.
