The Uncertainty Of America’s Far-Right

We’re in an interesting political moment. Democrats did surprisingly well in the midterm elections, holding onto the Senate but narrowly losing the house. Since then, the politics world has been dominated by two ridiculous stories: the fables of George Santos and the many attempts of Kevin McCarthy to be confirmed as Speaker of the House.

I’m not sure that the Santos story tells us all that much about society. (Or maybe it does. Hopefully not!) But the McCarthy saga illustrates the disjointedness of the Republican party, a chaos driven by the increasingly-powerful hard-right section of Congress.

It was the hard-right, led by cartoon characters like Matt Gaetz, that refused to vote for the more moderate McCarthy in order to extract demands from him. They ultimately succeeded in gaining significant concessions from McCarthy, including the ability to trigger what amounts to a vote of no confidence to remove him as speaker, and the House finally returned to normalcy on January 7th by electing McCarthy.

This drama signals that the divided Congress will struggle to function as a government. McCarthy is the least powerful speaker in a century at least, presiding over a narrow majority and a caucus that resents the normal operation of government. The far-right, in the style of Joe Manchin, will hold any agenda they don’t like hostage…