News of demonstrations and riots in the streets, the parliament in chaos, accusations of corruption and cabals, a populist leader claiming legal persecution and appealing to his followers before the old regime is toppled, before he is installed with a little help from friends overseas.
From the 1890s on, such events, such passages popped up in the news from faraway places, in grainy newsprint photos. Local unrest started or was started as a nation came apart and in the “free” world, the US stepped in visibly, or more usually otherwise, and order was “restored” i.e. a new regime established.
Now, after 10 decades, the US is doing a Guatemala to itself, as the House of Representatives sacks its speaker — simultaneously the one who decides how the place will run, and the legislative leader of government or, in this case, opposition – after eight ultraist Republicans used the party’s slim majority, and the willing connivance of the Democrats, to oust their own leader, not in the partyroom, but on the actual goddamn floor of the House of Representatives.
Kevin McCarthy, a leader who is of the right by Republican standards, of the very right on the US spectrum, and off the scale entirely by ours, was politically executed for doing a deal with the Democrats to pass a continuing resolution to keep the government being funded and avoid a shutdown, which was mere hours away. The Republicans are periodically pushed to such shutdowns, and they always lose politically — even among people who complain of alleged high taxes and debts and deficits, which are the causes that motivate the shutdowns.
McCarthy played chicken with the Democrats, gained some points and concessions, then swerved sideways at the last second. Not good enough for the traitorous cohort, it seems, who wanted a kamikaze head-on. So the eight, who form a mere part of the Trumpist “freedom caucus” have destroyed a leader who gave them practically everything they wanted.
The result, a house without a leader and no simple path to choosing a new one, is unprecedented for the United States. Even in the country’s first seven decades, before the current party system stabilised, the speaker remained inviolate, a figure hanging between partisanship and sovereignty. Together with the unprecedented multiple prosecutions of former president Donald Trump, it marks as great a dividing line in the history of the republic as any since the Civil War.
Indeed, the defenestration occurred on the heels of day one of Trump’s judge-only trial for fraud. Most of the verdict has already been decided, with the judge ruling that Trump has no defence against the case — brought as a civil procedure by New York’s Attorney-General Letitia James — that he was fraudulent in massively inflating his earnings and holdings to secure bank loans. The trial is now concerned with penalties, which may run up to $250 million. James can sic the forensic accountants on Trump and bankrupt him. And if he and his family are caught hiding money, it becomes a criminal matter.
So what happens now? Well, here’s where it all gets a bit National Treasure II. The speaker pro tempore is Patrick McHenry, a North Carolina congressman chosen for the role when McCarthy was elected — the selection for that role being kept a secret to foil assassins. Technically the speaker doesn’t even have to be a member of the House of Representatives, so the Republicans could choose Trump for the role. Ah, the supremely rational mechanisms of the US political system, which run as efficiently as does any 18th-century machine.
As your correspondent noted in his recent short volume Red, White and Blown: Is the United States of America a Cult?, the US, er, is a cult, not simply a nation which hosts a lot of them. Its founding in the period when liberalism had not yet split between its “classical” and “social” forms, means that those who pledge utter fidelity to the literal spirit of its revolution must, in the present, chase an ever more idealised and unreal version of it.
The country is a kludgy military superstate, dependent on manufactured hyper-consumption and debt to keep ticking over, and this requiring a hinterland empire (the hinterland being the rest of the world), corporate control of politics and a massive administrative state, and so it is essentially type 2 diabetes as a state-form. But in the minds of the followers of the “freedom caucus” it is still the agrarian small town republic of stout freemen in tricorn hats, blunderbusses at the ready.
As the gap between the American ideal and its shabby reality widens, both parties have suffered in terms of civic participation. But it is the Republican Party that has shrunk to such a degree that its dissident faction is now the party, and must go to war against itself to stay in business. What keeps these anti-state liberty lovers in business is that both major parties are quasi-state apparatuses, for which you register — with the actual state — if you want to vote in most of their primaries. With a broad, low involvement support base, steered by a professional core capable of being seized by a faction, the party has become a machine for faction — which is the exact opposite of what the founders were trying to achieve with their institutional design. They are protected because it is more or less structurally impossible for the country to confront itself and reflect on whether whole parts of the thing don’t work any more. So they rock on, with the shadow world of vast corruption and potential malfeasance never intruding on the beau ideal.
That’s certainly the case with some of these participants. Matt Gaetz, the rock-jawed, lush-parted-haired leader of the eight dissenters, is under congressional investigation for (*checks notes*) sex trafficking and sex with minors, paying for sex, and numerous other matters. Sex trafficking? Its the old “transporting a minor across state lines” thing, it being alleged he took a 17-year-old on a tour of some of the region’s motels. Though he was not prosecuted, he remains under investigation by Congressional ethics committees. He had asked McCarthy to derail these — according to McCarthy — so it’s possible there’s another reason beyond the spirit of Jefferson (actually…) for the internal revolt.
With all this going on, and Trump in court, it’s a measure of the partisan division of the US that the Republican vote has not collapsed, as the UK Tories’ appears to have done. But despite this, the disapproval for President Joe Biden among independent voters grows, over his age, over the recovery and cost of living — matters on which his proposals have been obstructed by Republicans at every turn. With no obvious way to swap in a replacement, and with Vice President Kamala Harris being kept sidelined so as not to be one, the Democrats are stuck with Joe. There is not going to be a rebellion from within the party that has any real success: the Clintons-Obama-Biden machines have fused.
The mercurial populist anti-vaxxer Robert Kennedy Jr, who threatened to mount a challenge, has now gone independent. From that position he is polling 19%, which could grow — and would need to for him to have the chance of winning any states. A quixotic run? Not if the structures of American politics are really changing. In that case, Kennedy could run, grow his campaign, win some states, and make it impossible for any other candidate to get to 270 electoral college votes.
At that point, the election goes to… the House of Representatives, where each state delegation gets one vote — California and Delaware alike — and whoever gets 26 or more becomes the president. In that circumstance, Kennedy is either kingmaker — or a candidate Republicans can throw themselves behind as a compromise, so as to not seat Trump. Trump will be the nominee, unless death intervenes — the possibility of which is pushing the alternative candidates to run hard. No accusation or conviction will dissuade his supporters. If Trump transported a minor across state lines for immoral purposes, a welcoming committee would be at the Borders City Motel 6 with flowers and a banner.
The US thus appears to have become a banana-split republic, its own client state. Some Russian and Chinese punting aside, there’s no outside force doing this — unless from space a Martian Kermit Roosevelt has arrived in DC — and this inward crisis of the nation that has externalised all previous ones is an interesting time.
How unseemly the battle for the speakership becomes will be a measure of just how much the US has abandoned its imperial projection of authority while still holding on to an empire. Whew! Thank God Labor repudiated Scott Morrison’s unthought-through AUKUS commitment, that’s all I can say! It’d be looking pretty silly by now if it hadn’t!
Meanwhile, if Patrick McHenry is running the joint, it’s because of founding father Patrick Henry, the new speaker giving the phrase remodelled for our time: Death or McLiberty!
