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Today’s Republicans Need to Get Out of Their Own Way

Clarence Page, Tribune Content Agency on

“I don’t know what their endgame is,” he said.

I agree. As with the mob that assaulted the Capitol on Jan. 6, two years ago, the current House dysfunction appears to have deep roots, a combination of the Stop the Steal aftermath of Donald Trump’s presidency on top of the Obama-era tea party and the eight-year-old Freedom Caucus in the GOP’s far-right congressional wing.

And while they figure out whatever their endgame might be, they’ve got a great vehicle in today’s media age for building their own profiles and campaign coffers, independent of the traditional party leadership that used to maintain more control on party unity and messaging.

The same happens on the left, of course. Obama broke new ground in his use of Twitter and other internet campaigning but Donald Trump, among many other conservatives, showed he could play that game, too, for better or worse.

The result has been an informal but quite potent rise of new stars of performative politics like Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, Lauren Boebert of Colorado and Matt Gaetz of Florida as de facto leaders in opposition to McCarthy, even though you could hardly squeeze a playing card between their ideological differences.

Political scientists Matt Grossman and David Hopkins argue in their 2016 book “Asymmetric Politics” that the differences between today’s major parties are not about personalities but about structure. “While the Democratic Party is fundamentally a group coalition,” they write, “the Republican Party can be most accurately characterized as the vehicle of an ideological movement.”

 

The same can be said about Democrats, though in recent years we have seen progressive Democrats largely embraced by the party establishment, while Republican populism is more freewheeling and unpredictable in its challenges to the system.

Either way, McCarthy and his fellow traditionalists have a big challenge on their hands as they try to restore some civility and order within their own party. Former Speaker Nancy Pelosi had to do that, too. But, compared with today’s Republicans, she made it look easy.

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(E-mail Clarence Page at cpage@chicagotribune.com.)

©2023 Clarence Page. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.


(c) 2023 CLARENCE PAGE DISTRIBUTED BY TRIBUNE MEDIA SERVICES, INC.

 

 

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