Yet McCarthy also appears to face a big problem. He already can’t control some of his wilder junior colleagues, including far-Right representatives like Marjorie Taylor Greene and Paul Gosar, who are a constant source of embarrassing headlines. Now, a new wave of MAGA mavericks — including Mayra Flores, a “far-Right Latina” known for sharing QAnon hashtags — are on their way to join them. 

There’s no doubt that these new Republican members will be controversial. But the question for followers of the American political scene is, how much will they really matter? A quick look at the recent history of the GOP suggests that the answer is: not much. Loose-cannon legislators are nothing new, and while they might cause headaches for party elders, they almost always vote with mainstream Republicans on the issues that really matter to the party. In other words, for all the sound and fury about an emerging QAnon caucus, don’t expect the Congressional Republican Party to change much any time soon. 

McCarthy’s trouble with his party’s Right began in earnest earlier this year, when an audio recording circulated in which he could be heard discussing the need for Donald Trump to resign after the January 6 riot. Whereas most in the press derided McCarthy for his cowardice in only criticising Trump behind closed doors, some of the Trumpiest members of the House saw the recording as evidence of McCarthy’s disloyalty. The minority leader drew harsh criticism from the far-Right Freedom Caucus, a group founded in 2015 to advocate for an “open, accountable, and limited government” that now serves as the home base for many of the party’s most truculent young members. 

The Freedom Caucus is certainly a colourful group. Take Lauren Boebert of Colorado and Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, who chanted “build the wall” in unison at President Joe Biden’s State of the Union address in March. Later that month, the pair found themselves in a heated argument about Greene’s decision to attend the America First Political Action Conference in February alongside Iowa Congressman Steve King. King, of course, was taken off U.S. House committees by McCarthy and the GOP leadership after asking when the term “white supremacist” became offensive. 

King, however, is a moderate compared to the conference’s host, Nick Fuentes, a Holocaust denier and veteran of the 2017 Charlottesville riots who claims that “having sex with women is gay”. Breaking bread with Fuentes was apparently too much for Boebert. But Boebert is no stranger to controversy herself. In addition to voicing support for QAnon, the Colorado Republican has recently come under fire for abandoning her then-sister-in-law after a 2020 off-roading accident that occurred two months prior to her victory in a Republican congressional primary. She’s also been fending off salacious — and seemingly spurious — rumours that she used to work as a sugar-daddy call girl.

The Freedom Caucus was also home to Madison Cawthorn, the troubled MAGA stalwart who recently lost his primary after falling afoul of the DC Republican establishment, which he had accused of tolerating orgies and cocaine use among its members. The establishment fought back with a classic “dirty tricks” operation, digging up salacious rumours and passing them on to sympathetic journalists. The same American Muckrakers PAC that is now attempting to smear Boebert released documents and videos suggesting Cawthorn was sexually harassing his male second cousin, and someone leaked to The Daily Beast that Cawthorn’s chief of staff had received tens of thousands of dollars in outside money beyond what is permitted by House ethics rules. Cawthorn, having made himself into an annoyance, was unceremoniously shoved out of Congress. 

As strange as that saga was, Cawthorn’s brief tenure speaks to the fundamental strength of party politics in the American system. Crazies may get elected, but they live and die based on their ability to make themselves useful to the party. Rising MAGA candidates such as New York’s Carl Paladino, who called Adolf Hitler “the kind of leader we need”, and Washington’s Loren Culp, a former police chief who tweeted his support for hanging a black man who could be seen on video pushing a senior citizen down the stairs, may generate bad press, but they will vote with the party much of time — and if they make more trouble than they’re worth, they’ll be kicked to the curb. Trump himself was a shining example of this phenomenon: Although he exasperated Republican grandees, he was able to secure their support by pushing party priorities like tax cuts and conservative Supreme Court appointments.

This isn’t a new problem. Every few years, a new generation of GOP radicals emerges to shock liberal sensibilities, but the party’s priorities remain the same. The “Republican Revolution” of 1994, engineered by Georgia Congressman Newt Gingrich, broke the so-called “conservative coalition” of conservative Republicans and “boll weevil Democrats” that had worked together since the New Deal. But while Gingrich’s “Contract with America” contained novel proposals like term limits, these never came to fruition. Instead, the party hewed closely to its post-Barry Goldwater identity: Bill Clinton was forced to move to the right on issues such as crime and welfare, and his Republican successor, George W. Bush, worked with the GOP to pass sweeping individual tax cuts, expand the surveillance state, and conduct military operations in Afghanistan and Iraq. Some legislators elected in 1994 evolved into establishment figures and major power brokers, while others were quickly defeated following gaffes and controversies.

The Tea Party movement, which coalesced in 2009 following CNBC reporter Rick Santelli’s call for a “Chicago Tea Party” to chasten big government, underwent a similar evolution. It failed miserably in its goal of shrinking the US federal government, but it succeeded in launching new Republican political careers, including those of pundit Glenn Beck, Florida Congressman Matt Gaetz, Texas Senator Ted Cruz, and the aforementioned Iowa Congressman Steve King. At the time, some commentators saw the Tea Party as the voice of America’s forgotten heartland, but political scientist Robert Putnam was nearer to the mark when he observed that the Tea Party’s activists were simply Republican voters who wanted increased border security, restrictions on immigration, and a renewed infusion of some elements of traditional Christianity into public life. They were, in Putnam’s terms, “super-Republicans”, even if the rhetoric they used sounded alarmist, extremist, or unorthodox.

Even Trump himself — the seeming bête noire of Jeb Bush and all the other corporate Republicans he crushed in the 2016 primary — was another outgrowth of the Tea Party era. His rise to fame was built on the back of a quixotic campaign to determine the national origins of then-President Barack Obama coupled with clever tweets about things like Massachusetts Congressman Barney Frank’s protruding nipples. Trump’s own reputation as a charismatic, unorthodox speaker with a socially libertine lifestyle led many to believe he could be all things to all MAGA hat wearers. But controversies and crises aside, this avowed fan of “Two Corinthians” came through on taxes and abortion, the core Republican political issues since Ronald Reagan assumed the presidency in 1980. Despite his rhetorical disdain for Mitt Romney and other old-guard leaders, Trump, once in office, delivered the goods that the party had long promised its base.

At the end of the day, then, Kevin McCarthy need not worry about what Carl Paladino and Loren Culp will do to the Republican Party. It will keep doing what it does best, asserting issues of public morality and low taxation that resonate with its long-term base, which is gradually assimilating more Latino voters. In doing so, it will be reasserting the power of historical continuity and frustrating the hopes for a more genuinely populist course espoused by “post-left dissidents” and members of the “New Right”. But McCarthy, who has served in Congress through the Speaker of the House tenures of John Boehner and Paul Ryan, surely knows that failing to find the right mix of velvet glove and iron fist could empower challengers and cost him his own position of authority. Political fortunes are always rising and falling in America, even if the partisan song remains the same. 

This event is mentioned approvingly in Molly Ball’s new biography of Nancy Pelosi. We are meant to be impressed by the speaker’s sense of self and propriety — she is, after all, America’s most successful elected female politician and hey, Congress and the White House are co-equal under the Constitution.

But oh dear: where is the emotional intelligence here? Could she not have just plopped herself down on a sofa. On the floor, even? Did it really matter so much?

Suggested reading

Can British media steer clear of the American sewer?

By Douglas Murray

There is something about Nancy Pelosi that captures in vivid fashion the failure not just of the Democratic party but of many modern democratic politicians to realise the threat that — post Obama — populism posed. They thought they could carry on as normal. They thought they could keep the same rules, the same perks, the same dignity. And folks would go on voting for them. Getting out of their chairs.

Pelosi is not an interesting book in its own right because — as the author all but acknowledges — Nancy Pelosi is not a particularly interesting person. It is best read as a study in (unintentional) irony. Almost everything it wants us to admire leaves us less than admiring.

It is meant to be a success story — the battles of a woman who didn’t begin her career until she was 47 and eventually reached high office and national importance. It is actually a story of how a political movement went awry. How the US Democrats, at pivotal moments in their post-Clinton history, took themselves ever further into the wilderness, or the upper atmosphere — sometimes into outer space: enabling George W Bush via Gore’s vapidity, then losing Congress so that Obama couldn’t govern effectively, and finally allowing a man uniquely unqualified to be president to win because Hillary Clinton literally couldn’t be bothered to travel to the state of Wisconsin to campaign.

Molly Ball’s Pelosi spans all of this because Nancy does. Our eponymous heroine gets to Washington DC in 1987, with Reagan still in power. She is still there today. In spite of efforts by the Left of the party to topple her she was re-elected for this Congress as Speaker of the House of Representatives, which, as we are constantly reminded, makes her the most senior elected woman in the nation: occasional White House invitee, target of presidential ire and sexist unpleasantness. But above all… well, that’s kind of it.

More from this author

Coronavirus has driven America mad

By Justin Webb

She calls herself a ‘master legislator.’ She gets things done in the corridors of Congress. She knows the numbers. She even impeached the president. But does she reach the parts of America that need to be reached? Does she energise? Does she galvanise? After all these years of getting to know her, do Americans think, “ah Nancy, don’t always agree with her but she speaks plainly to me and my concerns”?

A brief taste of Pelosi gives a clue. As so often in the book, the prose is designed to make us say ‘wow’ but leaves us mouthing, ‘huh’?

She had been up until 2 a.m., calling colleagues, tweaking this clause and that, refreshing herself as she did so with a watermelon-lime seltzer. At seventy-eight, she found her preternatural energy undiminished. She never drank alcohol, rarely had caffeine that wasn’t from her beloved dark chocolate and didn’t need more than a few hours’ sleep per night.

To be blunt, she’s a freak. She ain’t normal. And that, in a nutshell, is the problem for the Democratic party and for other decent, hard-working western politicians wondering how populism could have happened when they are all so busy and disciplined and up all night.

It’s all so tight and prinked and holier than thou. Obama succeeded because he lodged himself in the imagination of a nation that wanted — yearned — to be good. But outside that brief and passionate spasm of symbiosis between party and nation, the Democrats have played it cool, played it distant. Culminating in the loss to Trump.

And it’s not about policies. Although she represents a district in lefty San Francisco, Ms Pelosi has been perfectly happy at various junctures to face down the Left of her party. She has fallen out pretty spectacularly with ‘the squad’ of ethnically diverse Left-wingers who have dominated much of the coverage of the most recent congress. She is not an extremist or a fan of unfocused dreamers: she is a doer of deals.

Suggested reading

Immigration, citizenship and those "go home" tweets

By Matthew Parris

So what went wrong? Her life — like the life of her party — has simply diverged from the life of the nation. She is rich (from her husband’s business.) She holidays in Hawaii in the winter and her Napa Valley vineyard in the summer. She lives in a mansion in San Francisco and a riverside penthouse in Washington DC. She travels in private jets. She knows the in-set. The Hollywood set.

Does she know about life in Baltimore, where she was born? Perhaps she reads about it. I am convinced by the book that she genuinely wants it to be better and works hard to make it so. But like her party, she has taken a one-way trip to what seemed like a better place. We are not in Baltimore anymore.

So when the populists came, Nancy Pelosi had no defence. And now, more dangerously, she and her ilk takes pleasure in Pyrrhic victories, apparently genuinely thinking them real and substantial. The book begins with an endorsement from Senator Amy Klobuchar: “If you think a woman can’t beat Donald Trump, Nancy Pelosi does it every single day.”

This is not really true, is it? She has landed some blows to be sure: an encounter at the White House where she spoke sharply to him on camera and he looked foolish, the tearing up of his State of the Nation speech while sitting behind him in was also quite a thing, a meme for the faithful. She gets under his skin, as Molly Ball rightly points out. And all the more so because she and he used to be pally — and he thought they could be when he came to power.

Suggested reading

The truth about 'Obamagate'

By Michael Tracey

But all of this is failure because all of it is on his terms. Tearing up speeches in public is Trumpism. She has fallen into his trap. It takes Pelosi and her party to a place where he wants them: a place where nothing is normal, everything hyper-partisan. She is wealthy and entitled and cross: all meat and drink for the populist president.

Again, the point here has nothing to do with policies, and everything to do with style and connection with normal people who are — even in modern America — willing to be brought politically to a safer place. With Joe Biden, and more importantly with his vice president and with a new Congressional leadership coming from the younger generation, it is entirely possible that the Democratic party re-invigorates itself and re-establishes its place in the nation.

But they have to give up their chairs. They have to read Pelosi, thank her for her service, and move on.