Give Newt Gingrich credit

It’s tempting to blame Donald J. Trump for the dumpster fire that
the U.S. House of Representatives has become, but that’s unfair.
The House Republican caucus was a smoldering tinderbox of
white grievance, racism, conspiracy-mongering and “Christian”
nationalism before Trump was elected president. He merely
added rocket fuel to the embers.
Many historians and political observers have noted that the GOP
began its descent into the fevered swamplands of white grievance
in the 1960s, after President Lyndon B. Johnson signed historic
civil rights legislation and assigned the Democratic Party the role
of ally to people of color. Republicans quickly noted they could
implicitly assign themselves the role of ally to angry white people.
Starting with Richard Nixon, Republican presidential candidates
have adopted a “Southern strategy” of pandering to white voters
who resented the changes wrought by the civil rights movement.
Trump’s shamelessness allowed him to take the GOP’s brewing
white nationalism from implicit pandering and dog whistles to
explicit denunciations of people of color, “elites,” and the
establishment. He has the grifter’s talent for manipulation, and he
used that to stoke the cinders of racism and resentment that
awaited his particular propellant.
Still, there are others equally deserving of credit — or blame —
for the cynicism and dysfunction which currently engulf the
Republican Party. One person who deserves to be remembered
alongside Trump is Newt Gingrich, who, like the sad Kevin
McCarthy, desperately wanted to be Speaker of the House.
Gingrich, though, was smarter, more cynical and more calculating
that the hapless McCarthy. A narcissist like Trump, he had no
regard for either the duty of elected representatives to pass laws
to aid their constituents or the decorum that had traditionally been
associated with Congress. Gingrich merely wanted to hold power,
and, in order to get it, he was willing to tear down the institution
over which he wished to reside.
Though he was a backbencher from exuburban Atlanta in a
House led by Democrats, Gingrich knew how to gain notice. He

started giving incendiary speeches denouncing Democrats from
the House floor. The chamber was often empty when he gave
those speeches, but C-Span’s cameras were on, recording them.
Viewers didn’t realize the chamber was virtually empty.
And Gingrich went further than merely denouncing his political
rivals for views that differed from his. He pioneered the use of
inflammatory labels for his Democratic colleagues and taught
other Republican House members to do the same. Gingrich
actually held seminars in which he coached GOP colleagues to
describe Democrats with such words as “sick,” “traitors,” “corrupt,”
“bizarre,” “cheat,” “steal,” and “devour.”
Gingrich also discouraged his GOP allies from spending
weekends in Washington because he knew they were likely to
spend some time socializing with Democrats, which would breed
cross-party alliances. His lessons took hold, helping to destroy the
bipartisanship that had turned the wheels of democracy. While
Gingrich’s poisonous legacy is most obvious in the House
Republican caucus, it has also seeped into the Senate, where
bipartisanship has become quite rare.
That legacy is also obvious in the rhetoric Republican politicians
use to describe Democrats. Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lauren
Boebert, among the more colorful right-wingers in the GOP
caucus, simply took Gingrich’s ideas and stirred them with their
own zest of hyper-extremism. Given their frequent appearances in
the rightwing mediascape, it’s no wonder that their voters have
become accustomed to the idea that Democrats are “enemies”
and “traitors.” How, then, could you justify compromising with
them?
Rational political observers have taken to asking what these
absurdist Republicans want and what can be done to placate
them. The answer, sadly, is that nothing can be done. They want
what they have — power and attention. Their politics is
performance theater. Like Gingrich and Trump before them, that’s
all they care about.

Perhaps it will occur to their constituents at some point that that’s
not what legislators are sent to Washington to do. Maybe
Republican loyalists will come to understand that they aren’t
getting their money’s worth. Or maybe those GOP voters are too
deeply invested in the performance of white grievance politics to
care.