American political thought has long held that radicalism carries the seeds of its own reform—that the system, left on its natural cycle, will eventually slide back toward equality.
Under that logic, the future of the Republican Party goes like this: After a two-term presidency and the MAGA coalition that Donald Trump built, the party will finally right itself, driven back toward stability by growing dissatisfaction with Trump’s low approval ratings, the unstable economy, and social media threats to wipe out the entire civilization of Iran.
American political thought has long held that radicalism carries the seeds of its own reform—that the system, left on its natural cycle, will eventually slide back toward equality.
Under that logic, the future of the Republican Party goes like this: After a two-term presidency and the MAGA coalition that Donald Trump built, the party will finally right itself, driven back toward stability by growing dissatisfaction with Trump’s low approval ratings, the unstable economy, and social media threats to wipe out the entire civilization of Iran.
Such optimism was seen when former Representative Majorie Taylor Green, once a MAGA hero of the first degree, broke with the administration over the Epstein files, denouncing the Iranian president’s threats as “crazy.”
But recent history shows that the party may end up becoming more radical, not less. After the GOP’s bombshell Newt Gingrich era, there were expectations—highlighted in George W. Bush’s 2000 presidential campaign—that the party would try to move to the center. Instead, as the 2010 midterms and the rise of the Tea Party showed, Republicans ended up moving further.
The same thing can happen again. Soon The New Yorker piece and Antonia Hitchens traced the growing ranks of young white nationalists who have moved from the fringes of social media into the circles around mainstream Republicans. Popular streamer Nick Fuentes and his Groypers—who are generally anti-Semitic, nativist, and racist—have been hard to ignore. A war in Iran, Fuentes says, could prove a breaking point that increases their power. “Trump is the trailblazer,” one Republican told Hitchens, “the guy who opens the door for the rest of us. He opened the door for this next generation to come and take over.”
Fuentes and Groypers are just one group of extremists circulating within the Republican political party. Unless prominent Republicans step forward to form a coalition that steers the party in a different direction, the day may come when pundits talk wistfully of the “good old days” when Trump represented the restrained and good wing of the GOP.
Gingrich rose in shape radical Republican politics in the late 1980s and 1990s. As I recounted in my book burning down the house, the Georgia representative spread a style of extreme partisanship within the upper ranks of the Republican leadership. There have been politicians who abandoned protectionism and prioritized partisan warfare over the importance of governance and institutional preservation—most notably Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy in the 1950s—but none rose as high as Gingrich.
From the impeachment of Democratic House Speaker Jim Wright in 1989 to his election as speaker in 1995, Gingrich pioneered a new leadership vision that used the news media, partnered with conservative talk radio, and carefully broadcast political speeches to empower a party that had weakened as a “permanent minority since 1947-1949.” 1953-1955, and, in the Senate, 1981-1987). He dismissed the appreciation of civility and bipartisanship as a smokescreen that kept Democrats in power.
Moderate Republicans such as Olympia Snowe of Maine grudgingly supported his rise, wanting his party to gain influence in Washington. Gingrich and a group of like-minded colleagues in the early 1990s—including Robert Smith Walker of Pennsylvania, Vin Weber of Minnesota, and John Boehner of Ohio—took Washington by storm, legitimizing a toxic, unbridled populism where character assassination became the norm and every process a political incitement.
But by the time Barack Obama won the presidency in 2008, Gingrich’s generation was beginning to look sloppy to young Republicans frustrated that their party, despite eight years in the White House under Bush, had failed to significantly reduce the size of government.
During the 2010 midterms, a new generation of Republicans ran for office in anger over the Wall Street bailout that Bush and Obama supported after the 2008 financial crash. They were mobilized against Obama’s national health care plan, which they saw as a government takeover of medicine. They demanded drastic cuts in public spending and were ready to do anything to get them.
Boehner, a former thug who was now so entrenched in the GOP establishment that he was House minority leader, supported these so-called Tea Party campaigns despite widespread concern among party leaders that these candidates were too radical to govern. He he believed he could bring these rebels into union; to take back Congress from the Democrats; and using the Tea Party’s energy—while in control—to push policy proposals that would hurt Obama in the 2012 election while simultaneously checking the president’s legislative progress. The national party invested heavily in this race. FreedomWorks, a national organization led by Gingrich’s second running mate, Representative Dick Armey, provided significant support for Tea Party grassroots activities.
The strategy worked. Republicans took back the White House, building a conservative stronghold for the Obama administration. But Boehner quickly realized that he could not control the forces he helped unleash.
The most striking example of how far young Republicans were willing to go came with the federal debt ceiling, a pro forma process by which Congress votes to pay off a bill it has already agreed to, or else risk pushing the nation into bankruptcy. Since 1917, when the system was established, Congress has repeatedly voted in favor of increasing how much the Treasury can borrow to pay for expenditures it has already appropriated. Although there have been symbolic votes against raising the debt ceiling and one time in 1979 when the Democratic Congress technically failed because of delays (it was immediately fixed), the situation in 2011 was different.
The Tea Party was serious about their threat to block the bill. The default was averted only after Obama agreed to tough budget cuts and agreed to create an executive committee that would plan for additional cuts in the future. As a result, Standard & Poors downgraded its rating for the United States. Instead of taking a lesson from the war on what not to do, Republican Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell he said: “I think some of our members may have thought that the issue of default was a hostage that you could take a chance to shoot. Most of us did not think so. What we have learned is this—it is a hostage that deserves to be freed. And it puts the focus of the Parliament on something that must be done.”
But Boehner had opened the door in the House. A marriage of convenience turned into a long-term union. The Tea Party pushed the Republican Party further to the right and justified tactics and rhetoric that were more extreme. Threatening the debt ceiling again in 2013, justifying government shutdowns, blocking Supreme Court nominees, and using language that would make Gingrich blush became standard tactics. Many supported, or remained silent about, the “birther movement” that questioned the legitimacy of the nation’s first Black president. In 2012 opinion poll30 percent of Tea Party supporters said they believed Obama was not born in the United States; the other 29 percent said they don’t know.
By the time Trump was elected in 2016, most Republicans had already done away with MAGA, before the term even existed. After he was fired from his job in 2015, Boehner described Ohio Rep. Jim Jordan as a “legal terrorist” and write in his memory that these Republicans were from “Crazytown.”
While Trump spent his first term pushing the boundaries of democratic norms, a practice that led to his impeachment twice, Republican lawmakers were given the opportunity to support him and reinforce his agenda. Republicans who defied many, no matter how conservative, found themselves marginalized within the party or led out of power. In a period of very small and changing parliamentary numbers, as political scientist Frances Lee he arguedparty leaders could not afford members to defect from the party for fear of losing their majority, or losing the opportunity to bring back the majority.
Political scientists have described the trends of these decades as “asymmetric polarization.” Both the political parties split, moving further from each other and losing their center, but the Republicans generally advanced more in terms of policy and tactics. While the Democrats remained under the control of leaders who tended to favor favoritism, moderation, and the imperatives of governance, the Republicans were ready to burn it all down.
The direction of Republican party politics has continued to go in the right direction and, in terms of tactics, more extreme with each passing year. What began as insurgent energy on the fringes of the 1980s has become the logic of leadership leadership. Basic challenges and tests of credibility have increasingly disciplined even veteran parliamentarians. The party’s center of gravity has shifted to such an extent that positions that were once considered extreme, such as opposing the legitimacy of the electoral system and turning the rule of law into a blunt instrument of partisanship, are now not surprising. And when Trump wrote Social Truth posts about destroying Iran, what stood out the most was how many of his fellow Republicans said nothing.
It could be that the GOP is nearing an inflection point and will begin to rein in some excesses once Trump leaves office. But it can also easily move in the opposite direction, embracing the right side as the new normal. The decisions that party leaders make in the coming years about what they want their party to look like in the history books will have a big impact on the course of American politics.
