The National Interest: Jonathan Chait The Coup Déjà Vu Why House Republicans keep ousting one another

"THE HISTORY OF THE EMPIRE is a monotonous story of the intrigues of priests, eunuchs, and women, of poisonings, of conspiracies, of uniform ingratitude, of perpetual fratricides," wrote a 19th-century historian

 

He was describing the Byzantine Empire, but the quote-minus the details about the eunuchs and the poisonings-applies about as well to today's House Republicans.

The past three decades have seen an endless succession of coups, scandals, and humiliations, at times reducing the position of Speaker of the House to a hollowed-out title hardly anybody of note even wanted to claim. By this point, the rituals of plotting and counterplotting are so deeply ingrained that every new Republican Speaker is greeted with built-in opposition and ready speculation as to who will take over next after he is inevitably deposed.

The congressional-Republican fratricide era began with the rise of Newt Gingrich. But its intellectual roots stretch back to the early 1960s when the upstart conservative movement first crawled out of the primordial ooze and set out to seize control of the party.

A key document of the movement is A Choice Not an Echo, Phyllis Schlafly's 1964 book that the Barry Goldwater campaign embraced as a manifesto. Schlafly argued that the Republican Party had endured a series of defeats since the 1930s because "a small group of secret kingmakers, using hidden persuaders and psychological warfare techniques, manipulated the Republican National Convention to nominate candidates who would sidestep or suppress the key issues." The party could have won all these elections, she argued, but it lost because its leaders had an interest in sustaining the status quo and pushed the party to squelch a frontal rightwing challenge.