Childhood's end: Sweet, innocent Kevin McCarthy faces the flames

By all appearances, House Speaker Kevin McCarthy is not personally corrupt, or at least not in the most familiar sense of that word. Given existing political reality — meaning the profound cynicism, nihilism and tribal bitterness of the institution he supposedly governs — that may not be a net positive. When Salon did some reporting on McCarthy's personal circumstances a few years ago, it emerged that he and his wife owned a modest home in Bakersfield, California, a distinctly unglamorous inland city at the heart of one of the Golden State's few remaining solidly Republican congressional districts. Kevin and Judy McCarthy met as students at Bakersfield High School and have been together ever since. Judy McCarthy has a full-time job as a fundraiser for the California Republican Party, another institution with a remarkable downward trajectory. (Which, in fairness, is probably not her fault.)

But friends and fam, lend me your ears — I come not to praise Kev, although I hardly need to bury him. He's doing a terrific job of that all by himself, and keeps on eagerly handing shovels to his enemies. How else can we account for the dewy-eyed innocence of McCarthy's response this week, after two failed procedural votes to bring a defense appropriations bill to the floor of the House? It's perfectly true, as Salon's Tatyana Tandanpolie reported on Thursday, that under normal circumstances such votes on House rules are predictable partisan affairs: Members of the majority party all vote in favor, even on occasions when debate and disagreement about the actual bill in question are likely to follow.

But please note the weasel words "under normal circumstances" in the above sentence, which should perhaps come underlined, in bold italic type and outlined with neon strips: In case the House speaker and the rest of the world haven't noticed, the Land of Normal Circumstances is a dim and distant memory, left far behind us as our creaky ship of state takes on water in a sea of storms and monsters. The sailors have lashed Captain Kev to the mast, so only he can hear Lauren Boebert and the Sirens sing sweet selections from a third-rate touring musical on their vape-clouded island.

Considering the unprecedented humiliation McCarthy endured to become speaker in the first place, granting virtual veto power over his decisions to a handful of renegade members on his far right flank, it's difficult to fathom his surprise that he can't get anything done. It was "frustrating" to suffer two defeats on supposedly routine procedural votes, McCarthy told the posse of Capitol-corridor reporters outside the House chamber on Thursday. "I don't understand why anybody votes against bringing the idea and having the debate. This is a whole new concept of individuals that just want to burn the whole place down. It doesn't work."

Ex-squeeze me? A "whole new concept"? Dear sweet child of this just-concluded planet-broiling summer, under what cabbage leaf were you newly born? Have you Stockholm-syndromed yourself so thoroughly to Matt Gaetz and Marjorie Taylor Greene (not to mention He Who Shall Not Be Named and Did Not Actually Lose the Last Election) as to believe there is any appetite among your congressional caucus to pass any actual legislation about anything, ever? Yes, there are still fake-credulous Beltway political reporters who will try to stuff this situation into a familiar frame, and we too can play that game if we must: McCarthy faces a new challenge to his embattled speakership! He must try to hold his fractious coalition of discontented moderates and fire-breathing conservatives together somehow! While working with Democrats in the Senate and White House to avoid a government shutdown!

It's startling to encounter evidence that McCarthy still believes in that narrative frame, or at least wishes he did badly enough that he can feign surprise about "individuals" who "just want to burn the whole place down," which is — as he is well aware on some other level of consciousness — a reasonable description of the dominant current of opinion among voters and elected officials of the Republican Party, circa 2023. It's easy to make fun of McCarthy's current predicament, as well as abundantly justifiable, but there is considerable pathos there as well. 

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There may be another Republican speaker of the House — indeed, there may be one very soon — but there will never be another from the party's so-called mainstream, or at least not for many years to come. McCarthy this week came clearly into focus for the first time as a dumbed-down version of Joe Biden, another career politician from a modest middle-American background with little in the way of bedrock ideological principles. Biden came into office promising bipartisan progress and healing, and still tries to draw a taxonomical distinction between "MAGA Republicans" and some other increasingly rare white-rhino variety whose preservation is crucial to our future. Biden's political innocence or willful blindness or whatever it is has been at least partly burned away by the fires of circumstance. In his sheer cravenness and stupidity and Bakersfieldian eagerness to please, Kevin McCarthy has been untouched by the flames until now.