Was Kevin McCarthy Beaten By the System?

America's political system may not be ideally suited to the country we've become, but alternative systems would likely manifest similar problems

Kevin McCarthy, in happier times

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I spent much of yesterday working on a long foreign policy-related post, which I am still working on. I’ll plan to publish that tomorrow—right now, I’m going to take a detour to address something more “in the news,” namely the collapse of Kevin McCarthy’s speakership.

I don’t really have anything to add to the choruses of schadenfreude and hand-wringing, nor do I have any insights into what comes next: who will be the next speaker, whether there will be any political fallout from these events, etc. But I do want to respond to something Matt Yglesias said at his Substack that I think deserves some pushback. Yglesias’s tenth “thought” on a list of fifteen took the broadest view of the meaning of McCarthy’s downfall, which is that it’s an indictment of the American political system itself:

The United States will probably not have a civil war [which Yglesias points out is what happened shortly after the last time no party gained a majority in Congress], but this is a powerful reminder that many of our core governing institutions don’t really make sense. This drama is essentially downstream of the fact that the Speaker is picked by the whole House rather than by the majority party, which requires near-unanimity among the majority party to seat a speaker. This is a stupid system.

The American system, famously, was not designed with parties in mind, and Yglesias is of course right that a lot of downstream oddity flows from that misunderstanding of how Congress would work. But I don’t think it’s obviously correct that if, for example, the Speaker were elected by the majority party McCarthy would have won easily. Here’s why.

If you want to run this hypothetical, you can’t just count the votes in the current system and assume those are the votes that McCarthy would have gotten in an alternative system. Rather, you have to ask how a rebellion like Matt Gaetz’s would have manifested under an alternative system. And it seems to me that the obvious way for it to manifest would be for Gaetz and his fellow rebels to bolt the Republican Party and form their own faction. At that point, whoever the GOP chose as their leader would have to engage in negotiations to form a coalition in order to have a majority at all. Those negotiations would give Gaetz the same leverage that he has now.

Now, you might assume that someone like Gaetz couldn’t afford to leave his party because then he’d have to run as something other than a Republican in the next election and win his seat in a very Republican district, which he might not be able to do. But he faces a similar vulnerability today: if the party wanted to punish him for his effrontery, they could back a primary challenger—and if the GOP brand is what’s so popular in his district, such a challenge would be expected to be effective. It’s not like Gaetz has no critics back home, after all. They don’t do that not only because it’s not clear it would work to unseat Gaetz (is the generic GOP brand actually more popular in his district than MAGA is?), but because Gaetz’s style of politics is popular in many other Republican districts currently represented by more normal Republicans. Coming out against Gaetz would expose those normal Republicans to primary challenges from the right—so they can’t do anything. That’s exactly the dynamic that would be operative if Gaetz were a member of a breakaway faction that left the GOP.

The point is: if the Speaker were elected by the majority party rather than by the House as a whole, there would be an incentive, under the conditions that obtain today, for an extreme faction to break away rather than remaining inside the tent, because that would be the best way to preserve their leverage. And if they did that, you’d be in the same situation that the GOP is in now where either they have to win the support of the opposition to govern or they are stuck being held hostage repeatedly by their extremist wing. The extreme right’s leverage comes from their real electoral support, and not from a quirk of the system.

You can see this dynamic playing out in countries with totally different electoral systems from America’s. Israel is currently governed by the most extreme right-wing government in its history. Why? Because the other mainstream parties refused to sit in coalition with him as long as he was under indictment, so that was the only government Benjamin Netanyahu could form. Netanyahu’s dependence on them for his political survival has given extremist parties a high degree of leverage over Netanyahu’s government—not infinite leverage, but a lot. But all this has transpired under a political about as different from America’s as can be imagined. Israel is a parliamentary system with proportional representation and a relatively low threshold for party inclusion in the Knesset—and the center-right has a clear popular majority. Nonetheless, here we are.

The important reason why we’re having all this drama isn’t that the way Congress elects a Speaker is irrational. The important reason is the one identified by Yglesias in his fifth point, about how the “normal” Republicans could have saved McCarthy extremely easily:

Importantly, the shit show is bigger than the handful of rebels. The rebels are absolutely part of it, but given that, the mainstream wing of the party has no choice but the cauterize the wound and make a deal with Democrats to keep McCarthy in the Speaker’s chair. That means mainstream Republicans need to suck it up and offer Democrats something. They don’t need to like sucking it up, but that is the position the rebels put them in. And they just refused. That’s a top to bottom dysfunctional Republican caucus. People need to see and understand that.

Yglesias is absolutely right about this—but I think he’s underestimating the potential political consequences to those mainstream Republicans of doing an end run around Gaetz and negotiating with the Democrats by saying they don’t have to “like” sucking it up. The problem is that the ones who have to accept the deal aren’t the representatives themselves but the primary voters in Republican districts whom they represent—and they might well not. And a different political system wouldn’t necessarily change that dynamic.

Consider the situation in Germany. If Germany held an election today, the AfD would be the second-largest party in the Bundestag, and the largest party in nearly every state in the former East Germany. The center-right CDU/CSU alliance would be the AfD’s “natural” coalition partner at both the state and federal level, but this idea is abhorrent to most Germans, and, to date, has been rejected by the CDU as well. But maintaining this cordon sanitaire may well require the CDU/CSU to form very broad coalition governments, which will set up the AfD as the voice of the opposition, poised to gain even more support if those coalition governments become unpopular. (I’ve written about this problem before.) Worse still, from a political perspective, one way for the CDU/CSU to forestall the rise of the far-right would be to coopt its issues—but forming broad governing coalitions with the SPD or the Greens or both would prevent them from doing that effectively.

The Congressional GOP has implicitly made the opposite bargain: a “no enemies on the right” approach that gives the far-right a lot of leverage in exchange for keeping them “in the tent,” but that makes cooperating with the Democrats against the far-right very politically risky as well as distasteful. This is a rational response to the structure of American institutions—and to that extent we can blame those institutions for that decision. If we changed the institutions, another response might indeed become rational—but as the situation in Germany indicates, if the underlying conditions empowering the far right didn’t change, then the problem wouldn’t be solved; it would merely change form.

I’m not saying that changes to the way our institutions work couldn’t possibly improve things; they certainly could. If I didn’t think that, I wouldn’t have written my Romney post from last month. My point is simply that such maneuvers are opportunities to change the underlying conditions driving polarization rather than being ways to avoid the consequences of those conditions. If those conditions don’t change, then you’ll still have a serious problem, regardless of how you tweak the system.