Can the world still rely on the United States of America? The question arises after the tragicomedy that presented itself on Tuesday, October 3, which ended with the ousting of the Republican speaker of the House of Representatives, Kevin McCarthy, after the defection of a handful of radicalized elected representatives. What's at stake is more than the fate of a man finally devoured by the tiger he thought he could outrun. It's about the institutional functioning of the world's leading power, which will run out of money in around 40 days' time. It's also about its ability to provide a country under attack, Ukraine, with aid that is crucial to its survival.
Elected with great difficulty in January on the 15th ballot, after having multiplied concessions to the wing claiming to be the most loyal to former president Donald Trump, the elected official from California will go down in history for the shortest stint in this office since 1876 and for his excommunication to have been served up to him by some of his own troops. But, after agreeing to open an impeachment inquiry against President Joe Biden on more than flimsy grounds and showering House Democrats with criticism, McCarthy could hardly have expected them to save him.
Both McCarthy and the man who dug his grave, Florida's Matt Gaetz, are the faces of what the Republican Party has become in less than two decades, since the emergence of the quasi-insurrectionary Tea Party movement in 2009, driven mainly by hatred of the federal state. The Grand Old Party has transformed itself into a party of disorder, agitated by purges justified by a concern for ideological purity that often masks pure personal ambitions, and all of this under the controlling influence of Trump who is drowning in legal proceedings.
Compromised by the attempt to invalidate the results of the 2020 presidential election during the vote that followed the assault on the Capitol by a Trumpist mob (a good hundred elected House Republicans had voted against these results), the Republican Party proved incapable of breaking with the instigator of this chaos. And McCarthy was one of the first to be misled by loyalty to Trump. Their servility has not been paid back. Trump has decided to impose himself on the party's operations by skipping the televised primary debates and insulting his conservative opponents with the regularity of a metronome. Should the ballot box favor him in 2024, it is not hard to imagine the vertiginous top-down power structure he would put in place, not to mention his plan to purge the federal state of anything deemed suspicious.
At the root of the Republican crisis is a democratic dysfunction that manifests itself in the centrality of primaries. Only one in five voters take part in this election at the expense of the most moderate candidates. This drift is confirmed in general elections that are decided in advance in some 350 of the 435 districts that make up the House of Representatives, as much because of electoral gerrymandering as because of the profound split between two camps that disagree on almost everything. The impossible hegemony of one over the other should force compromise, whereas the prospect of compromise has become an anathema.
The field of ruins that the House of Representatives has become can only worry America's allies and delight its adversaries. These adversaries can count on the continuing blindness of Republicans who claim to be patriots.
Translation of an original article published in French on lemonde.fr; the publisher may only be liable for the French version.