NRPLUS MEMBER ARTICLE {I} s anyone up for a little “bothsidesism”? Good. Settle in, then, while I gird my loins and clear my throat and say the thing that’s been bothering me since last week: The ejection of Kevin McCarthy as speaker of the House of Representatives demonstrates neatly why both of our major political parties are worthless and frivolous and ought by rights to be launched into the outer reaches of the sun.

First, there are the Republicans, for whom the lion’s share of the blame must be reserved. Try as I might, I can see no good reason why the Republican Party has elected to create a mess in the House of Representatives of which, in theory at least, it is currently the custodian. Removing McCarthy from his position secured no long-coveted conservative policy change, removed no hated rule or regulation, and ushered in no superior or alternative speaker whose politics were manifestly better than his own. I have been told that this fight was between the “establishment” and the “base,” but I cannot see how this can be true. Polling shows that Republican voters disapprove of the ouster, and, regardless, the guy whom the ringleader of the decapitation, Matt Gaetz, endorsed as McCarthy’s replacement was Representative Steve Scalise, whose politics and approach are similar to McCarthy’s, and who, until McCarthy was deposed, was serving as House majority leader. Like Seinfeld, the incident seems to have been a show about absolutely nothing.

The downsides of this show are real. On the issues, Republicans are doing rather well at present. The GOP has the largest lead on the economy that it has held in the history of NBC’s polling, and it is currently trusted over the Democrats on crime, immigration, foreign policy, and the national debt. If there was one clear message from the 2020 and 2022 elections, it was that even when voters prefer Republican candidates on policy, they will vote for Democrats if they do not trust the GOP to be responsible with power. The Republican Party is already deaf to this problem at the presidential level, as is evidenced by its continuing support of Donald Trump. By defenestrating a relatively popular speaker for no good reason, it has now extended its reputation for performative nihilism to the management of its majority in the House. In 2022, the Republicans won control of just one part of the federal government. It would have been a good idea for the party to show that it could use that power conscientiously. Instead, it has staged a carnival.

Ultimately, this mess is the Republicans’ fault. But the Democrats should not be let off the hook for the role they played in it. If the Democratic Party had wished to, it could have prevented the tiny minority of wreckers within the House GOP from removing Kevin McCarthy, and thereby prevented the “chaos” and “dysfunction” about which so many Democrats are now complaining. When one points this out, one is asked why it is incumbent upon the Democrats to “save” the GOP, as if the idea is self-evidently absurd. It is no such thing. The Democrats do not have a majority in the House of Representatives, and, as such, they are not going to enjoy a Democratic speaker until at least the next election. But they do still get to vote. If they believe — as they seem to — that a Speaker McCarthy is better than a vacant speakership or an unknown Republican substitute, then why didn’t they vote for him? When it suits it, the Democratic Party is more than capable of waxing lyrical about the importance of sacrifice and compromise and order and democracy. Here, the party had a chance to show that it believes in its own rhetoric. It failed to take it.

Had McCarthy been unrelentingly awful to the Democratic Party and its interests, one could perhaps understand this call. But the thing is: He wasn’t. Indeed, twice this year, McCarthy chose to work with the Democrats to avoid ugly outcomes — even though he knew that doing so might cost him his job. In June, McCarthy managed to avoid a default on federal debt by combining 149 Republicans and 165 Democrats into the majority he needed to suspend the debt limit for another 18 months. Two weeks ago, McCarthy repeated that trick, adding every Democrat but one (209 in total) to 126 Republicans, and passing a bill that prevented a federal shutdown. Responding to that deal, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries explained that the “spending bill” that his party had helped push through “was a complete and total victory for the American people,” and that “House Democrats have had to come to the rescue and push back against the extremists.” McCarthy, meanwhile, said that he had done what he had done because “there has to be an adult in the room.” Why these characterizations did not apply last week, too, is unclear. If, as Jeffries suggests, the bill that McCarthy worked with him to achieve was “a complete and total victory for the American people”; if, indeed, the Democrats came “to the rescue”; if, as we were all told, McCarthy’s speakership helped the Democratic Party to stand in the way of the “extremists,” then, surely, Jeffries should have returned the favor and, in the interest of the nation, kept McCarthy in place?

I am not blind to the imperatives of politics, and I am well aware that, very often, our disputes must be resolved in a way that pleases one side and angers the other. But there is a material difference between advancing one’s agenda and sowing chaos for its own sake. Last week, a handful of Republicans acted stupidly, and the entire Democratic Party gleefully aided them in the endeavor. And for what? An undetectable uptick in cable-news viewership?