In the hours after the House of Representatives’ historic vote to oust Kevin McCarthy from the speakership, a photo began circulating online of the cover of Young Guns, the splashy policy treatise authored by then-Reps. Eric Cantor, Paul Ryan and Kevin McCarthy in 2010. The irony of the photo was clear enough: The book, which featured a gleaming group portrait of the three self-declared standard-bearers of the Republican Party, was intended to introduce the rising stars of the GOP to the American people — but now, just 13 years after its publication, the book had become a visual obituary for the party’s past.
When I called Theda Skocpol — a political scientist at Harvard University who’s written extensively about the rise of the tea party and the transformation of the Republican Party — shortly after the House kicked McCarthy out of the speakership, she was staring at this same photo.
“I’m sitting here looking at a picture on my iPad of the three ‘Young Guns’ from that iconic cover of their book,” she said. “All three of them were felled in succession by the popular anger of the tea party base.”
The tea party that Skocpol was referring to no longer formally exists as a faction in Congress, its erstwhile allies having been subsumed into the far-right Freedom Caucus or into the generic “America First” wing of the GOP. But according to Skocpol, the history of the tea party remains essential to understanding the forces that ultimately led to McCarthy’s political demise.
“It represents the culmination of [the tea party movement],” said Skocpol. “All the research that I and other political scientists have done on the movement shows that by the 2010s — just before Donald Trump emerges — the tea party had taken the shape of a just-say-no, blow-it-all-up, don’t-cooperate, do-politics-on-Twitter faction — and this is the perfect expression of it. This is where it leads.”
In some respects, Skocpol’s argument is counterintuitive. In the late 2000s and early 2010s, McCarthy and the other Young Guns rose to power by harnessing the grassroots power of the tea party movement, promising to slash government spending, constrain federal power and foil the Obama administration’s policy goals. But though McCarthy and the other Young Guns rose to prominence by allying themselves with the tea party movement, Skocpol said, their banishment from the GOP doesn’t mark a break with the movement’s legacy. Instead, it shows that the Young Guns never really understood the forces that they helped unleash.
“The fact that McCarthy and the other Young Guns were once called tea party people because they dallied with the movement,” Skocpol said, “does not mean that the tiger wasn’t going to consume them in the end.”
[see article for interview]