House speaker debacle underscores MAGA’s 'Leninist' quest for 'domination': ex-GOP strategist

On Tuesday, October 24, Republicans nominated Rep. Tom Emmer (R-Minnesota) for House speaker — only to watch Emmer withdraw from the race a few hours after the nomination. Later that same day, Republicans nominated Rep. Mike Johnson (R-Louisiana) for the position. But it remains to be seen whether or not Johnson will be able to get the 217 votes needed for confirmation.

In a scathing article published by The Bulwark the following day, Never Trump conservative Tim Miller argues that the speaker debacle underscores the overall dysfunction in the GOP and the MAGA movement.

"Tom Emmer's four-hour run as the Republican nominee for speaker of the House yesterday — 3/200ths of a Scaramucci, for those counting at home — will be remembered, if it is remembered at all, as one of the final gasps in the long overdue reckoning that has been coming for leaders of a bygone Republican party," laments Miller, a former GOP strategist. "For about a decade and a half now, the governing wing of the party has attempted every strategy imaginable to delay handing congressional leadership power to the group of lawmakers who better represent the desires of today's GOP voters — the erstwhile renegades the late John McCain dubbed 'wacko birds.' That group has grown from only a handful of troublemakers to a significant bloc of Congress that's bolstered by an additional group of 'closet normals' who dress in wacko bird costumes for the retweets."

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Far-right MAGA Republican and "War Room" host Steve Bannon has described himself as a "Leninist" — not because he favors communism, but because, like Soviet leader Vladimir Lenin, he believes that a political movement has to destroy in order to create. Bannon believes that the MAGA movement cannot be successful if it reaches any compromises with either liberals or traditional non-MAGA conservatives.

Miller argues that the chaos in the U.S. House of Representatives underscores the "Leninism" in the MAGA movement.

"This behavior is just the latest bit of evidence that the MAGA movement is based not on policy, but on domination," Miler stresses. "As my colleague Jonathan V. Last has written, at its core MAGA has a Leninist objective: power. Who will overtake whom? When you know that that is the central question — when you know that one side is willing even to threaten democracy itself to win the power struggle — eventually, you reach a point where there is no middle ground left."

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