The sudden withdrawal of Kevin McCarthy from the House Speaker's race has thrown Congressional politics into an October Revolution. Expect the Revolution to devour more of its own
"We will turn our hearts into steel, which we will temper in the fire of suffering and the blood of fighters for freedom. We will make our hearts cruel, hard, and immovable, so that no mercy will enter them, and so that they will not quiver at the sight of a sea of enemy blood. We will let loose the floodgates of that sea. "
- Feliks Dzerzhinsky, Krasnaya Gazeta, September 1918
In his epic volume Ten Days that Shook the World, American journalist John Reed chronicled the fall of the Russian Provisional Government and the rise of the Bolshevik-led Petrograd Soviet in October 1917, resulting in the first hard-line Communist government in the world and leading to the foundation of the Soviet Union. It described the turmoil that engulfed the ministers of the Provisional Government, who had by then so thoroughly discredited themselves through petty politicking while strikes engulfed the country and Germany blasted through a weakened and demoralized Russian army, and the ascension of the die-hard Communist Bolshevik politicians led by Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky, with the help of some rifles in the hands of the Petrograd Garrison and a few shots from a sympathetic battlecruiser in port.
From that point on, the political movements that had led to the abdication of the Tsar and to the attempted establishment of a "moderate" government gave way to the stern and violent zealotry of the Bolsheviks. Within a few months of the October Revolution, those moderate ministers who had not fled Russia would be in prison, and many of them would die there or be executed in the years that followed. The new head of the government, Lenin, would decree the formation of the Cheka, an agency devoted to preserving the new government through violent suppression of anyone declared a counter-revolutionary, and which formed the seeds of the future KGB. It then proceeded to not only destroy the vestiges of opposition from the Provisional Government, but from among the ranks of the Bolsheviks themselves, some of whom had some second thoughts about giving authority to people like Feliks Dzerzhinsky (quoted above), or Joseph Dzugashvili, a Bolshevik bank-robber and all-around thug from Georgia who would later take on the name "Stalin".
Fast forward ninety-eight years. The Soviet Union and all of its genocidal terror is largely relegated to history, but the style of the revolution keeps on going. Now, a far less violent but no less intense struggle goes on between the revolutionary factions of the Republican Party in the House of Representatives. Having spent years playing games of radical one-upsmanship to determine who was the more racist - sorry, principled - opposition to Barack Obama, John Boehner and company now find themselves trapped in a circular firing squad after squandering years of effort and millions of taxpayer dollars with nothing to show for their efforts. Eight Benghazi committees, dozens of meaningless bills opposing Obamacare, applauding Senator Benjamin Netanyahu from Israel, and nothing. Not a single meaningful piece of legislation from the House in years. So poor that even their colleagues in the Senate have given up and turned inward, knowing full well that trying to get anything out of the Bath Salts Caucus on the Hill is a loser's game.
Now, these esteemed worthies who would deign to have us call them our masters while they spout hatred to appeal to the very worst instincts of the American body politic are scrambling to avoid the consequences of their own bad decisions. The sudden withdrawal of Kevin McCarthy and the delay in the House Speaker vote while the GOP tries to avoid having Jason Chaffetz become the third-in-line to the Presidency bears all the hallmarks of the self-indulgence and introspection of the Mensheviki of 1917, after they thought they had the radical Bolsheviks in line and contained, only to find themselves stood up against the wall across from angry men with rifles because after they ignored the warning signs in those fateful months.
Anyone with a knowledge of history and a taste for politics knows these things. It has been a part of human organization from the days of Sargon through the French Revolution and the Russian Civil War. If John Boehner, Dick Cheney, and the other members of the Mickey Mouse Club that runs the Republican Party had ever stopped to study the dangers of radical political change and learn to avoid it in the service of democracy, instead of simply throwing it into the mix of their verbal diarrhea to score cheap political points with the backwater coprophiles* of the American electorate, they might have found themselves in a better spot than where they are now.
Oh well. I suppose those who are ignorant of history are doomed to repeat it yet again. I'll just keep making plans for my own eventual exile from America when President Trump, Vice President Carson, and Speaker of the House Chaffetz finally cement the fate of the United States once and for all. I understand Australia is lovely this time of year.
*Warning - be very careful if you feel the need to Google this word.