Why the Next Generation of Republicans Might Be More Extreme Than MAGA

Under that logic, the Republican Party’s future goes something like this: After two presidential terms and the MAGA coalition that Donald Trump built, the party will eventually self-correct, nudged back toward stability by growing dissatisfaction with Trump’s low approval ratings, unstable economy, and social media threats to obliterate an entire civilization in Iran.

Such hope was on display when former Rep. Majorie Taylor Green, once a MAGA warrior of the first degree, broke with the administration over the Epstein files, and denounced the president’s Iran threats as “madness.”

But recent history suggests the party may end up moving toward greater extremism, not less. After the era of Newt Gingrich’s bomb-throwing GOP, there was an expectation—highlighted in George W. Bush’s 2000 presidential campaign—that the party would try to shift to the center. Instead, as the 2010 midterms and the emergence of the Tea Party showed, Republicans ended up moving further right.

The same thing could happen again. A recent New Yorker piece by Antonia Hitchens traced the growing ranks of young white nationalists who have migrated from the fringes of social media into circles surrounding mainstream Republicans. The popular streamer Nick Fuentes and his Groypers—who are generally antisemitic, nativist, and racist—have become impossible to ignore. The war in Iran, Fuentes argues, could prove a breaking point that expands their power. “Trump is the trailblazer,” one Republican told Hitchens, “the person who opens the door for the rest of us. He opened the door to this next generation coming to take over.”

Fuentes and the Groypers are just one extremist faction circulating within the Republican body politic. Unless influential Republicans step forward to build a coalition that steers the party in a different direction, the day may come when pundits speak nostalgically about the “good old days” when Trump represented the restrained, reasonable wing of the GOP.

Gingrich’s rise shaped the radicalization of Republican politics during the late 1980s and 1990s. As I recounted in my book Burning Down the House, the Georgia representative popularized a style of bombastic partisanship within the top echelons of Republican leadership. There had always been politicians who abandoned guardrails and prioritized partisan warfare above the imperatives of governance and institutional preservation—especially Wisconsin Sen. Joseph McCarthy in the 1950s—but none had risen so high as Gingrich.

From his takedown of Democratic House Speaker Jim Wright in 1989 to his election as speaker in 1995, Gingrich pioneered a new vision of leadership that weaponized cable media, allied with conservative talk radio, and consciously unleashed blistering political rhetoric to empower a party that had languished as a “permanent minority” on Capitol Hill since 1933 (with the exceptions of 1947-1949, 1953-1955, and, in the Senate, 1981-1987). He dismissed the valorization of civility and bipartisanship as a smokescreen that kept Democrats in power.

Moderate Republicans such as Maine’s Olympia Snowe grudgingly backed his rise, eager for her party to gain influence in Washington. Gingrich and a cohort of like-minded colleagues in the early 1990s—including Robert Smith Walker of Pennsylvania, Vin Weber of Minnesota, and John Boehner of Ohio—took Washington by storm, normalizing a toxic, no-holds-barred partisanship in which character assassination became routine and every lever of the political process was a potential weapon.

But by the time Barack Obama won the presidency in 2008, Gingrich’s generation was starting to look tame to younger Republicans frustrated that their party, despite eight years in the White House under Bush, had failed to dramatically shrink the size of government.

During the 2010 midterms, a new generation of Republicans ran for office furious about the Wall Street bailout that both Bush and Obama had supported after the 2008 financial crash. They mobilized against Obama’s national health care plan, which they viewed as a federal takeover of medicine. They demanded steep cuts in public spending and were willing to do whatever it took to get them.

Boehner, the erstwhile maverick who was now so entrenched in the GOP establishment that he was House minority leader, threw support behind these so-called Tea Party campaigns despite widespread concern among party leaders that these candidates were too radical to govern. He believed he could bring these renegades into the coalition; retake the House from Democrats; and use the Tea Party energy—while controlling it—to push through policy proposals that would hurt Obama going into the 2012 election and simultaneously check the president’s legislative progress. The national party invested heavily in these races. FreedomWorks, a national organization co-led by Gingrich’s former second-in-command partner, Rep. Dick Armey, provided crucial support to the Tea Party’s grassroots operations.

The strategy worked. Republicans retook the House, building a conservative firewall to the Obama administration. But Boehner quickly learned he could not control the forces he had helped unleash.

The most dramatic example of how far the younger Republicans were willing to go came with the federal debt ceiling, the pro forma process by which Congress votes to pay bills it has already agreed to, or else risk pushing the nation into default. Since 1917, when the procedure was put into place, Congress regularly voted in favor of raising how much the Treasury could borrow to pay for spending that it had already appropriated. Although there had been symbolic votes against raising the debt ceiling and one moment in 1979 when the Democratic Congress technically defaulted because of delays (it was immediately corrected), the situation in 2011 was different.

The Tea Party was serious about their threat to block the bill. The default was averted only after Obama conceded to stringent budget reductions and agreed to set up a supercommittee that would map out additional cuts in the future. As a result, Standard & Poors downgraded its rating for the United States. Rather than taking from the battle a lesson on what not to do, Republican Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell said: “I think some of our members may have thought the default issue was a hostage you might take a chance at shooting. Most of us didn’t think that. What we did learn is this—it’s a hostage worth ransoming. And it focuses the Congress on something that must be done.”

But Boehner had opened the door in the House. A marriage of convenience turned into a long-term union. The Tea Party pushed the Republican Party further right and legitimized tactics and rhetoric that were more extreme still. Threatening the debt ceiling again in 2013, regularizing government shutdowns, blocking the consideration of Supreme Court nominees, and using language that would have made Gingrich blush became the common tactics. Many supported, or were silent about, the “birther movement” that questioned the legitimacy of the nation’s first Black president. In a 2012 poll, 30 percent of Tea Party supporters said they believed that Obama was not born in the United States; another 29 percent said they didn’t know.

By the time Trump was elected in 2016, many Republicans had already gone full MAGA, before the term existed. After being pushed out of his job in 2015, Boehner described Ohio Rep. Jim Jordan as a “legislative terrorist” and write in his memoir that these Republicans had come from “Crazytown.”

When Trump spent his first term pushing the boundaries of democratic norms, conduct that resulted in two impeachments, congressional Republicans were primed to back him and entrench his agenda. Republicans who defied the majority, no matter how conservative, found themselves marginalized within the party or primaried out of power. In a period of incredibly narrow and shifting congressional majorities, as the political scientist Frances Lee has argued, party leaders could not afford to have members defy the party for fear of losing their majority, or losing an opportunity to win back the majority.

Political scientists have described the dynamics of these decades as “asymmetric polarization.” Both political parties polarized, moving further apart from each other and losing their center, yet Republicans as a whole moved much further to the extreme in terms of policy and tactics. While Democrats remained under the control of leaders who tended to privilege centrism, moderation, and the imperatives of governance, Republicans were more willing to burn it all down.

The direction of Republican politics has continued to move in a rightward direction and, in terms of tactics, more extreme with each passing year. What began as insurgent energy on the fringes in the early 1980s has become the leadership’s governing logic. Primary challenges and loyalty tests have further disciplined even veteran legislators. The party’s center of gravity has shifted so far that positions once considered extreme, such as challenging the legitimacy of the electoral system and turning the rule of law into a blunt partisan instrument, are now unremarkable. And when Trump wrote Truth Social posts about destroying Iran, what was most notable is how many fellow Republicans said nothing.

It could very well be that the GOP is on the cusp of an inflection point and will begin to rein in some of the excesses once Trump is gone from office. But it could also easily move in a very different direction, embracing the far right as the new normal. The decisions that party leaders make in the coming years about what they want their party to look like in the history textbooks will have a huge impact on the trajectory of U.S. politics.