Dumb is dumb. Among the dumbest is a political strategy that harms your own side and infuriates your normal allies, the ones who stand with you on most issues.
That describes Marjorie Taylor Greene, who is a master of both bad ideas and bad strategies. She’s a bomb-thrower who lights the fuse, gathers her friends around her and then drops the bomb on her own toes.
She illustrated those qualities last week, not once but twice. First, she opposed a House bill on antisemitism, which passed easily with bipartisan support. Her reason was that the resolution could be used to attack believing Christians. To prove it, she dredged up medieval calumnies against the Jews as “Christ-killers,” who handed Jesus over to the Roman authorities.
Besides the noxiousness of her position, she is driving a wedge among strong allies, pro-Israeli Jews and Evangelical Christians, who are among Israel’s strongest supporters. Those evangelicals are disgusted by antisemitism and its use to smear Israel. Greene’s position tries to gut those ties.
Fortunately, MTG’s position on antisemitism had little impact. It got her some screen time on a few cable networks, and that’s about it.
But her effort to oust House Speaker Mike Johnson is a more serious matter, one that poses risks for her party in an election year. MTG objects, as do many Republicans, to the deal Johnson cut with the White House and congressional Democrats to pass a foreign aid bill with billions for Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan but none to close America’s porous southern border.
Opposition to the bill is popular among Republicans and a perfectly legitimate issue, whether you favor or oppose aid to those countries or the tactics of omitting immigration measures that would have effectively killed the bill.
What’s not so smart is keep the issue alive and use it against your own party by trying to remove yet another Republican speaker. Success in that effort would launch yet another contentious (and possibly fruitless) search to fill the thankless position of speaker. That spectacle would be disastrous for Republicans in an election year. It would convince average voters that Republicans are more interested in ideological purity than in governing the country. Not a good look when you are asking them to let you govern the country.
Do this small person’s actions have a larger meaning? Yes, Greene’s efforts and their coverage illustrate three major changes in our political and media landscape.
First, Greene, like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the Squad, has achieved prominence because her extreme positions are clickbait in a fragmented media world. Both left-wing and right-wing media outlets give her lots of coverage, one to appeal to her supporters, the other to her opponents.
In the days of Cronkite and Huntley-Brinkley, she simply wouldn’t have received that kind of coverage in. Greene, like AOC, would have been a much less prominent figure.
Second, the only reason Greene has leverage is because the House is so closely divided. That, too, illustrates a larger point. Whenever a legislative body or the electorate are so closely divided, a small, cohesive band can exert tremendous leverage. But they only have one kind of leverage: negative. They can credibly threaten to “veto” a candidate or legislative initiative. What they cannot do is advance a positive agenda because other groups won’t go along. Indeed, those other groups could act as “veto groups” themselves to block positive initiatives by, say MTG or AOC.
You can see the same logic at work in Biden’s efforts to keep Michigan in the Democratic Party column this November. While Arab-American voters are not a large percentage nationally, they are crucial in that swing state. Biden fears they could veto his reelection. So, he needs to take them seriously despite their small numbers.
Finally, efforts to understand MTG’s move to oust Speaker Johnson and her refusal to support the antisemitism language illustrate a fundamental mistake many professional analysts and ordinary citizens make in thinking about public issues. They begin — and all too often end — by asking “who benefits”? Qui bono? That’s always an important question, but it is not the only important question. And it may not be a good way to explain why policies are promoted or blocked.
Take Representative Greene’s attack on Speaker Johnson or Matt Gaetz’s successful effort to oust Johnson’s predecessor, Republican Speaker Kevin McCarthy. Those efforts ultimately helped Democrats, both in this congressional session and in the November election.
If you typically explain events by focusing almost entirely on “who benefits” (as some people do), then you would conclude MTG and Gaetz are Democratic operatives. They’re not. They just extreme, true-believerd on the right, determined to get their way. That assessment means that “qui bono” doesn’t work in this case. That’s worth remembering in other cases, too.
Our divided polity is now covered by ideological reporters in a fragmented media world. That inevitably gives a lot of weight to figures like MTG and AOC. We can refer to them by initials, as we do to towering figures like FDR and LBJ. That’s a sad reflection on the political world we now inhabit.
