After this week, the GOP will never be the same.

It all seems so inevitable in retrospect. Back in the 1960s, Republican Party strategists made a few simple calculations and decided to build what would become the modern GOP coalition of disparate voter groups, each with their own distinct set of priorities. And for the better part of a half century, it has worked. The model of single-issue politics – notably including anti-tax, pro-gun, and anti-abortion voters – delivered Republican victories and offset whatever demographic advantages Democrats might have expected to give them an advantage.

The GOP pivot in the 1960s and 70s came in the aftermath of Richard Nixon’s narrow victory over Hubert Humphrey in 1968. In that election, Nixon outpolled Humphrey 43.4% to 42.7%, while Alabama’s segregationist Governor George Wallace took 13.5% of the vote running as a third party. 

As Nixon political strategist Kevin Philips explained at the time, the election math was straightforward: the numbers of voters that had flocked to George Wallace far exceeded the potential Black vote for a Republican Presidential candidate, particularly as Democrats had made great inroads into the Black vote beginning in the New Deal and with Harry Truman’s integration of the military. If the GOP was prepared to walk away from its brand as the Party of Lincoln, it could build a new Republican majority for decades to come. And it was a strategy, Phillips argued, that would build upon itself, “The more Negroes who register for Democrats in the South, the sooner the Negrophobe Whites will quit the Democrats and become Republicans. That’s where the votes are.”

And the proof was in the pudding. In short order – beginning with Nixon’s overwhelming victory in 1972, twelve years of Ronald Reagan and George Bush in the White House, and culminating with the GOP finally winning the House in 1994 after 40 years of Democrat control – the power of that new coalition overwhelmed whatever loyalty long-time Republicans might have had to their long-time Black comrades-in-arms, and their identity as the Party of Abraham Lincoln.

For the better part of the last half-century, the strategy has worked perfectly. Business elites who long comprised the core of the Republican Party, have won power through the votes of less educated white voters motivated by guns, religion, and racial resentments. But for most of those years, as Lee Atwater had explained in 1981, Republicans learned to speak in code: "You start out in 1954 by saying, 'N–ger, n–ger, n–ger.' By 1968 you can't say 'n–ger' -- that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states' rights and all that stuff. You're getting so abstract now [that] you're talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you're talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites.” 

Over the ensuing years, the strategy became more abstract, as Atwater suggested, but the underlying message endured. In the mid-1980s, while Reagan Lieutenant Grover Norquist refined the GOP playbook into the anti-tax, pro-gun, and anti-abortion messaging, while the use of wedge issues to draw anti-gay voters to the polls, and racially coded language endured. 

By the time Donald Trump grabbed the playbook, all the nuance was out the door, as racial code was replaced with a bullhorn. With the emergence of Trump’s MAGA followers as the unchallenged base of the party, the GOP leadership literally did away with a policy platform, suggesting instead that it stood for whatever Donald Trump stood for. A half century after George Wallace ran as a populist channeling white resentments against establishment elites, the politics of race and resentment has subsumed any last vestiges of the GOP as the party of personal responsibility, and White and Christian Nationalists came out of the closet and pranced proudly on the White House lawn. 

The internet changed everything, and it changed nothing. It changed nothing because it has only amplified the effectiveness of resentment and hate as organizing principles in politics. It changed everything because it freed politicians with social media skills from dependence on the leaders of political parties for funding.

To watch Matt Gaetz and Lauren Boebert on the floor of the House this week has been to see the fulfillment of the MAGA dream. The Republican Party is in turmoil, as the political progeny of the George Wallace voters have come of age. Lured into the Republican Party a half-century ago to serve as the election day tools of business elites, this week MAGA consumed the host. The 90% of the House Republicans who sat quietly in their allegiance to Kevin McCarthy seethed in resentment every time Gaetz stood up to speak. 

Yet the Matt Gaetz that stood before him would not bend the knee; he was a man fulfilled. Ridiculed for years for his Elvis hair and his apparent interest in sex with underage women, he ruled the roost this week. In 2020, Gaetz explained his ethos as a member of Congress in an interview with Vanity Fair. “If you aren’t making news, you’re not governing.” Being on social media, being on Fox, that is governing, according to Gaetz. Garnering attention is the job. Getting clicks is the mission. Because attention and clicks equals money, and money means no one can tell you what to do. 

Standing before his colleagues, taking on Kevin McCarthy, was the moment Matt Gaetz has dreamed of, and that Lauren Boebert lives for, because they both live only for the attention. Once Donald Trump’s foot soldiers, they have found their own voices. This week, when Trump came to Kevin McCarthy’s aid and declared that it was time for Boebert and Gaetz and the rest of those blocking McCarthy to fall into line, they were unmoved. Donald Trump, Boebert was quick to declare on the floor of the House, was her favorite president, but they were not going to do his bidding. Instead, the time had come for him to do what she demanded, and tell McCarthy it was time to withdraw.

On Friday, as McCarthy came within a few votes of victory, Gaetz lashed out once more. Kevin McCarthy is the LaBron James of special interest fundraising, he declared. The issue of special interest fundraising is central to the MAGA view of Washington DC as a swamp, and the MAGA mission to drain the swamp. And this is Gaetz’s sweet spot as well. In 2020, he was the first Republican member of Congress to refuse to take any PAC contributions. After Gaetz’s attack on McCarthy, #sellout trended on Twitter, and those who have been supporting McCarthy – even those with MAGA cred like Dan Crenshaw and Margorie Taylor Greene – found themselves scurrying to defend themselves against MAGA rage.

Kevin McCarthy may yet win the votes this week, and be sworn in as Speaker of the House, but Matt Gaetz and Lauren Boebert have already won the war. Whoever emerges as Speaker of the House, that person will serve at their pleasure.  The tail is now wagging the dog.

Follow David Paul on Twitter @dpaul. He is working on a book, with a working title of "FedExit! To Save Our Democracy, It’s Time to Let Alabama Be Alabama and Set California Free."

Artwork by Joe Dworetzky.  Follow him on Twitter @joedworetzky or Instagram at @joefaces. And thanks to Damon Langlois https://www.damonlanglois.com/ for summing up our current state of affairs in his sandcastle sculpture of one-time Republican Abraham Lincoln.