To be fair, though, Gingrich was a much better rebel leader than majority leader. Gingrich has always been a frustrating personality. He’s _very_ intelligence and perceptive, he can put his finger on the pulse of the GOP electorate, at least during campaigns, and he has a sense of where Dem weak points are. Yet he has a proven track record of fumbling handling the GOPe and the nuts and bolts of retail politics in Congress. He seemed incapable of quite getting his mind around the total indifference to truth on Bill Clinton’s part, too.

As an individual, he’ll go for months or years at time, saying the right things, mostly doing the right things, and then suddenly he’s sitting on a sofa with Nancy Pelosi in an ad banging on about global warming. He’s erratic.

That depends almost entirely on Trump and the GOP. If they play their cards right, they can force the Dems into a nearly prostrate position for 2026 and 2028. If the Dems blow their reaction, their party could indeed shatter, at least for a time. The opportunity does exist.

But if Trump and the GOP screw up, the Dems could come roaring back in 2026 and 2028. It’s balanced on a razor’s edge. And simple luck will play a role, too, because it always does.

There’s a legend that some 20C British prime minister had just been put into office and a functionary asked him what he thought would be the biggest thing that shaped his government, and he supposedly answered: “Events, dear boy, events.”

Politics works like that.

Similarly, the GOPe hated every minute of the 1994 – 1998 Gingrich Revolution and drove him out as soon as they could. He was described in the media in terms very similarly to how Trump is described today, but that’s hard to separate out from their Emmanuel Goldstein treatment of any Republican leader.”

The reason for that is that American politics have been dominated since the first Bush Administration by an alliance of right-wing business interests and lefty ‘limousine liberal’ social activists. This is the more so because both these groups are dominated by members of the same social class. The ‘liberal transnationalists’. The Uniparty. It goes by a bunch of semi-descriptive terms.

While the business wing of the GOP and the lefty liberals of the Dems don’t necessarily _like_ each other, their interests mostly lie together. Both want weaker borders, unlimited immigration, to dissolve sovereign nation-states, rule by technocrats, etc.

Which is why policy broadly stayed the same (with a few specific exceptions) under Bush I, Clinton, Bush II, and Obama. It’s why the Uniparty tried to set things up so that the 2016 election would be a choice of…a Bush or a Clinton. More Of The Same.

Even back in 1994, the problem existed. The GOP gained control of Congress, for the first time in about 40 years, because of Hillary Clinton’s (because she was in charge in 1993-94) overreach on social issues and health care. But TPTB had no interest in opposing that, they wanted free trade and ‘entitlement reform’ and business deregulation and cheap labor. Gingrich may or may not have understood the problem, but he wasn’t able to do anything that the base voters had been voting for, because the dominant factions in the GOP allied with Clinton to block him.

Heck, it goes back farther. In 1976, Reagan mounted an impressive challenge to Gerald Ford, making him the natural front runner for 1980. But TPTB in the GOP more or less told him that he either picked GHWB as his veep candidate or they’d sabotage the election and give Carter four more years. Sure enough, after Reagan was gone GHWB steered the GOP back toward the patrician northeastern soft-liberal mode that the business wing supported, and the GOP stopped getting landslides and started struggling again. The northeastern liberal GOP is _unpopular_ .

Even now, with Trump ascendant, a lot of the Congressional GOP, esp. on the Senate side, are stalling and hoping to ride it out and go back to ‘normal’. Rumor has it that the proposed NASA funding bill, in its Senate version, basically funds everything as usual and blocks all of Trump and Musks’ proposed changes. I suspect a lot of GOP Senators and some GOP Representatives are hoping they can eventually force Trump to sign ‘business as usual’ bills, even today.

It wouldn’t take much of that to give control back to the Dems in 2026.

In re hot civil war, I’m going to bump a link that Snow on Pine posted late on a Saturday thread.
Pray to God that it never comes to this, but He doesn’t seem to have much influence over the Democrat leadership and activists right now.

https://thelawdogfiles.substack.com/p/monsters

“There’s nothing worse than a monster who thinks he’s right with God.”
~Malcom Reynolds, captain of the cargo ship Serenity

I have spent a great deal of my life fighting monsters. Not the fun monsters that Larry Correia writes about, but the tawdry, dreary reality of men engaged in the ten thousand ways of being inhumane to other men.

I have seen the monsters borne of greed; of madness; and those borne out of lust for power over others.

Of all the monsters I’ve had dealings with over the last five decades, the absolute worst are the fanatics — those monsters who think they’re right with God1.

Fanatics are people who think that their actions are blessed and/or required by a Higher Power; and are scary for a lot of reasons, but the two primary are:

Not only are their consciences clean no matter the evil they do, but there’s usually a group of like-minded people (mob, Politburo, cult, congregation, cell, bloc, Social Media, whathaveyou) providing moral support, validation, hero worship, and all of the other fun stuff that falls under “Group Dynamics”; and

Mission Creep. Defined as: “The expansion of a mission or task beyond its original goals, often after initial successes”, in this context mission creep refers to the nasty habit that fanatics have of always expanding their butcher bill list of “Heretics, Heathens, Idolaters, And Other What Deserve Our Righteous Wrath”. Yes, they always expand this list — unless and until someone (metaphorically-speaking2) holds their little heads under water until the bubbling stops.

In Africa and the Middle East, I witnessed first-hand the damage that fanatics can do; along with the snow-white consciences of those who committed some of the worst atrocities ever seen by the gods in the name of ideology, or religion, or politics.

Here in the United States — other than a brief fanatic embuggerance during the 1930s and 1940s, and again in 2020 — we don’t have a lot of experience with the little bugsnipes. Here when fanatics move up to their post-doctoral studies, the Rule of Law or society in general plays Whack-A-Mole with them, and then we trundle on our merry way.

In the last score of years or so, I’m starting to worry that this is no longer the case — and this concerns me, although probably not in the way that the average Gentle Reader imagines.
…
[AF: don’t skip this part, but it’s too long to excerpt]
…
I’m worried that when Biff the Hygienically-Challenged and his Coterie of Fanatics decide that sucker-punching neo-nazis just isn’t enough — or torching electric cars doesn’t have that same rush — and mission creep themselves into Proper Fanatical Stupidity, that some truly scary people are going to start whacking and stacking in response.

I don’t want to find myself standing over what’s left of a coyote attack and suddenly realizing that unless coyotes are carrying knives, some unsettlingly well-trained monster has just decided that he has had enough, and has gone hunting.

Y’all should be worried about this, too.

Re J. B. Pritzker, hopefully the country is not ready for someone who President Trump said “makes Chris Christie look svelte.” Warning – this picture is truly gross:
https://www.mchenrycountyblog.com/2025/03/23/pritzker-unable-to-buy-presidential-love-one-percenter-a-two-percenter/

I hesitate to have any Democrats with influence on foreign policy. The days when you could count on them to put American interests first, as opposed to those of the Davos or Brussels crowd, are forty years behind us.

The Labour party was at this point after thatchers second election