Joseph Sabino Mistick: Kevin McCarthy and the GOP nihilists

The general public has not heard much about nihilists since “The Big Lebowski” was released in 1998, but during the recent GOP fight to pick a speaker of the House in Washington, D.C., we learned that nihilists now have their own caucus in the Republican Party.

In the movie, three German nihilists stormed from scene to scene, creating chaos everywhere. At one point, they shouted at Jeff Bridges’ title character, “We believe in nothing, Lebowski. Nothing.”

That sounds a lot like the 20 or so Republican members of Congress — led by ultra-right Freedom Caucus members — who wrecked Kevin McCarthy’s plans to smoothly assume power and scuttle the Democratic Party’s agenda. Even with a thin midterm majority, electing a Republican speaker should have been easier.

But the election of McCarthy as speaker took 15 ballots over several days, during which he traded away so much of the power and perks of the speakership that he is left with little more than the title. In the end, McCarthy barely had just enough votes to get a bad deal. But apparently that’s good enough for him.

Before the speakership debacle, there had been warnings of a coming nihilist caucus in the Republican Party. A quick Google search produced these headlines: “The Rise of Republican Nihilism,” “Republicans embrace Nihilism,” “Republicans aren’t conservatives, they’re nihilists” and “Beware a nihilistic Republican Party with nothing to lose.”

It’s enough to send you to the dictionary to figure out what it means to be a nihilist. Here’s how Merriam-Webster describes nihilism: “a doctrine or belief that conditions in the social organization are so bad as to make destruction desirable for its own sake independent of any constructive program or possibility.”

The Free Dictionary says that nihilism is “relentless negativity or cynicism suggesting an absence of values or beliefs.” Hardly the qualities that lead to good government.

It all sounds dark, and the deals McCarthy had to make to get those holdout votes — some of which have already been leaked — make McCarthy’s prospects of governing after this mess even darker.

As Chris Hayes of MSNBC reported last week, “In bullet number two of the ‘ultra-secret’ PowerPoint that Kevin McCarthy showed his Republican caucus — a few days after cutting a secret deal with the MAGA-wing of the party — is the plan to cut Social Security and Medicare.”

According to The New York Times, McCarthy vowed “to allow open debate on spending bills and to not raise the debt limit without major cuts — including efforts to reduce spending on so-called mandatory programs, which include Social Security and Medicare — in a deal that brought many holdouts … into his camp.”

In other words, these Freedom Caucus members fought a 15-ballot floor fight for the right to commit political suicide for a generation. McCarthy has now hitched his wagon to these people, and they may well pull him off a cliff.

Watching this spectacle reminded me of what Democratic Sen. Ralph Yarborough said when Texas Gov. John Connally switched from the Democratic Party to the Republican Party in the thick of the Watergate scandal in 1973.

“It is the only case on record of a man swimming toward a sinking ship,” Yarborough said.