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This is the culmination of a decades-long trend in the Republican party, of never-ending purges by conservative hardliners. It can be dated back several decades, to the draft Goldwater movement of the early sixties, if not even further. https://twitter.com/jayrosen_nyu/status/1347700494848954369
First to be targeted were the GOP liberals, such as Senators Jacob Javits or Clifford Case. They were all run out of the party by the end of the 1970s. Javits's defeat in the 1980 New York Senate primary was the end of genuine liberalism in the Republican party.
Next on the hardliners' target list were the GOP moderates, exemplified by Senators like Chuck Percy, Mark Hatfield, William Cohen and John Chafee. They were more numerous than the liberals, and "purging" the party of them took longer.
By the late 1990s, however, moderates had largely disappeared from GOP ranks outside of New England and the Middle Atlantic states. Gradually, the remaining moderates retired and were replaced by Democrats. Susan Collins hangs on as a pathetic remnant in the Senate today.
But the big project for the hardcore conservatives was taking the party over from the "Stalwarts" (I borrow the term from Geoff Kabaservice ( @RuleandRuin)). Stalwarts were generally conservative in their views, although usually less strident than the ideological conservatives.
But the big difference between Stalwarts and ideological conservatives was that the Stalwarts, when elected to office, went off to DC or their state capitol to govern, not to demonstrate their ideological purity.
For 50 years after the end of World War 2, Stalwarts were the dominant faction in the GOP. Eisenhower, their first postwar President, did not belong to any specific GOP faction, but his basic instincts were those of a Stalwart most of the time.
Presidents Nixon, Ford and Bush 41 were Stalwarts, as was Bob Dole. Most of the GOP congressional leadership were Stalwarts, such as Ev Dirksen, Howard Baker or Dole in the Senate, or Ford, John Rhodes or Bob Michel in the House.
William McCulloch, a key figure in the creation of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, was a Stalwart. Longtime Senator Richard Lugar was a Stalwart.
Beginning in the late 1980s, ideological conservatives led by Newt Gingrich began asserting themselves in the House of Representatives. Gingrich's ascension to Speaker of the House after the midterm election in 1994 began the era of dominance by the ideological wing.
The problem that ideological conservatives have is that you can't govern by just writing conservative dogma into law, for a variety of reasons. First of all, governing means cooperating with people who don't share your views.
When you have focused for decades on "cleansing" your party of people of differing views, it is hard to get yourself into a different state of mind, and sit down and engage in genuine give-and-take with them.
Second, governing involves compromising. Ideological conservatives spent decades selling themselves to their base voters as being people who would "hold the line on our principles" and not "sell out." But to govern, you have to do the opposite.
A third problem for ideological conservatives is that, as many of us to the left politically like to put it, reality has a liberal bias. There are a long list of cherished conservative beliefs that are, plain and simple, not true.
Massive tax cuts do not "pay for themselves." They create huge structural deficits. Global warming and other environmental problems are not "hoaxes." They are real. Etc., etc., a hundred times over.
This means that when a conservative gets into office, they quickly encounter a reality that differs from their campaign rhetoric. They can either be true to their ideology, and be ineffective, or they can accept the reality, and anger their base.
Ronald Reagan is an interesting case. He is remembered today as a great champion of ideological conservatism. And he was, but he was more. Reagan always campaigned on solidly conservative ideas.
But when he got into office, both as governor of CA and as President, he showed a lot of ability to govern. He could work with politicians form the other side of the aisle effectively, and he could make compromises to get necessary legislation passed.
What Reagan had was a unique ability to make all those compromises, without dampening his appeal to the conservative GOP base.
Could Reagan accomplish that in today's political environment? Maybe not, given the increased expectations, and almost perpetual anger, of the base Republican voters today. But his accomplishment in his own time is notable.
A couple of more recent examples are worth noting. First, John Boehner. During the final years of his career, Boehner was the subject of a lot of reporting that cast him as a "reasonable" conservative, beleaguered by the demands of the hard right wing in his caucus.
But what was often left out was the Boehner got his start in Congress as one of Newt Gingrich's wingmen. He was one of the architects of the scorched-earth approach to politics that has come to dominate the Congressional GOP.
So years later, when the Tea Party/Freedom Caucus crowd started making his job as Speaker so difficult, Boehner was essentially being hoist with his own petard.
Another example is John McCain. McCain had basically Stalwart instincts, but he also was ambitious. So in a period of increasing dominance of the GOP by ideological hardliners, his career saw, to use a naval metaphor, a lot of major changes of course.
McCain would zig in the direction of responsible governing, for instance by cosponsoring campaign finance legislation with Russ Feingold.
But then, he would zag, to get the approval of the hard right. The most notable example, of course, was his selection of the hopelessly unqualified Sarah Palin as his 2008 running mate.
Finally, we have Lindsey Graham. If anyone didn't realize this, Graham was at the receiving end of all the heckling in the video at the start of this thread. Graham started out his Senate career as something of a McCain protege.
But he has always had a tendency to try to position himself alongside more significant figures in the party's hierarchy, and that led him, a few years ago, to become one of Donald Trump's main congressional water carriers.
When Trump, as anyone could have predicted, finally went completely off the deep end, even the unprincipled Graham reached a point where he couldn't go along for the ride any more.
While he is hardly a traitor, it's hard to feel pity for his plight, just as it was really hard for anyone who knew recent history to have a lot of sympathy for John Boehner.
