But the truth is that angry conservative media hosts have only themselves to blame for McCarthy’s downfall and the disarray currently facing House Republicans.
The leaders of conservative talk radio and cable news have spent years assailing GOP congressional leaders — including McCarthy — and they are largely responsible for turning far-right rebels like Gaetz into stars. Going back to the 1990s, conservative media created the political ecosystem in which torching and targeting Republican leaders is good politics on the right. And they’ve ensured that the next speaker, whether it’s Steve Scalise or someone else, will face the same poisonous incentive structure that took down McCarthy.
In 1994, the burgeoning conservative talk radio empire provided crucial support that helped catapult the GOP to control of the House for the first time in 40 years. The contributions of talk radio were so great that the day after that fall’s electoral earthquake, a jubilant soon-to-be-speaker Newt Gingrich called Rush Limbaugh, the king of talk radio, and thanked him for helping Republicans “overcome the elite media bias,” and arming “millions of people across the country with the facts that let them argue in October and November so successfully.” The Republican freshman class made Limbaugh an honorary member, and greeted him like a rockstar at their orientation.
Yet, as soon as the celebration ended and Republicans faced responsibility for governing, tension emerged between the GOP leadership and conservative hosts. They had fundamentally different goals: Republican congressional leaders had to compromise with then-President Bill Clinton to get anything done. Meanwhile talk radio, which would be joined in 1996 by Fox News, was a business. The goal was to get the largest audience possible to tune in for the longest possible time. And that demanded entertaining, engaging programming above all else.
Explaining why Republicans had to backtrack from promises and cut bipartisan deals, however, was neither entertaining nor engaging. It was dry, boring — and unsatisfying. Hosts therefore never hesitated to blast the GOP for such betrayals or to boost rank-and-file members trying to pressure leadership. Then-Freshman Rep. Van Hilleary (R-Tenn.), for example, once used a talk radio campaign in 1995 to force a vote on a term limits amendment to the Constitution. (He got his vote, but the measure failed.)
The tension between conservative media and elected Republicans only grew over time. Hosts usually supported President George W. Bush — especially when it came to the War on Terror and the Iraq War — and helped him get reelected in 2004. Nonetheless, they still regularly rose up against Republican heresies, including when they played an instrumental role in torpedoing Bush’s bipartisan immigration reform bill in 2007.
The relationship between conservative media and Republican leaders began to deteriorate in more fundamental ways in the late 2000s and 2010s. Two factors were at play.
First, competition increased in conservative media. Fox was now a massive political and media force, while conservative talk radio shows proliferated thanks to syndication and the profitability of the format. Many cities had multiple conservative talk stations and the rise of internet streaming and podcasting meant that listeners had their pick of shows at pretty much any time of day. In 2013 and 2014, OAN and Newsmax TV, two more conservative cable networks, joined the fray.
Additional competition meant pressure on hosts not to get outflanked on the right by new upstarts who could make a name for themselves by being incendiary and demanding even greater ideological purity and hardball tactics from congressional Republicans.
Second, conservative talk radio hosts sensed the smoldering anger among their listeners over how four years of unified Republican governance really hadn’t produced the conservative revolution that was promised. Roe v. Wade was still the law of the land, spending was up and Bush had even added a prescription drug benefit to Medicare.
The case that Nashville talker Steve Gill made for supporting Republicans in the 2006 midterm elections reflected his listeners’ disgruntlement. “The Republicans certainly deserve to get spanked,” he admitted to the Washington Post’s Howard Kurtz at the time. But if liberals gained control of Congress, it would be “America that gets spanked.”
These dynamics left hosts with every business incentive to tee off on Republican leaders. As former House Speaker John Boehner later explained to POLITICO Magazine, Levin, whose show went national in 2006, “went really crazy right and got a big audience, and he dragged [Sean] Hannity to the dark side. He dragged Rush to the dark side. And these guys—I used to talk to them all the time. And suddenly they’re beating the living shit out of me.”
In 2012, Congress confronted the “fiscal cliff,” a combination of expiring tax cuts and automatic spending cuts designed to have such unpleasant consequences that legislators would be forced to act. Democrats had enormous leverage. President Barack Obama had gotten reelected after pledging to raise taxes on the wealthy, and his party had also gained seats in both houses of Congress.
If ever there was a moment for Republicans to compromise, this was it. Yet, when Boehner made an initial offer to Obama, Limbaugh blasted the speaker’s press conference as a “seminar on how to surrender.” In Limbaugh’s mind, Boehner and his colleagues had “no interest” in defending conservative values because they “really aren’t conservatives.” Talk radio’s king made clear that because of the gulf between the sides, “There is no compromise. None! There is only concession. That’s all that can happen.” He repeatedly urged Republicans to stick to their principles even though they’d get blamed if the country went over the cliff.
The debate illustrated how antagonistic conservative media had become toward the Republican leadership during this period. Boehner said he had one “really blunt” call with Hannity, which temporarily reduced the vitriol heaped on the speaker. But things eventually frayed again, because he “wasn’t going to be a right-wing idiot.”
In addition to routinely heaping scorn on Republican leaders, talk radio hosts promoted far-right members of Congress who were all too happy to embrace the ideological purity and political warfare demanded by conservative media. These members became frequent guests, who were happy to lob rhetorical bombs, which made for good radio and good fundraising opportunities for lawmakers.
Nothing epitomized the way that conservative hosts could champion fringe members willing to join their crusade at the expense of leadership than a June 2015 incident involving then-Rep. Mark Meadows (R-N.C.). The issue seemed like procedural inside baseball but led to an uprising that showed how leadership could be overpowered.
Thirty-four Republicans had voted against the rule governing debate in the House on a trade bill. Lawmakers are expected to side with their party on rule votes, so this was the ultimate sin in the chamber. Meadows was one of those dissidents, and in punishment, he was stripped of his subcommittee chairmanship in the House Oversight Committee.
Instead of accepting his punishment, however, Meadows blitzed the talk radio airwaves to decry what one Fox host dubbed “very Tony Soprano-ish” tactics. Hosts were outraged, none more so than Levin.
During an epic rant, Levin dismissed Boehner as a “fool” and a “moron” and branded McCarthy, then the House majority leader, “the sleaziest of the bunch” — a man he wouldn’t even let “sell me a used car.” He accused Republican leaders of wanting to “destroy the conservative movement.” This was a call to action: Levin’s listeners needed to “go after” Boehner, McCarthy, and then-Majority Whip Steve Scalise.
It worked. Amid the conservative uproar, Meadows was reinstated to his committee post. And the following month, Meadows took steps to oust Boehner with the motion to vacate — the same procedural maneuver Gaetz would ultimately use to dethrone McCarthy. (Boehner eventually decided to resign rather than force his members to go through with such a vote.)
The whole episode underscored how conservative media portrayed politics: Far-right fighters like Meadows who scorned compromise and playing by the rules were heroes, and party leaders were traitorous, spineless villains. It became clear to ambitious young members that antagonizing leadership was the key to achieving political stardom.
From Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) to Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), a cadre of conservative bomb throwers became some of the biggest names in politics, despite having very little traditional influence on Capitol Hill. They routinely took to the airwaves to slam their own leaders on everything from spending to abortion, and occasionally even managed to lead their party into a government shutdown a la the futile effort to defund Obamacare. And while this alienated their peers — Sen. Lindsay Graham (R-S.C.) once quipped, “If you killed Ted Cruz on the floor of the Senate, and the trial was in the Senate, nobody would convict you” — they didn’t need popularity on the Hill to amass power.
The message was clear: Demand political warfare, savage anyone who compromised with Democrats — no matter the situation or the consequences of not compromising — and reap the political benefits. It’s this culture that has shaped Gaetz and his allies.
The only surprise might be that conservative media personalities are so aghast at McCarthy’s ouster; perhaps it’s because they’ve been painfully aware of just how hard McCarthy worked during the nine months of his speakership to cater to right-wing priorities. In the end it didn’t matter.
But they only have themselves to blame. Conservative talk radio and cable hosts created the political ecosystem that precipitated McCarthy’s downfall and so long as they continue rewarding similar tactics, this incentive structure will plague whoever succeeds him.
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