As GOP politics has become more radicalized in recent years, news consumers have confronted a familiar headline more than once: “____ has moved from the Republican fringe to the Republican mainstream.”
In many instances, the reports have related to right-wing ideas that the GOP has incorporated into its agenda. Politico published a report in 2018, for example, on Republican opposition to birthright citizenship and the 14th Amendment. The headline read, “How Trump’s ‘birthright’ idea went from the fringe to the Oval Office.”
The same week, coincidentally, The New York Times ran a report on right-wing conspiracy theories about philanthropist George Soros, which had also been incorporated into mainstream GOP talking points. “How Vilification of George Soros Moved From the Fringes to the Mainstream,” the headline read.
In other instances, there’s been related reporting about individuals. As we’ve discussed, in 2016, The Washington Post ran a report on then-Sen. Jeff Sessions — the year before he became the U.S. attorney general — under a headline that read, “How Jeff Sessions went from fringe figure to mainstream Republican.” Similarly, during his congressional career, former Vice President Mike Pence earned a reputation as a lawmaker on the periphery, with a voting record well to the right of House members such as Michele Bachmann and Louie Gohmert, but he’s now seen as an entirely mainstream GOP voice.
Some figures from Breitbart News “labored on the fringes” right up until they secured jobs in the Trump White House. Stephen Miller “spent years on the political fringe” before he started shaping Trump’s agenda. Members of the House Freedom Caucus were seen as part of the party’s fringe, but its former members include the governor of Florida, a former NASA administrator, and a former White House chief of staff.
It was against this backdrop that The New York Times published a report over the weekend on Jim Jordan — a top contender to become the next House speaker — under a headline that noted the Ohio Republican’s journey “from the fringe to the center” of the GOP.
As a co-founder of the conservative House Freedom Caucus, Representative Jim Jordan, Republican of Ohio, once antagonized his party’s leadership so mercilessly that former Speaker John A. Boehner, whom he helped chase from his position, branded him a “legislative terrorist.” Less than a decade later, Mr. Jordan — a fast-talking Republican often seen sans jacket, known for his hard-line stances and aggressive tactics — is now one of two leading candidates to claim the very speakership whose occupants he once tormented.
The point is not that Jordan began as a radical voice, but he moderated and matured over time. On the contrary, the opposite is true. As the Times’ report added, “Mr. Jordan’s journey from the fringe of Republican politics to its epicenter on Capitol Hill is a testament to how sharply his party has veered to the right in recent years, and how thoroughly it has adopted his pugilistic style.”
Or as a Washington Post analysis summarized, “The fact that Jordan is a viable option [for House speaker] appears to be less about his own evolution than the Republican Party’s.”
In the recent past, the idea of someone like Jordan chairing the House Judiciary Committee would’ve seemed absurd, while the idea of him becoming a competitive candidate for House speaker would’ve been laughably ridiculous. But in 2023, GOP politics has reached the point at which the line between the party’s fringe and the party’s mainstream has blurred to the point of invisibility. Nate Silver published a memorable analysis for FiveThirtyEight in 2015 that pointed to research that concluded: “The most conservative Republicans in the House 25 or 30 years ago would be among the most liberal members now.” In other words, if you were following national politics in the 1990s, you could’ve found plenty of members of Congress who would’ve fairly been described as quite conservative. A generation later, those identical individuals constituted the GOP’s “moderate” wing. What’s more, Silver’s analysis was written nearly a decade ago. It’s hardly unreasonable to suggest Republican politics has moved even further to the right since 2015 — the year before Trump’s election. The result is a party in which the GOP’s center of gravity keeps moving in a radical direction, to the point that Jim Jordan, of all people, is under consideration for the most powerful job on Capitol Hill. This post updates our related previous coverage.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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