Fifteen times lucky! You have to go back over a century and a half, pre-Civil War, to see anything like it when it comes to selecting a speaker of the US House of Representatives. The establishment Republican candidate, Kevin McCarthy, had to put his name forward fifteen separate times, failing each of the previous fourteen, before he could convince enough dissenting Republican members of the House of Representatives to give him the job. And along the way, as failed attempt followed failed attempt, McCarthy had to make some pretty major concessions to his critics in what you might think of as the ‘America First’ or ‘Big Business is not our Friend’ wing of the party, the one that styles itself the ‘House Freedom Caucus’. These concessions include only needing one member to introduce a motion forcing a vote to remove the Speaker; more Freedom Caucus members on the important House rules committee; written promises to hold votes on border security bills (the Big Business wing of the Republican party more or less wants open borders as much as many Democrat members of Congress); no clean increases to the debt ceiling; and solid guarantees that the McCarthy controlled campaign finance PAC fund would not weigh in on any open-seat primaries in safe Republican districts (as Republican Senate leader Mitch McConnell did for Senate seats before the 2022 midterm election to support long-time establishment candidates over insurgent newcomers, arguably costing the Republicans a Senate seat or two because of this misspent money).

Ultimately, it took a call from Mr Trump to some of the dissidents (and not one call at that as the failed attempts kept coming) to get Mr McCarthy over the line and elected Speaker. These anti-establishment Republicans were extremely angry at the state of their own party.

Now, one thing no one can deny is that discipline has broken down in the Republican party. Of course, whether that is a good or bad thing depends upon whether you think the establishment Republicans were doing a good job up to now and were generally worth supporting. I do not. In effect, the rebels are in part challenging their party establishment’s ability to protect its own people from being defeated in their equivalent of our pre-selection battles – you know, the way former PM Scott Morrison and Alex Hawke so disgracefully gamed promised preselection battles before the last election. And the way the NSW Liberal party is doing so now, promises to the party faithful be damned!

A few ironies are worth noting here. One is that virtually all Democrats and all sections of the mainstream media (bar Fox TV after dark) think that disunity is bad for the Republicans. Personally, I don’t believe taking advice from one’s political enemies has any worth. The insurgents know that a little open chaos is better than an establishment coronation as happened with regards to the woeful Mitch McConnell in the Senate. Remember, the US has a strong form of bicameralism. The Democrats control the Presidency and the Senate, so all the Republicans can do until 2024 is block, block, block and harass President Biden for a couple of years. We have just recently seen McConnell in the Senate and McCarthy in the House (the two Republican Congressional leaders) wave through a huge spending bill that amounts to a wish list for the Democrats with next to nothing for any conservative other than the Big Business wing of the Republicans. Why should the insurgents prefer that sort of insider Washington stitch-up to disunity? The truth is that the Republican leadership is deeply impoverished. (Sound familiar readers, when you think of today’s Liberal party that still can’t summon up the will to oppose the Voice on the principled grounds that our Constitution ought never to treat Australians differently based on race, or even manage in NSW to stand up to Matt Kean?)

Even during much of President Trump’s tenure the congressional Republican leadership failed to pursue systemic issues like government finances, middle-class jobs, economic security, healthcare, immigration, woke universities and border security. In some ways they blocked Trump as much as the Democrats. And so it is another irony that it is Trump who has done as much as – no, more than – anyone to create the climate where voters and members of Congress are openly challenging authority in Washington, at least as regards those on the right of politics. If the New York Times and the Washington Post – neither of whom has yet to report on the Twitter release of the FBI and bureaucratic corruption around the Hunter Biden laptop, not a single article – well, if they call this insurgency ‘disunity’ then give me more of it. In fact, if anything, we conservatives in Australia need a lot more disunity within the Liberal party because if you go back to when Tony Abbott was defenestrated in 2015, what has ‘our’ party done in office or out that is worth anything at all? (Mr Abbott stopped the boats, a big tick, but even he did nothing much else, caving in on the s.18C hate speech repeal effort, without even making the Senate block the repeal effort.) Meanwhile the Libs oversaw and condoned the thuggery, illiberalism and plain cost-benefit stupidity of the pandemic lockdowns while implicitly condoning vaccine mandates and masking idiocy. They ran the biggest taxing and biggest spending government since world war two. They refused to fight on any front at all of the culture wars, not one. They cravenly caved in to the ABC out of fear that that billion dollar behemoth wouldn’t be nice to them, when any thinking being knows these wall-to-wall lefties in ‘our’ ABC won’t ever be impartial anyway. They supercharged asset inflation by succumbing without quibble to the Keynesian orthodoxies of Treasury, in a way that has seen wealth transferred from young to old, and from poor to rich. Heck, they couldn’t even summon up the will to appoint conservatives to anything –  just look at their appointments to head the ABC, the Human Rights Commission, the courts (mostly, there were a few honourable exceptions dragged out of a thoroughly embarrassed Liberal party after the 2020 Love decision was brought to you by Liberal judicial appointees, not Labor ones).

Received wisdom is that disunity is death in politics. But if you’re dying anyway, a little disunity might be just the ticket. Some in the Republican party in the US have certainly come to that conclusion.