Jim Jordan Doesn’t Know What
Courage Is
Oct. 19, 2023
By David
French
It’s
hard to overstate the extent to which our nation’s absurd Jim Jordan moment
encapsulates the deep dysfunction of the political right in the United States.
There’s
of course all the chaos and incompetence of the Trumpist Republican Party, on
display for the world to see. An extremist faction of the House deposed their
own party’s speaker of the House without a successor, and now — in the midst of
multiplying international crises — the House is rudderless. In fact, it’s worse
than rudderless. As I write this newsletter it’s in a state of utter confusion.
But
there’s also a deeper reality at play here, one that goes well beyond simple
incompetence. The Republican base admires Jordan because it thinks he is tough.
It perceives him as a man of courage and strength. He is not. Instead, he is a
symbol of the way in which Trumpist Republicans have corrupted the concept of
courage itself.
To understand what courage is supposed to be, I turn to a
definition from C.S. Lewis: “Courage is not simply one of the virtues but the
form of every virtue at the testing point, which means, at the point of highest
reality.” It’s a beautiful formulation, one that encompasses both the moral and
physical realms and declares that courage is inseparable from virtue.
Lewis’s
definition presents us with the sobering realization that we don’t truly know
if we possess a virtue unless and until it is tested. We can believe we’re
honest, but we won’t know we’re truly honest unless we have the courage to tell
the truth when the truth will cost us something we value. We can believe we’re
brave, but we don’t know if we are until we show it when we face a genuine
physical risk.
When
I meet a virtuous person, I also know that I’m meeting a person of real
courage. A lifetime of virtue is impossible absent courage. Conversely, when I
see a person consumed with vice, I also know that I’m likely in the presence of
a coward, a person whose commitments to virtue could not survive the tests of
life.
Now
contrast the Lewis vision of courage with the courage or toughness lionized on
the MAGA right. From the beginning of the Trump era, the entire concept of
courage was divorced from virtue and completely fused with two terrible vices:
groveling subservience and overt aggression.
The
subservience, of course, is to the demands of Donald Trump, the right-wing
media or the angry Republican base. The command is clear: Do what we say. Hate
who we hate. But how can anyone think that such obedience equals courage?
Because in this upside-down world, aggression is equated with toughness and bullying
is exalted as bravery.
Few politicians personify this distortion of courage into
cowardice better than Jim Jordan, and it is a sign of the decline of the
Republican Party that he was even considered for the speaker’s chair, much less
a few votes away from becoming the most powerful Republican elected official in
the nation, second in line to the presidency.
Is
there anything that qualifies him for the position other than his subservience
and aggression? His legislative record is extraordinarily thin. As Aaron
Blake meticulously documented in
The Washington Post, during Jordan’s 16 years in Congress, he hasn’t passed a
single bill of his own. According to the Center for Effective Lawmaking, he’s
consistently one of the least effective members of the entire Republican Party.
What
is Jim Jordan good at, exactly? He’s a Donald Trump apologist, a performative
pugilist and a Fox News fixture. The liberal watchdog group Media Matters for
America collected data showing
that as of this month, Jordan had been on Fox 565 times since August 2017,
including 268 appearances in weekday prime time. In a party that now prizes
performance over policy, each of these Fox appearances builds his résumé far
more than legislation ever could.
But
for sheer subservient aggression, nothing matches his enthusiastic
participation in Trump’s effort to steal the 2020 election. The final report of the
House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United
States Capitol calls him a “significant player” in Trump’s scheme.
As
the committee records, “On Jan. 2, 2021, Representative Jordan led a conference
call in which he, President Trump and other members of Congress discussed
strategies for delaying the Jan. 6 joint session.” On Jan. 5, “Jordan texted
Mark Meadows, passing along advice that Vice President Pence should ‘call out
all the electoral votes that he believes are unconstitutional as no electoral
votes at all.’” He spoke to Trump at least twice on Jan. 6 itself and voted against certifying the election results,
even after the Trump mob stormed the Capitol. In 2022 he defied a select committee
subpoena.
Never forget that this reckless aggression was all in
service of some of the most absurd conspiracy theories and legal arguments in
modern American political history. All the Republicans who voted against
certifying the presidential election were the very definition of cowards. When
the virtue of integrity reached its testing point, they collapsed. But
bizarrely enough, they often collapsed with a swagger, casting themselves as tough
even as they capitulated to the demands of a corrupt president and a frenzied
mob.
That
MAGA aggression has spilled over to the speaker fight itself. As The Times reported on Saturday, “lawmakers and
activists” close to Jordan “have taken to social media and the airwaves to
blast the Republicans they believe are blocking his path to victory and
encourage voters to browbeat them into supporting Mr. Jordan.”
The
pressure campaign includes Sean Hannity, a Fox prime-time host and wannabe
Republican kingmaker. Representatives from his show sent messages to
Republican holdouts transparently designed to pressure them into voting for
Jordan. Politico’s Olivia Beavers reported that the pressure campaign even
reached the wife of Representative Don Bacon of Nebraska. She received personal text messages threatening
Bacon’s career, including a message that said: “Your husband will not hold any
political office ever again. What a disappointment and failure he is.”
On
Wednesday afternoon, the pressure campaign began to reach its inevitable
conclusion: death threats. Steve Womack of Arkansas told The Washington Post that
his staff has been “cussed out” and “threatened.” Mariannette Miller-Meeks of
Iowa issued a statement claiming
that she’d received “credible death threats and a barrage of threatening calls”
after she voted against Jordan.
Roughly
30 minutes after Miller-Meeks’s statement, Jordan finally condemned threats
against his colleagues. By then, however, it was too late to repair the damage.
Eight years into the MAGA era, Republicans should know exactly what happens
when they launch a public pressure campaign. Threats follow MAGA pressure like
night follows day.
I’ve written a series of newsletters on the culture of MAGA
America, including how it combines rage and joy to build community, how it exploits civic ignorance to denigrate its
opponents, how its corruption is contagious and how it fosters and
feeds a dark caricature of working-class values that warps
its populist base. Even so, few elements of right-wing political culture are
more toxic than the way it turns vice into virtue and derides the very idea of
character in politics.
But
all is not lost. Just as key conservative jurists joined with their liberal
counterparts to reject Trump’s absurd election challenges, key Republican
leaders refused to bend the knee to the mob on Jan. 6. And it was conservative
lawyers who blew the whistle on Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton’s corruption.
A remnant of courageous
Republicans stood against Jim Jordan’s campaign for speaker of
the House and twice rejected his bid.
They
did more than reject Jordan. They directly rejected the MAGA bullies Jordan
unleashed. As Aaron Blake reported,
several Republican members of Congress have directly condemned the tactics of
the MAGA right. Representatives Steve Womack of Arkansas, Kay Granger of Texas,
Jen Kiggans of Virginia, Carlos Giménez of Florida and Miller-Meeks have all
denounced the pressure campaign. And John Rutherford of Florida blamed Jordan
directly for the threats and acts of intimidation. He told The Washington Post’s Jaqueline Alemany that
Jordan’s “absolutely responsible for it” and that “nobody likes to have their
arm twisted.”
Their
courage wasn’t wasted. On Thursday morning, The Times reported that
Jordan wouldn’t immediately seek a third floor vote. Instead,
he would “endorse a plan to empower Representative Patrick T. McHenry of North
Carolina” to act as a temporary speaker until Jan. 3. At the same time,
however, Jordan wasn’t exactly standing down. Under his plan, he’d continue to
act as “speaker designee,”
which would permit him to continue whipping votes for his speaker bid, a
preposterous idea that would undermine the temporary speaker every day that
Jordan worked to sit in his chair.
Maybe
Jordan realized it was preposterous, too. By the afternoon, he was back to
offering himself for a third House vote on the speakership.
I’m grateful for the stand of a few stalwart Republicans. But their small number is one reason I remain profoundly concerned. We’ve watched pressure campaigns work on the right for eight long years, until the people who continue to resist dwindled to an ever-smaller minority — a minority strong enough to help block the worst excesses of the MAGA G.O.P. but far too weak to cleanse the Republican Party of its profound moral rot.
The battle over the next speaker is yet another proxy
fight for the soul of the American right, and the fact that a man like Jim
Jordan has come so close to such extraordinary power is proof that the rot runs
deep. Only a very small minority of elected Republicans have passed the test.
Signs of courage remain, but as long as men like Jim Jordan and Donald Trump
run the G.O.P., the bullies still reign.