Earlier tonight, the U.S. House of Representatives voted to remove Marjorie Taylor Greene from the committees to which she’d been assigned as a newly-elected representative from Georgia. Before being elected to Congress, Greene was active in what we might call the conspiracy theory community, writing unhinged blog posts, rallying around “false flag” lies about mass shootings from Sandy Hook to Christchurch, and nearly every other vile, insane, and inhumane interpretation of reality. From the September 11th terror attack to the murder of Seth Rich, Greene has stoked the absolute worst of America and ridden a swelling tide of grievance and misinformation to the House of Representatives.

Eleven of her fellow Republicans voted to strip her of those committee appointments, which means 199 did not. Republicans have already vowed to seek revenge the next time they are in control of the House, which could be as soon as 2022; they will almost certainly pursue their vendetta in the most vile, racist way possible, having already spent weeks falsely equivocating The Squad of left-leaning Democrats with certifiably batshit members like Greene, Lauren Boebert, and my own representative, Madison Cawthorn. Even before they were sworn in, we knew these represented a hateful face of the GOP’s future and they’ve wasted no time proving every fear correct, including their role in the January 6 insurrection.

The question of what Trumpism-without-Trump looks like is becoming clearer every day, as David Roth writes, with the new rise of American kooks:

For all the clammy and overdetermined machinations by the aspirants to Trump’s throne, it is plain to see which people in our politics are most authentically like him. The new congressional Representatives Marjorie Taylor Greene and Madison Cawthorn and Lauren Boebert take after Trump in their thirst and strident idiocy, but mostly in their understanding that their jobs are to sell, and complain, and post and post and post, and never to disclaim any of the lazy suspicions and secondhand gripes and idle vendettas out of which they’ve fashioned their public selves. As with Trump, the goal is in one sense more about presence than power; as also with Trump, and with Schilling, the obligation to that thirst runs far deeper than the ridiculous outward presentation would suggest.

The politics these people profess is not about helping anyone, lord knows, or really about any kind of ideological program at all. It is about an obsessive and even loving taxonomy of and fixation upon enemies and problems, and the way it works is through relentlessness, and through a refusal to ever stop performing weird arias of anger and umbrage. The terrified and fuming derangement that conservative media sought to embed in its consumers, mostly to keep them pliable and on the hook through the commercial breaks, has blossomed into this: a rising army of impossibly unhappy people, their ambitions both vague and vast, who have come to understand that the dizzy righteousness of that derangement is the point.

Roth has captured better than anyone the horrors, large and small, of the Trump years and once again has laid bare the lunacy at the heart of the GOP. For all the handwringing over a battle within the party, it’s painfully clear how much Trump remade Republicans into a mirror image of himself, and in such short order.

Gabriel Rosenberg¹ has also captured the darkness of the current political moment, writing of Trumpism as “a structure of a feeling”²:

One thing I need emphasize now is that because it is a structure of feeling, Trumpism is unstable and impossible to describe coherently as either a set of claims about the world or as a particular constituting public. Put differently, if it seems like I’m playing fast and loose with who belongs in the Trumpkin tent or what conspiratorial claims make up their worldview, that’s by design. It’s people who believe the vote was rigged and the election was stolen. It’s people who think Antifa stormed the Capitol. But it’s also people who see Cultural Marxism lurking in a offhand use of the phrase “speaking truth to power.” It’s people who are obsessed with George Soros and it’s people who have common, if disturbing beliefs about Christ’s imminent Second Coming. It’s pizzagate and birthers. And, of course, it’s Qanon. That no one believes in all of it and that some of the constituent beliefs are contradictory is the point. Trumpism is how these disparate, fractious, and contradictory positions become a unifying feeling about the world and, thus, come to obtain an articulated, actionable cohesion that they would otherwise lack. Trumpism is the structure of feeling that knits these disparate elements into a political force.

It’s hard to come away with much hope from any of this. As Rosenberg concludes, it’s entirely likely Trump, by remaking the GOP in his image (“precisely what makes Trumpism Trump ism”), has doomed the party to a certain degree of failure. It’s also a truly terrible thing for American government, politics, and society that one of two political parties is doing everything in their power to establish ethno-religious minority rule.

And then there’s the question of how, exactly, do we even begin to communicate, let alone convince via the difficult work of politics, a growing plurality of countrymen who simply refuse to accept reality.

I try, especially as I’ve aged and my views of the world softened a little, not to ascribe facets of American life to being uniquely American — conspiracy theories are a global phenomenon, there are hateful bigots in every corner of the earth, just as there are many, many, many more kind and generous souls everywhere. I try to remember there’s very little that’s truly new in any given age — “The Paranoid Style in American Politics,” which shares many of Roth’s and Rosenberg’s observations with the added looming threat of nuclear holocaust, was written in 1964 after all.

There are, though, unique challenges today, primarily epistemological and driven by our fractured media and culture. The United States, of course, has is own unique history that as often as not we still need reckon with to overcome. And the kooks keep marching.