This is when purity tests overcome democratic ideals. Democracy is a process of debate and compromise. You likely never go home truly happy with everything because there’s no body of people that 100% agree on something, so you must compromise to make the system work.
Once you fill your representative seats with hardline ideologues you end up with people who begin purity testing every issue and candidate. If that candidate or issue doesn’t meet the representative’s ideals 100% of the way, they reject it. There’s no compromise nor debate, just rejection.
Having some ideologues in the House has always happened. The issue is that the GOP let too many in. They’ve spent decades telling their voters that they should get 100% of what they want and anything less is somehow a betrayal to the god and the nation. Once the ideologue percentage in the party exceeds to needed margin to hold the Speaker’s seat, you suddenly end up in purity test stasis. Nothing will satisfy the hardliners from both sides so you can’t get enough votes to move forward as a body.
How do you solve this? Mostly by finding the extreme edges of the party and trimming them off, then compromising with other reps who actually believe in a democratic system until you have a functional majority again. Good luck getting the modern GOP to bend because their voters don’t know how a republic should work, so they’re stuck being crushed by unbending anti-democratic voters on one side and anti-democratic ideologue representatives on the the other.
If they can’t bend, then they break. The only question is when and how much damage they do to the nation before they finally give out.
