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It’s never been more fraught to be the “main character” in the United States. Below, I look at how this week’s debacle in the House of Representatives is illustrative of a larger cultural phenomenon. But first, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

GOP fantasy collides with reality. How to steal an election in advance Nothing defines America’s social divide like a college education.

Vacancy

Most of us grew up with the phrase main character as a synonym for a story’s protagonist—the person we root for. In recent years, this concept has been inverted.

Main-character syndrome, the defining personality trait of our time, is not a compliment. Consider the people who snap flirty selfies at somber locations such as Auschwitz. Or those TikTok “day in the life” videos, where something as simple as traveling to a sales conference and hitting the hotel breakfast bar is portrayed with the cinematic gravitas of the restaurant scene in Goodfellas. In 2023, a main character is often clueless and narcissistic, someone who views the world around them as a backdrop while they waltz through life.

Politics has long been full of these kinds of main characters, but the Trump era brought them into the mainstream. Representative Lauren Boebert recently flouting theater norms (understatement of the year) during a Beetlejuice performance? Main character. Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene doing well, anything? Main character. Main-character syndrome (also referred to as “main-character energy”) has spilled over into scores of congressional proceedings. Florida Representative Matt Gaetz is clearly the main character this week. Gaetz’s successful demolition of Speaker Kevin McCarthy was part of his larger demolition of the House of Representatives, which itself was part of … what, exactly? Why did this whole mess actually happen?

Gaetz appeared to be seeking the spotlight—though, notably, not setting himself up to take McCarthy’s job. Rather, he was seemingly punishing the speaker for what my colleague Ronald Brownstein called “the one sin that cannot be forgiven in the modern Republican Party”—working with Democrats. The irony is that Gaetz’s motion to vacate the chair succeeded only because of strong Democratic support. During yesterday’s proceeding, 210 Republicans opposed Gaetz’s motion. The vote passed because Gaetz and seven members of the GOP gambled, hoping they’d have enough Democrats to put them over the edge. Chaos ensued. Gaetz, Capitol Hill’s definitive new main character, got the headlines he craved.

In a recent episode of Washington Week With The Atlantic, our editor in chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, asked, “Why would anyone want to be the speaker of the House?” noting that the job sounds like “pure misery.” In some ways, the profoundly unappealing nature of the speaker gig calls to mind a timeless piece of internet wisdom: “Each day on twitter there is one main character. The goal is to never be it.” The new speaker, whenever they are elected, will likely face the same struggles that doomed McCarthy. After debasing himself to get the speaker job in the first place (remember those 15 rounds of votes?) and launching an impeachment inquiry against President Joe Biden, McCarthy proved his own main-character bona fides, making clear that he was someone who would do anything for approval. Weeks later, McCarthy’s story arc ended. As the Atlantic contributor Peter Wehner wrote, McCarthy is “a cautionary tale of what happens when people with soaring ambitions and no principles gain political power—and what they will do to keep that power.”

So what happens now? Some floated the idea of McCarthy merely running for the job again, but he assured reporters that won’t happen. As of this evening, two names have emerged: House Majority Leader Steve Scalise and Representative Jim Jordan of Ohio. The former is currently undergoing treatment for blood cancer, and the latter was accused of failing to intervene in a sexual-abuse scandal at the Ohio State University (which he has denied). Representative Kevin Hern of Oklahoma is a third possibility for the job, albeit a distant one. The interim speaker, Representative Patrick McHenry, has shown no interest in the full-time position. Though he did bask in his newfound authority to kick Nancy Pelosi out of her old Capitol office. He also handed down a comically dramatic gaveling. Honestly, watch the clip—it looks like he’s whacking the head of a plastic alligator at a boardwalk arcade.

And what of the future of the GOP? A hard-right faction led by Gaetz and propped up by the party’s inevitable presidential nominee, Donald Trump, wields extreme influence. But given that the House is the only branch of government where Republicans currently enjoy a majority, a lack of action in the chamber over the next year will still reflect poorly on the party and hurt the GOP in the 2024 election.

The next speaker will receive most of the blame, warranted or not, for Capitol Hill’s woes. McCarthy now goes down in history as the only speaker to be removed, after having served the shortest tenure since Michael C. Kerr in the late 19th century. As Representative Gerry Connolly of Virginia told my colleague Russell Berman of McCarthy, “From day one, he knew and everyone knew that he was living on borrowed time.” Time has officially run out.

Gaetz, meanwhile, seems content to simply live out his best main-character life as all of this goes down. In a 2018 interview with BuzzFeed News, the reporter Alexis Levinson asked Gaetz if he was worried that he might be “gaining notoriety, rather than star power.”

“What’s the difference?” Gaetz responded.

It was the sort of memorable quip that only a true main character could deliver.

Related:

The only sin that Republicans can’t forgive Kevin McCarthy got what he deserved.

Today’s News

More than 75,000 Kaiser employees have begun a three-day strike in what union leaders say could be the largest strike of health-care workers in recent history. The U.S. will transfer weapons originally seized from Iran over to Ukraine to alleviate equipment shortages. The Biden administration forgave an additional $9 billion in student-loan debt for 125,000 borrowers.

Dispatches

Up for Debate: Conor Friedersdorf gathers readers’ thoughts on whether Democrats should stick with Joe Biden or replace him with a younger nominee.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

Evening Read

Illustration by Joanne Imperio / The Atlantic. Source: Getty.

The 24-Year-Old Who Outsold Oprah This Week

By Caroline Mimbs Nyce

This past Sunday, Keila Shaheen woke up to find that, once again, she was the best-selling author across all of Amazon. To get there, she’d outsold every other book on the platform—including Walter Isaacson’s buzzy biography of Elon Musk and the Fox News host Mark Levin’s screed The Democrat Party Hates America. She’d even beat out Oprah.

At just 24, she is a bona fide publishing juggernaut. And yet few outside of TikTok have even bothered to notice. That’s probably in part because her best-selling book isn’t actually a book at all in the traditional sense. It’s a self-published mental-health guide called The Shadow Work Journal, and its success has been fueled by a steady drumbeat of videos posted on TikTok. Inspired by the writings of the psychoanalyst Carl Jung, it offers readers prompts and activities for interrogating the unconscious, repressed part of themselves. By getting to know our “shadow,” the Jungian theory goes, we can better understand ourselves and our behavior.

Read the full article.

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Culture Break

Neon Rated

Read. “On a Clear Day,” a poem by Victoria Chang inspired by the gridlike paintings of Agnes Martin.

Watch. Kitty Green’s new movie, The Royal Hotel (in theaters Friday), follows two backpackers who do everything they can to avoid male aggression—but find it anyway.

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Katherine Hu contributed to this newsletter.

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