Among the various reassessments of Kevin McCarthy following his successful debt ceiling negotiations, the one with the widest implications belongs to Matthew Continetti, who writes in The Washington Free Beacon that “McCarthy’s superpower is his desire to be speaker. He likes and wants his job.”If you hadn’t followed American politics across the last few decades, this would seem like a peculiar statement: What kind of House speaker wouldn’t want the job? But part of what’s gone wrong with American institutions lately is the failure of important figures to regard their positions as ends unto themselves. On the Republican side, this tendency has taken several forms, from Newt Gingrich’s yearning to be a Great Man of History, to Ted Cruz’s ambitious grandstanding in the Obama years, to the emergence of Trump-era performance artists like Marjorie Taylor Greene. And the party’s congressional institutionalists, from dealmakers like John Boehner to policy mavens like Paul Ryan, have often been miserable-seeming prisoners of the talking heads, celebrity brands and would-be presidents.

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Persons: Kevin McCarthy, Matthew Continetti, hadn’t, wouldn’t, what’s, Yuval Levin, —, Newt Gingrich’s, Ted Cruz’s, Obama, Marjorie Taylor Greene, John Boehner, Paul Ryan Organizations: Washington Free, American Enterprise Institute, Republican, Trump Locations: Washington