Kevin McCarthy Will Take Us Back to the 1920s. Is That Good? https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a42419121/kevin-mccarthy-french-hill-house/

#WantTheirSerfsBack
#NeoLiberalism
#GOPInBedWithRich

"...Making the case for McCarthy, Hill drew on the history of Republican political economics, and what he said probably had the history department at Vanderbilt University, his alma mater, falling into what my mother used to call "HIGH-sterics." He decided to enlighten his colleagues with the story of the last time Republican infighting screwed up the election of a speaker (his comments begin at about the 6:25 mark).
...
OK so far: The election of Frederick Gillett was held up for nine ballots because of intra-party feuding dating back to a split between Roosevelt and Taft supporters from 11 years earlier. But then we move into the realms of Republican mythology from a dusty volume I never expected to hear quoted again.

When Fred Gillett was elected speaker on the ninth ballot in 1923, [he had a] more unified Republican conference, one that would go to work with President Calvin Coolidge, cut government spending, balance the budget, and cut taxes while paying down the debt. House Republicans 100 years ago unleashed a pro-growth agenda. House Republicans under Speaker Kevin McCarthy will unleash a pro-growth agenda to get this economy moving. That pro-growth agenda benefited families in the ‘20s. The McCarthy pro-growth agenda will benefit families across this country today. A century later, under Speaker Kevin McCarthy—mark my words—this party will come together to unleash American energy, make the Trump tax cuts permanent, rein run-away government spending and fight for a balanced budget. I stand before you today with unqualified support to nominate my friend, the next speaker of the House, Kevin McCarthy.
I admire loyalty, I truly do. But making a case for McCarthy by saying that he would return the country to the economic policies that led directly to the Great Depression is like hearing a Democrat make the case for Hakeem Jeffries through the politics of Stephen A. Douglas. And calling Coolidge's policies "pro-growth" and a benefit to "families"— unless you mean the Astors and the Rockefellers—is flatly bizarre.
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Between the two of them, the country got a preview of what would happen in the years after 1980, when the Republicans succumbed to the voodoo of supply-side economics. Coolidge's tax cuts increased wealth inequality and provided easy credit that was a landmine under millions of personal economies. Farmers suffered tremendously, and when the first tremors of the economic earthquake began to be felt, he fell back on his stiff-necked New England morality. He vetoed several farm relief bills and even shut down an early version of what would become the Tennessee Valley Authority. As Walter Lippman famously said of him, Coolidge's real political skill was his ability to do nothing:
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Mr. Coolidge’s inactivity is not merely the absence of activity. It is on the contrary a steady application to the task of neutralizing and thwarting political activity wherever there are signs of life.
Which brings us back to French Hill, who brought Silent Cal back into the discussion Thursday afternoon with his promise that McCarthy would bring back the Roaring Twenties. (No, I don't want to think about Lauren Boebert as a flapper.) The Republicans—and more than a few nervous Democrats—followed Reagan into the past of laissez-faire and they've never really returned. Which has resulted in the boom-and-bust economic cycle of the past 30 years and in the establishment of fraud as the basic business plan for American corporations, just as it was in the 1920s.

In the aftermath of this (in the pages of this very magazine!), Ernest Hemingway threw an elbow at F. Scott Fitzgerald in his 1936 story “The Snows of Kilimanjaro”:

The rich were dull and they drank too much, or they played too much backgammon. They were dull and they were repetitious. He remembered poor Scott Fitzgerald and his romantic awe of them and how he had started a story once that began, ‘The very rich are different from you and me.’ And how some one had said to Scott, Yes, they have more money. But that was not humorous to Scott. He thought they were a special glamorous race and when he found they weren't it wrecked him as much as any other thing that wrecked him.
The rich can also buy better politicians."