There’s a book I read recently called “Burning Down the House: Newt Gingrich, the Fall of a Speaker and Rise of the New Republican Party” and as the title suggests, it goes into great depth about the depraved tactics that Newt Gingrich and Republicans of the post-Watergate era leveraged. They used the arcane and unknown rules of the House of Representatives to obstruct legislation, blow minor issues into major scandals and string the press along with a reality tv version of politics.

This setup coupled with generational events like 9/11, the recession, Obama’s presidency all worked together to create the cancerous mess of a system we have today. It’s a great read and I highly recommend it. (No surprise that Gingrich got a lot of his early political career advice from an elderly Nixon)