I’m not gonna lie, the ongoing Republican meltdown over Kevin McCarthy’s abortive speakership has been extremely funny. The spectacle of an upward-facing bootlicker groveling for the support of some of the stupidest and lowest-ranking members of his caucus — then losing round after round to the Democratic minority leader — is simply primo content.

But you also can’t miss what this portends for the future. It isn’t like the clique of hard-right lawmakers that is currently grinding Congress to a halt is going to just step aside and let the federal government function normally once this little passion play is over. Other equally venal members who are siding with McCarthy for whatever reason (notably Marjorie Taylor-Greene), will find other occasions to cause as much chaos as possible as well. That is what happens when you build a governing coalition around people who hate both the concept of government itself and most of the people they have been entrusted to govern.

If you want to see where these politics can lead, cast your gaze on the only foreign country the modern Republican Party has any real affection for: Israel. The Jewish state has been turning sharply to the right for the last few decades — a process propelled by demographics and the ongoing self-brutalization, as Aime Césaire would have put it, of its ratcheting apartheid policies and the occupation of remaining Palestinian-held lands. The Trump and post-Trump years in particular have seen a trend of convergent degradation, as the Israeli and American rights look to each other for inspiration on ways to be as corrupt and destructive as possible.

As it happens, I was living in and reporting from Jerusalem during one of the early defining moments of the reactionary turn. It came in 2003, when, amid the wanton violence of the Second Intifada, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon announced the withdrawal of Israeli ground forces from and the dismantling of all Jewish settlements in Gaza—to be carried out as he completed a wall across the unilaterally-defined border with the Palestinian West Bank. Instead of hardening Israel’s existing borders and neutralizing the far right, Sharon’s gambits further radicalized the minority Jewish supremacist movement and spelled the end of the social democratic Labor Party, which had dominated Israeli politics since the founding of the state in 1948.

Two decades later, the result has been systematic dysfunction of a kind that has surprised even longtime critics of the Zionist state — and that the likes of Matt Gaetz or Lauren Boebert could only dream of: five different governments in the last four years. (Under Israel’s parliamentary system, the president is a powerless figurehead. The real power rests with the prime minister of the Israeli Knesset, who structurally is the equivalent to the U.S. Speaker of the House.)

The journalist Matti Friedman — no one’s idea of a progressive — recently described the political crisis like this:

Parts of the new state apparatus, including government ministers, believe themselves to be at war with other parts of the state, particularly the judiciary. The primary enemies of this new Israeli government are other Israelis.

Sound familiar? He adds:

There have been bad outcomes for the center and left before. Israeli liberals have known disappointment for years. This time feels different … It’s dismantling the ability of Israeli Jews, and possibly the Jewish world as a whole, to act together in our common interests. This is a graver threat to us than any Iranian weapon or any group of Palestinian terrorists.

The latest right-wing government, sworn in just after Hanukkah, is the most absurd and dangerous in Israeli history. It is led by Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s longest-serving former prime minister, who is currently under indictment for bribery, fraud, and breach of the public trust in three cases, including an alleged $500 million quid-pro-quo with a telecom company. Desperate to win back the prime ministership — likely in hopes of quashing his charges and/or permanently delaying his trial — Netanyahu turned to the only people willing to make common cause with him: religious hardliners and other assorted bigots eager to make their most fevered, trolly dreams into a reality.

Control over the Israeli police will be handed to Itamar Ben Gvir, the religious son of Iraqi Jewish immigrants who as a young man joined the youth movement of the violent Jewish supremacist Kach party founded by the extremist Rabbi Meir Kahane. (The Israeli government designated Kach as a terrorist group in 1994; it was on the U.S. list of terrorist groups from the early 2000s until last year.) Ben Gvir publicly praised Kahane’s memory just over six weeks ago. Ben Gvir’s new cabinet position has been tellingly renamed from “Minister of Internal Security” to “Minister of National Security” — “an act of rhetorical annexation,” as the left-leaning Israeli +972 Magazine put it, intended not only to “maintain the ongoing colonization of the West Bank and imprisonment of Gaza, but also to help ‘re-colonize’ Israel itself.”

More direct control over the West Bank will be given to the extreme right Religious Zionism party, headed by Netanyahu’s new finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich. Smotrich was accused by a former deputy chief of the Shin Bet security service of having planned a terror act to halt the Gaza disengagement in 2005. (The security official said Smotrich “wanted to blow up cars on the Ayalon highway, at rush hour,” and claimed he was caught with 185 gallons of gasoline he intended to use in the act. Smotrich denied the allegations.) Smotrich is, according to +972, a “supporter of the complete annexation of the West Bank without citizenship rights for Palestinians,” who has “also advocated, in the past, for separation between Jewish and Arab maternity wards, and recently labeled human rights organizations as ‘existential threats.’”

This is the man will oversee the agency that handles civil affairs in the West Bank and acts as the principal liaison with the Palestinian Authority. He also wrote an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal last month in which he promised “to bring the Jewish state closer to the American model.” Specifically, Smotrich cited Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission, a 2017 U.S. Supreme Court case that decided that a baker could refuse to make a wedding cake for a gay couple on religious grounds. (The Religious Zionism Party said after the election that Israeli hotels and doctors should be allowed to refuse services for similar reasons.)

And we aren’t done yet! Avi Maoz, the sole Knesset member of the ultraconservative Naom Party — a Religious Zionist faction whose only real policy plank is to deny rights and protections to LBGTQ people — will head a new “National Jewish Identity” authority with powers over school activities. The far-right religious party United Torah Judaism, another member of the coalition, has proposed “tougher laws to enforce Sabbath observance, more segregation of men and women on public beaches, and an end to government support for any form of liberal Judaism.”

All this while Netanyahu’s new justice minister, Yariv Levin, tries to effectively dismantle the power of the Israeli court system — the one surviving Israeli institution that has shown any interest in even marginally protecting the rights of Arabs, women, and non-Orthodox Jews. With an eye, of course, toward preventing Netanyahu’s corruption trial, and allowing convicted criminals to continue to serve in government.

The thing is that none of this is a recipe for Netanyahu’s latest government to remain in power any longer than its recent predecessors. Frightening as it is, the new reactionary coalition is full of people who hate one another almost as much as they hate the people they’re about to oversee. Netanyahu himself is a product of the liberal Jewish diaspora his new allies so violently hate: he went to high school in suburban Philadelphia (the same high school my mom later attended, funnily enough), and attended a Reform congregation, Temple Judea. He is widely reported to be an atheist and has no problem with personally violating Shabbat. He began butting heads with the ultra-Orthodox members of his coalition almost as soon as it was announced.

Further, the new Netanyahu government — like the current Republican Party — is filled with people who spent their entire lives being inculcated with distrust of the state. And it is filled with people who were told that salvation from the secular state’s predations can only come in the form of doctrine as interpreted by an all-powerful and wise father figure (be they an extremist cult rabbi like Meir Kahane, or an extremist cult minister like Jerry Falwell.)

How’s that going to turn out for everyone involved? Well, how’s it turning out for Kevin McCarthy right now? Who wants to bet that a finance minister credibly accused of plotting to blow up cars on the main highway to Tel Aviv less than two decades ago isn’t likely to exhibit more of a sense of pragmatic compromise than the denizens of his “American model” across the sea?

Again, this is the problem when your sole governing ideals are destroying your enemies, dismantling the regulatory state, and committing as much graft as possible in the meantime: It’s hard to stay in power when you piss everyone off unless you just get rid of democracy. The better news in the United States is that, for the moment, the nihilist/authoritarian coalition party does not control the executive or even the upper chamber of Congress — little solace as that may be for the targets of U.S. drones or Palestinian victims of the I.D.F. But all can rest assured that the various members of the Israeli and American right-wing coalitions are watching each other and taking notes this week on what works, what doesn’t, and for whom.