America’s challenges are complex and serious. Too many of our leaders aren’t.

U.S. Rep. Nancy Mace is trending on Twitter (or whatever we call it now) as I write this column. Her antics, including wearing a white T-shirt emblazoned with a scarlet A, got the South Carolina Republican what she wanted: fame.

The desire to achieve self-serving fame seems to be the primary motivation of a lot of people in government these days.

Any republic is going to attract some officeholders who are in it for themselves. Even now, though, those deeply self-interested actors are a minority — many people in both houses of Congress want to serve their country and make it a better place.

But the fringe cases, the nihilists, the would-be cable news stars — they take up all the air in the room. Lately, that has included the choice of eight Republicans — including Mace and led by Florida’s Matt Gaetz — who joined with Democrats in bringing down House Speaker Kevin McCarthy from the post to which he was elected just 10 months ago.

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Gaetz has been a bomb-thrower from day one, but Mace’s participation in that palace coup was especially inexplicable. She had voted for McCarthy steadfastly in the long process leading to his election as speaker in January, and McCarthy’s PAC had helped fund her reelection.

Yet the lure of fame proved shinier and more attractive than the steady work of learning the job, working her way up into leadership, and effecting positive change for the country. She isn’t the only one, and it’s not the first time that a House member voted against her own party’s nominee for speaker. In fact, every election for speaker since 2011 has featured rebellions by members of one or both parties.

Those defections were performative, and the margins were not close enough for it to matter. In this closely divided House, though, Gaetz’s small, blow-it-up caucus held the deciding votes.

After getting some well-deserved pushback, Mace adopted the pose of a martyr and donned that T-shirt with the red A. (What does she think the A stands for in The Scarlet Letter?) The color scheme evoked the spectacle of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s “Tax the Rich” dress at the 2021 Met Gala. While the message was even more convoluted, the effect was the same, though: bombastic, extreme, and everyone was talking about it. The performance was the point.

Yuval Levin wrote in his 2020 book, A Time to Build, about the difference between institutions being formative and being performative. The former is a place that helps shape members’ characters and help them better themselves while striving toward a higher good. The latter is a place for people “to be themselves and to display themselves before a wider world.”

When institutions become purely performative, people lose trust in them. “They aren’t really asking for our confidence,” Levin writes, “just for our attention.”

Meanwhile, the world burns.

The past few years truly proved the point that the world is a dangerous, war-torn place that needs serious leadership from a serious America. After the recent terrorist massacres in Israel, the country’s legislature formed a unity government, bringing together all sides to work toward defeating a genocidal enemy.

America is not under such a dire threat, but it is profoundly telling that we cannot even bring the majority party together. Indeed, the new intifada only shows further cracks in our society as the Democratic Socialists of America — an institution that includes several members of Congress — took the occasion to rally in defense of the Palestinian “resistance” — a move mainstream New York Democrats like Gov. Kathy Hochul called “abhorrent and morally repugnant.”

It led Rep. Shri Thanedar, a Michigan Democrat, to renounce his Democratic Socialists of America membership. Four more members issued weak statements of condemnation, but remain affiliated with the group, so far without consequences.

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There is a reason such extremism is rising, even in Congress. Politicians live in the same world we all do, one where they think everyone must know your status, hear your opinions, and give you the dopamine hit that comes from those precious “likes.” Instead of real life, with all its complexity and consequences, many of them act like they’re in a live-action role-play, a real-life video game where extremism and recalcitrance are just as virtuous as reasonableness and compromise — but they grab more attention.

Gaetz and his gang refuse to countenance any compromise with Democrats. Radical Democrats can barely bring themselves to condemn Hamas. Mainstream members — and mainstream voters — of both parties are left to watch as the institution of Congress descends into farce.

America is not going to form a unity government like Israel has now. But the continuing dysfunction in the House may leave no other possible option than for the sane members of both parties to elect a moderate member with cross-party support as speaker, and leave the extremists out of it. A House run by a sensible moderate — like Pennsylvania’s Brian Fitzpatrick of Bucks County or Mary Peltola of Alaska — could at least function, and maybe even find some consensus on important issues.

This arrangement is unlikely to be permanent or to herald a great realignment of the parties. But it would place the House in the hands of serious members who came there to govern — not to perform for the cameras.

Oh, wait. Now Jim Jordan is trending.