Liz Cheney's Republican problem. And ours.
It's not her father's party anymore. It's a party out of bounds
Wyoming’s Republican voters have spoken. Liz Cheney is out.
Liz Cheney has also spoken. She says she’s just getting started
My question is: started doing what? Cheney seems to believe that if she can only purge Donald Trump from the Republican Party, it will spring back to the party she grew up in as the daughter of Dick Cheney. But it won’t. Trump’s Republican Party has been deformed past the limits of recovery. Trump has welcomed and activated a militant base of support that pushes the identity of the party past conservatism toward outright fascism. As strong and smart as Liz Cheney has shown herself to be, she won’t undo that.
The problem with Trump was never just Trump. It was also the cadré of operatives and ideologues who fell in behind him—the Steve Bannons, Roger Stones, Alex Joneses, Mike Flynns, etc. Beyond them, it was the The Christian nationalists, the militias, the crackpot lawyers, and the trolling class of politicians who define their job not as governing but as owning the libs. But beneath all of that, the biggest problem with Trump has always been his base. And that base now defines the Republican Party.
Trump connected deeply with a fearful, resentful group of voters who were eager for a champion to smite their enemies. His promise to them was to hold back the tides of demographic and cultural change. Remove Trump and that entire structure remains—the operatives, the ideologues, and the voters. They won’t dissipate. They will simply gravitate to someone else who offers to satisfy their desire for ruthless, divisive leadership.
In short, the problem with Trump isn’t Trump. It’s the Republican voter. And Liz Cheney no longer speaks to the Republican voter.
There’s an ironic symmetry that limits Cheney’s future options. Democrats have a gazillion reasons to oppose Liz Cheney and only one reason—a ginormous one—to applaud her. Republicans, on the other hand, have precisely the same gazillion reasons to applaud Liz Cheney and the same ginormous reason to despise her.
What are the gazillion reasons? They are all matters of policy: Cheney is a fierce advocate for nearly every right-wing priority and a steadfast opponent of nearly every item on the progressive agenda. Major House bills she opposed this session include all of Biden’s proposals: including the Inflation Reduction Act, the Assault Weapons Ban, the Bipartisan Infrastructure Act, the American Rescue Plan (COVID relief), the D.R.E.A.M Act, and the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act.
Let that last one sink in. Liz Cheney, self-proclaimed champion of democracy, voted against the Voting Rights Act.
As for that one ginormous reason that sparks Democrats’ admiration and Republicans’ dismissal of Cheney, I welcome it, but I wonder where it leads. Her courageous and steadfast opposition to Trump’s Big Lie and failed coup as co-chair of the House January 6th Committee has given her a national prominence. But not inside her party. Her vote to impeach Trump led to her ouster from GOP House leadership last year and her defeat for reelection this year. So, what’s next for her?
Cheney has the resources to continue her quest. She raised upwards of $14 million in her primary campaign and spent very little of it. She clearly was looking ahead.
In the 2024 campaign, she will continue to harass and bloody Trump. She may even get to do it in person on the GOP primary debate stage, although it’s a safe bet that the GOP establishment will do anything they can to prevent that. The blows Cheney lands against Trump won’t keep him from the nomination, but they will damage him further in the general election.
GOP rot is not limited to Donald J. Trump. A fish may stink from the head, but cut off that head and the fish still stinks.
Charles M Blow, in his New York Times column was clear about what Trump provided to his voters:
Instead of running away from their bigotries, intolerances and oppression, they would run headlong into them. They would unapologetically embrace them.
This, to many Republicans, felt good. They no longer needed to hide. They could live their truths, no matter how reprehensible. They could come out of the closet, wrapped in their cruelty.
If Trump can’t provide it, they will seek it elsewhere.
It would seem that Cheney knows how deep the rot goes in her party. She touched on it in her concession speech:
“Today, as we meet here, there are Republican candidates for governor who deny the outcome of the 2020 election, and who may refuse to certify future elections if they oppose the results. We have candidates for secretary of state who may refuse to report the actual results of the popular vote in future elections. And we have candidates for Congress, including here in Wyoming, who refuse to acknowledge Joe Biden won the 2020 election, and suggest that states decertify the result.”
But what she hasn’t acknowledged yet is that Republican leaders take those positions because Republican voters insist on them. That’s why, in Wyoming, they turned from Cheney to this woman:
That’s the red meat that the voters Red-state America are eager to scarf down from anyone who will feed it to them.
Cheney, to her credit, has made it clear she will not stoop to that level baseless defamation. She will not, like so many contemporary Republican politicians, reach into the grab bag of sanctioned smears—groomer, antifa, trafficker, communist, socialist, woke, etc.
America’s divisions were decades, even centuries building. They have never disappeared. They probably never will. But at times they recede. At other times they are resurface. This is one of those times when the divisions are fully exposed. A time when talk of civil war roils social media and the GOP propaganda mills. Ours, is an era in which no Republican will be rewarded by their voters for offering reconciliation. On the contrary, they are rewarded only for militancy.
Never lose sight of the fact that these militant Republicans comprise a minority of no more than 25 to 30 percent of our population. Their current strategy is to use every bit of leverage they can muster to perpetuate dominance by the minority over the majority. To the extent that Liz Cheney opposes that strategy, she is also ensuring her future irrelevance as a Republican.