Liz Cheney Is Toast And I Don't Mind
The Republican Party is Trump's to do with as he pleases. But it's still the same party it's been for as long as I can remember.
“Completely unscrupulous will to power and toadying fealty to Donald Trump are now mandatory preconditions for participating in conservative politics.”
Liz Cheney, the daughter of the warmongering former Vice President, Dick Cheney, has become persona non grata in the Republican Party after criticizing Trump’s election fraud claims and wagging her finger at the recent Capitol riots.
Cheney, you see, has forgotten the first rule of conservative politics in 2021: Never criticize Trump, no matter what. Even if your principles and integrity are forced to take a backseat (or hide in the trunk) a conservative’s first and only loyalty lies with Trump. Test that hypothesis and you get Liz Cheney, facing both an upcoming challenge from the right and a vote to strip her of leadership roles in the House.
Liz Cheney is toast. Cry me a river.
Writing at The Week, Ryan Cooper reminds us that despite Cheney’s distaste for Trump’s election lies and despite her public statements against the Capitol riots, this hardly makes her any kind of principled hero:
It's important to be clear up front that Cheney has had an exceptionally monstrous career thus far. Her domestic policy record is the usual Bush-era mix of social conservatism and total deference to the oligarch class, but her real passion is foreign policy. Just like her father, she is a bloodthirsty imperialist warmonger. After working in support of the Bush administration's wars of aggression inside the administration, she founded a think tank to advocate for an invasion of Iran, and was constantly on conservative media stoking frenzied bigotry against Muslims.
In office she has advocated relentless violence — indeed, one of her few quarrels with Trump' foreign policy was that he wasn't belligerent enough, despite him hugely ramping up drone strikes (and attendant civilian casualties) and his illegal assassination of a top Iranian official. She has also been a passionate defender of torture. A toll of 800,000-plus dead in America's bungling, pointless imperialist crusade in the Middle East is apparently not enough for her.
There is no love lost between the neoconservatives of the Bush/Iraq War-era and the Trump camp. Many of the most ardent supporters of Bush’s 2003 invasion of Iraq are part of the “never Trump” contingent who spent the last several years writing stern Op/Eds about the evils of Trumpism, all while blithely ignoring their own support for an arguably even more monstrous administration (at least in terms of foreign policy; the death toll of the COVID-19 pandemic overshadows all else).
Cheney herself has penned an Op/Ed urging the GOP to—in the immortal words of Sam Wilson—do better.
It invokes all the things the Republican Party once pretended to care about: the rule of law, a strong foreign policy, inspiring quotations from Ronald Reagan, “limited government.” The GOP pays lip service to these things still, but the pretense is increasingly paper thin.
I have to wonder: Does it even matter?
Republican politicians used to be a little bit better at the pretense. They tried to talk a big game about the constitution and balancing the budget, but whenever they took control these fictions were immediately exposed as little more than campaigning. Lower taxes for the rich, sure. Deregulation of the energy industry, most definitely. Balanced budgets? Not hardly.
But now all that plays second fiddle to the one true passion of the GOP: Donald Trump.
Whatever Trump says, Republicans believe (unless he talks tough on guns). If Trump had repackaged ObamaCare with only a few light, cosmetic changes and rebranded it as TrumpCare, his base would have embraced it with open arms. (Likewise, many of his fiercest critics would have rejected it out of hand). As far as Trump is concerned, inspiring Reagan quotations only serve to take attention from the one and only president who really matters. The very best president. All his friends say so.
Do we care that Liz Cheney is going down in flames now that her party has turned against her? Should we shed tears or lament the decline of the “moderate right?” Any movement too obsessed with purity standards and groupthink eats its own. The left should worry about this, also.
Cheney and her ilk are, if anything, even more dangerous than Trump. While Trump’s presidency certainly emboldened white supremacists, these groups hold very little real political power. I’m much more concerned by the wolves dressed in sheep’s clothing than I am by Trump, who wears his bullshit on his sleeve.
Trump and his supporters care more about identity politics than they do about expanding US interests in the third world. Trump’s foreign policy isn’t great by any means, but he’s no ideological hawk. He has no foreign policy beliefs whatsoever, because Trump only believes in Trump. His foreign policy is built around flattery and first impressions. It’s dangerous and absurd, but it’s not as dangerous as the “moderate” Republicans, and many Democrats, who behave well on stage and in front of a camera, but still lead us heedlessly into wars at the expense of blood and treasure and dignity.
"Trump is seeking to unravel critical elements of our constitutional structure that make democracy work—confidence in the result of elections and the rule of law. No other American president has ever done this," Cheney writes in her Op/Ed. "The Republican Party is at a turning point, and Republicans must decide whether we are going to choose truth and fidelity to the Constitution."
As though the Republican Party has been such a brave defender of the Constitution or truth in recent decades. As though 9/11 didn’t give the Bush Administration carte blanche to pursue a reckless, aggressive Middle-Eastern foreign policy that saw us embroiled in not one, but two wars of aggression. (And Obama followed suit in Libya). As though the Bush Administration didn’t lie and manipulate and coerce this nation into those wars, with bigger and more destructive lies than even Trump has told, or at least lies in the same truthy stratosphere. As though a sad old bastard railing about a stolen election comes even close to as horrific as the warmongering actions of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney. They're all awful. There's very little “conservative” about conservatism these days.
There is no choice here, no regardless of what Liz Cheney would have you believe. There never was. The neocons and the Trumpers may hate each other, but they’ve both set this macabre stage. The party that held the Constitution so near and dear to its heart, the party that Cheney claims to be a part of in her Op/Ed, is just a fiction. It doesn’t exist. The party of Donald J. Trump is not any different than the party of George W. Bush. It was never about principles. It was always about culture (and economics to a lesser extent).
Remember Sarah Palin? Rush Limbaugh? Remember the Tea Party? Do we really think that QAnon and the Capitol riots sprung out of nowhere? That these are infant phenomena rather than the natural outgrowth of years and years of rightwing TV and radio?
Liz Cheney is toast, but she needn’t worry. Her legacy—and her dad’s legacy—will live on in the GOP’s MAGA future. She just won’t be a part of it. Not because she isn’t a good fit for the GOP, but because she didn’t play ball. It’s not about principles, silly. It’s just politics.
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