The Trumptown Races

Liz Cheney and the Republican Party's Descent into Hell

In times likes these, when satire has been lapped so often by reality that it long ago wandered out of the arena in search of a quiet room and a good psychotherapist, many things have happened that I didn’t see coming. But if you had told me even two years ago, that I would be praising Liz Cheney for anything at all, it’s safe to say I would have looked askance at you.

It’s not just that she is Dick Cheney’s daughter. You can’t choose your parents, but Cheney junior holds most of her father’s opinions on foreign and domestic policy.  She supported the Iraq war, and indeed any war America has wanted to fight and even the ones it didn’t.

She approved of all the exceptionalist  ‘gloves off’ strategies of America’s age of terrorwars, whether it was extraordinary renditions, detention without torture or waterboarding.  She even criticised Obama for making the somewhat underwhelming acknowledgement that ‘we tortured some folks’.

So the apple doesn’t fall too far from the tree here.  Cheney refused to condemn the ‘Birtherist’ conspiracy theory about Barack Obama’s origins, and once suggested in 2009 that those who propagated this theory had a right to be enraged by a president who ‘is reluctant to defend the nation overseas.’  When a coalition of environmental campaigners succeeded in reinstating the Yellowstone grizzly bear as an endangered species in 2019, Cheney declared that ‘radical environmentalists’ were ‘destroying our Western way of life.’

In 2020 she called on the Department of Justice to investigate environmental activist groups including the well-respected Sierra Club, and suggested that such groups were being used by China and Russia to undermine American energy self-sufficiency.

As far as Trump was concerned, Cheney was mostly supportive. In Congress she voted in favour of Trump’s positions 92.9 percent of the time.  In 2019 she criticised Trump for not attacking Iran, after the Iranians had shot down an American surveillance drone.

In short, Cheney was – and no doubt still is – an unabashed neoconservative who you might expect to be out shooting moose from a helicopter with Sarah Palin with an AR-15 in her spare time or pontificating about the Muslim menace to civilisation with the likes of Frank Gaffney and David Horowitz.   If there ever was a progressive wing of the Republican party, she definitely didn’t belong to it. As a member of the Cheney dynasty, her political future in the party would, in normal circumstances, be all but guaranteed.

Yet on Tuesday she was heavily defeated in the Republican primary in Wyoming by pro-Trumper Harriet Hageman, a former friend, in what has been a defeat foretold for some time now, with her parents watching proudly as she gave her valedictory speech.

This extraordinary outcome is entirely due to her membership of the bipartisan Jan 6 Committee investigating the Trumpite assault on the Capitol last year.  Cheney’s resolute opposition to the attempted coup – and to the prospect of a Trump presidential bid in 2024 – has made her more popular with the Democrats than Republicans. 

Cheney has rightly been praised for her moral courage on this issue, because it does take courage to stand up to the Trump political machine, and she is one of the very few, and certainly one of the most influential, members of Congress to do this.   Cheney had already been ousted from her position as chair of the House Republican Conference last year for taking these positions.  The day before she was pushed out she delivered a speech in which she declared:

Every one of us who has sworn the oath must act to prevent the unraveling of our democracy. This is not about policy. This is not about partisanship. This is about our duty as Americans.  Remaining silent and ignoring the lie emboldens the liar. I will not participate in that. I will not sit back and watch in silence while others lead our party down a path that abandons the rule of law, and joins the former president’s crusade to undermine our democracy

These were brave and principled words,  and Cheney has paid a political price for them. With her defeat only two of the original ‘Impeachment ten’ lawmakers who voted to impeach Trump, remain in office.  The rest have been driven out of the party or retired.  To stand up to Trump now not only means that your political career is over as far as the GOP is concerned; it also means you are vilified, verbally attacked, and threatened with death.

Cheney spent thousands of dollars on private security protection ever since she voted to impeach Trump last year, and her campaign in the Wyoming primary was hampered by the fact that she was mostly unable to meet with voters because of security concerns.

All this has unfolded without a word of condemnation from the shower of corrupt, venal and snakebellied politicians and white nationalist fanatics who now dominate the Republican party. And whatever you or I may think of Cheney’s other views, her genuinely principled commitment to constitutional norms and the rule of law, reveals a great deal about the Republican party itself, and none of what it reveals is good.

Her defeat is further proof, if any was needed, that the Republican party is no longer a traditional conservative party, committed to the democratic process and law of the land and willing to concede political defeat in democratic elections.

The QAnon Party

It is now a full-blown MAGA party riddled with white supremacism, conspiracism, and culture war fallacies, that has tied its political destiny entirely to the cult of Trump and Trumpism, regardless of the consequences.  According to a PRRI report last year, 23 percent of Republicans believe the QAnon conspiracy that the US government and media are ‘controlled by a group of Satan-worshipping pedophiles who run a global sex trafficking operation’, while another 28 percent believe that ‘American patriots may have to resort to violence in order to save our country.’

A more recent poll found that 70 percent of Republicans still don’t believe that Joe Biden won the 2020 election.  Yet another found that 61 percent of Republicans regard the Jan 6 assault on the Capitol as a ‘legitimate protest.’

In short, the Republican party has moved so far to the right, and so far to Trump, that it no longer has room for the already very rightwing conservatism of Liz Cheney.  Instead it prefers politicians like the clowncar fascists Marjorie Taylor Greene, Lauren Boebert, and Matt Gaetz.  It chooses representatives like the Georgia senatorial candidate Herschel Walker, whose wife alleges that he once held a gun to her head.  

Walker is the kind of politician who makes Chance the gardiner look like an intellectual giant, whether pondering that evolution can’t be true because ‘why are there still apes?’ or attributing climate change to the fact that ‘Good air decided to float over to China’s bad air.’

Not many Republicans seem to care that Walker is an idiot, as long as he is a Republican idiot who supports Donald Trump.  Nor do they seem to be bothered by Arizona congressman Paul Gosar’s links to Nazis and white supremacists.

There are so many like this, from the same contemptible pedigree, and all of them worship or pretend to worship the Emperor of Mar-a-Lago.  Even the smarter ones, like Florida governor Ron DeSantis support the ‘Big Lie’ stolen election conspiracy. 

Some of them may be doing this because they actually believe it; others are undoubtedly playing along for political advantage, or simply because they lack the guts to do anything else.  And it’s precisely because there are so many politicians like this that Cheney has acquired a genuine moral authority and gravitas that once would have been unimaginable.

Even Harriet Hageman, the woman who defeated Cheney, once said that Trump was ‘racist and xenophobic.’ On Tuesday she thanked Trump for his ‘unwavering support.’

In a country of the wilfully blind, even one eye is better than none at all, and Hageman’s volte face is another symptom of the sickness that has deprived the Republican party of its heart, its conscience, and its brain, to the point when it regards democratic politics as a mere inconvenience and openly flirts with violence and insurrection, and supports a man who incited both.  

In this outrage machine, that spews conspiracies and culture wars to play to the worst instinct of its rabid base, the old tricks of the political trade are useless, and the old rules no longer apply.

To some extent the same thing has happened to the Tory party.  But in America the rot has gone much further, and the party’s flirtation with militias and the alt-right, coupled with its contempt for democratic norms and even truth itself, contains a potential for violent chaos that may burst out into the open even if Trump doesn’t decide to run again.

The hope, for the time being, is that the Republican party’s extremism and its blind loyalty to the beaten president does not reflect the views of the American public. Perhaps Biden’s recent run of successes may halt the extremist drift.  It’s even possible that Trump may be charged, and not beyond the bounds of possibility that he could up in jail.

In the meantime, the tiger that the Republican party has unleashed continues to devour those who stand in its way,  and some of the politicians who are now trying to ride the beast to power, may one day regret the fact that they kept their mouths shut, when Liz Cheney said out loud what many of them undoubtedly know to be true.