Liz Cheney’s Political Epitaph
Don’t buy the weaponized cynicism of the sneering critics: She's done the right thing, and that’s what matters
I began writing this post on Monday night and completed final revisions on Tuesday evening, a few hours before results were announced in Wyoming’s Republican primary. So I’m running a bit of a risk in pre-writing Rep. Liz Cheney’s political epitaph. But then again, it’s a very small risk, given recent polls showing Cheney losing her re-election bid by more than 20 points.
I realize it’s also premature to call this an epitaph when Cheney will, at minimum, continue to hold Wyoming’s at-large House seat for the remainder of the year, and when she is also actively entertaining a run for the presidency in 2024. The trouble is that if Cheney loses her seat by 20 points in her home state, her chances of gaining traction in the Republican presidential primaries 18 months from now are close to nonexistent.
Cheney might be able to compete for a while as an anti-Trump spoiler, mopping up a few percentage points of support in various states, just as she could try a kamikaze campaign (maybe for the newly formed centrist Forward Party) to prevent a general-election victory by Donald Trump. But she isn’t going to win the presidency, and her days as a Republican office holder are clearly numbered.
Republican Shifts
My view of Cheney has changed quite a lot over the years, as my assessment of the Republican Party’s history has shifted in the light of events over the past decade.
I broke from the conservative movement and Republican Party in 2004 for several reasons, but the Iraq War was a big one. Dick Cheney, Liz’s father, was a leading champion of the invasion within the Bush administration for which he served as vice president—and she has definitely followed in his footsteps when it comes to foreign policy. That, along with her unmodulated opposition to same-sex marriage (despite her own sister’s lesbianism), led me to dismiss her for a long time as precisely the kind of Republican who turned me into a functional Democrat.
Things look somewhat different now, and not only because Cheney has publicly repudiated her previous position on gay marriage. I still disagree with her about a lot of foreign policy questions (though probably somewhat less so about Russia/Ukraine and China/Taiwan than I did about Iraq and the rest of the so-called War on Terror). But like so many liberals and anti-Trump conservatives, I’ve come to admire the strong public stand she’s taken against Trump since the horrifying events of January 6, 2021. It’s a stand for which she is in the process of paying the ultimate price in terms of her political career. I consider that highly admirable.1
Feeling admiration for Cheney places me firmly on one side of an incredibly destructive divide in our politics. On Cheney’s side are those who still believe it’s possible, important, and praiseworthy for public officials to place country and Constitution over party, and even over personal self-interest, when they collide. Until fairly recently, this view was widely affirmed by politicians of both parties as well as by plenty of ordinary Americans. Today it’s held by nearly all Democrats and a minority of Republicans.
On the other side are those who follow former President Trump in denigrating such noble aspirations as either foolish or fundamentally dishonest. Those aspirations are foolish if the politician actually believes living up to ideals is better than pursuing his own advantage or the advantage of his friends and partisan allies. The aspirations are dishonest if the politician realizes their illusory character but nonetheless praises and engages in such deeds anyway, as a way of gaining political advantage from dim-witted suckers like Liz Cheney and me.
The Politics of Sophistry
Trump may have done more than anyone in our politics to popularize the latter view, but he’s hardly the first person in history to weaponize cynicism. The ancient political philosophers were well aware of such claims. Plato’s dialogues, in particular, contain vivid depictions of characters, usually sophists, who mock earnest appeals to justice (while doing argumentative and rhetorical battle against Socrates’ sometimes rather extreme, unconditional moralism). Machiavelli revived and transformed the sophistical view, encouraging politicians to exhibit flexibility in doing good and evil as necessity demands.
The reason why the sophistical position recurs down through the ages is that it’s based on a true insight into the character of human nature as it’s revealed through politics. Politicians nearly always try to win public favor by wrapping their proposals in the exalted language of virtue, justice, and the common good. Some do so out of a genuine desire to do what they think is right. But all are also driven, at least in part, by baser, self-interested motives. No politician—and maybe even no human being—is ever motivated entirely by selflessness.
Recognition of this truth can easily be turned into cudgel against the high-minded, which is precisely what the dumbed-down demagogue-sophist Donald Trump excels at doing. You say you’re motivated by higher ideals, but you think appealing to them gives you a political advantage, which makes you a hypocrite. You’re just pretending to be devoted to a noble cause when you’re really trying to get ahead in an especially dishonest way. We’re both going low, but you fake going high in order to win power. And what could be lower than that?
Trump is a genuine master at this move, which he’s deployed against (among many others) the late Sen. John McCain; Judge Gonzalo Curiel; FBI Director James Comey; Special Counsel for the Department of Justice Robert Mueller; those leading the House’s Select Committee to Investigate the January 6 Attack on the U.S. Capitol (including Liz Cheney); and Merrick Garland, the current Attorney General, for executing a search warrant at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home. And he’s bound to continue and intensify such attacks on federal law enforcement if he ends up being indicted for any number of arguably criminal acts.
Right When It Counted
But of course the fact of mixed motives need not render all higher aspirations null and void. Whether Cheney thinks she will be rewarded in some way for her stand against Trump or is acting in complete indifference to the personal consequences of her deeds has no real bearing on judging the nobility of the act itself. If she’s right to break from her party’s consensus against investigating Trump’s incitement of the insurrection, she should be judged favorably, now and forevermore.
If Cheney’s party had come to its senses on Tuesday and decided to reward her for her stand, that would have been wonderful. Tossing her out of Congress, by contrast, is unjust, though she has also received considerable praise from other quarters. She can always take comfort in those commendations, hoping that public opinion will shift in her direction as the years and decades pass—just as she can wave away thoughts of an alternative future in which nobility gets driven out of American politics altogether, leaving her public reputation in tatters.
These different paths forward are terribly important for the country, but they don’t much matter in assessing the praiseworthiness of Liz Cheney’s stand. Just as the sky would remain blue in a world in which nearly everyone had been struck with colorblindness, so righteous acts maintain their nobility regardless of how many people are capable of recognizing it.
In breaking with her party’s dishonorable deference to Donald Trump, Cheney did the right thing when it counted. If only more people in positions of power had the clarity of vision and fortitude to do the same.
Which isn’t to say I’d cast a vote for her. I haven’t voted for a Republican in 20 years, so she’d need to be running against an uncommonly terrible Democrat in order to get me even to consider it.
Well, she lost by 40 points instead of 20, which makes your point all the more salient. Politico had a good piece up about how disciplined the Trump effort to take her out really was, so you know it really mattered to him that his version of reality prevailed.
But it wasn’t real. Liz Cheney’s stand was real. Moral courage is a virtue precisely because it is rare, not because it is common. Such courage is in a regular person is rare; in a politician, unheard of. So whatever is to be her fate, she gets to claim this win for all time.
I admire Cheney for her stance. She deserves all the praise she's getting, and none of the negativity. While I too would not vote for her as president, if she obtained that office I would not worry about our democracy. I hope she goes forward with a successful career after she leaves office. She deserves the praise of the American people, not condemnation.