It’s an iron law of American politics that if you wait long enough yesterday’s villain will become today’s hero. It applies almost exclusively to prominent conservative politicians. They spend most of their careers demonised by the media as avatars of a dark politics of hatred and selfishness. Then one day, when they’re retired or no longer relevant or, best of all, dead, they become models of a newly discovered nobility of an earlier age.
It happened to Ronald Reagan, the one-time idiot B-movie actor and warmonger, who became a genial ex-president, the subject of endless testaments to his gentility. It happened to George W Bush, the Toxic Texan, architect of the Iraq war, who paints passable still-life art and is treated to friendly chats on daytime TV with Michelle Obama.
The latest archangel of depravity to be redeemed in this way is Liz Cheney. In the distant past - oh, maybe a year ago - Cheney was a representative of the new right-wing politics in the Republican Party. The rising congresswoman from Wyoming boasted one of the most conservative records in Congress. Pro-death penalty and anti-abortion, fierce opponent of gun control, supporter of tough restrictions on immigration and of course, like her father, Dick, someone who never met an opportunity for a war on hapless foreigners she didn’t like. Her ascent in the House of Representatives was portrayed in the media as proof of the essential and incurable wickedness of conservatives. Picture Margaret Thatcher with an assault rifle and you have the general idea.
Then Cheney found herself in fierce opposition to Donald Trump. She denounced him for refusing to accept the results of last year’s presidential election. She condemned his supporters for marching on the Capitol in January and voted to impeach him. This earned her the status of pariah among Republicans and therefore that of hero to most of the media establishment.
On Wednesday her transfiguration was complete when she was ousted by her fellow Republican House members as the party’s third-ranking leader there. It can’t be long before the one-time hardliner is invited on TV to talk authoritarianism and Rocky Mountain barbecue recipes with Oprah.
It’s easy to be cynical about the beatification of Cheney. But for all the hypocrisy of a media class looking for the quickest way to unseat any opposition to the progressive ideology they promote, her defenestration highlights the deepening crisis at the heart of the Republican Party. It emphasises the extent to which the so-called leadership of the party remains hopelessly out of touch with, but in hock to, a populist tide it cannot control.
It would be wrong to portray this as a civil war. The removal of Cheney demonstrates that opposition to the Trump hegemony in the party is weak, scattered and easily extinguished. The bigger challenge for the party is not schism but the fact that the changes in politics over the past 20 years have left it ideologically and politically hollowed out, a rusting hulk ripe for takeover by a persuasive conman.
Of course Cheney was right to denounce the former president’s refusal to accept the election result. Grasping how this obvious assertion of basic constitutional norms has put her in so much trouble requires a deeper understanding of what created the Trump hegemony in the first place.
Cheney is a near-perfect example of how the Republican leadership failed to move with changing political realities. Even as her brand of staunch conservatism used to get her in bad odour with the media, it was also increasingly out of step with Republican voters.
It’s not just that her background, the daughter of a longstanding Republican congressman, cabinet member and vice-president, rendered her a product of an ancien regime. It is that her insistence on Republican orthodoxy left her increasingly out of step with the party’s frustrated voters.
Trump’s rise can be ascribed in large part to the two great disasters of the past 20 years: the Iraq war and the great recession triggered by the 2008 economic crisis, both manufactured by American, and especially Republican, leadership. The first was directly created by leaders such as Cheney. The other was facilitated by them; a devotion to free-market policies that enabled financial excess and then bailed out its perpetrators with taxpayers’ money.
All the while this leadership eagerly embraced the global free market, adopting a liberal attitude to immigration and smiling at the export of American jobs overseas.
After the Iraq disaster the party picked John McCain as its standard-bearer in 2008, perhaps the most eager cheerleader for the war available. In 2012, after the financial meltdown, it picked Mitt Romney, a private equity plutocrat who once told an interviewer that he “liked firing people”.
Yet the party’s Washington leadership, including Cheney, kept doubling down. In 2016, finally despairing of them, the party’s voters presented them with an authoritarian populist.
The irony, of course, is that Trump failed too. He may have improbably won an election but his narcissism squandered the presidency and the party’s legislative majority.
Now it’s come to this: decades of failure have weakened the party so much that it has fallen prey to the personality cult of a proven loser.
It will be a long road back and, however much the media may lionise her and her dwindling band of resisters, Liz Cheney won’t be the solution.
The Times
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