When U.S. Rep. Liz Cheney told an interviewer in the closing days of her reelection campaign that she believed her Republican Party was “very sick” and may not be able to recover in the near future, she probably knew she was about to lose.
And she did. After easily winning three straight elections to the House, the Wyoming Republican resoundingly lost this primary to Harriet Hageman, an attorney who raised and spent more campaign funds than Cheney but was endorsed by Donald Trump.
In another era, the daughter of former Vice President Dick Cheney would have had the conservative voting record, track record and eloquence that her party would have championed.
Instead, she spoke of today’s Party of Lincoln as one might wistfully lament a beloved relative who seems suddenly to have gone bonkers.
But, putting aside the extremists of QAnon and the Proud Boys, today’s mainstream Grand Old Party has not lost its way. It has changed its ways.
After decades of internal struggles between pragmatic moderates and staunch hard-liners, today’s GOP is not just conservative in the model of Ronald Reagan or Barry Goldwater. It’s MAGA populist, dominated by Trump and his “Make America Great Again” movement, a slogan borrowed from Reagan’s 1980 campaign slogan “Let’s Make America Great Again.”
Populism, put simply, is less a party than a political stance or sentiment rallying in support of “the people” against powerful “elites,” whether on the right or the left, MAGA or Black Lives Matter, Boogaloo Boys or antifa.
With Trump leading every Republican preference poll, it’s easy to see how Cheney became a pariah in her own party for turning against him, despite having voted with Trump 93% of the time — and with President Joe Biden less than 18% of the time.
She not only voted to impeach Trump but, unlike Hageman, also refused to support Trump’s reckless insistence that the 2020 election was rigged.
Worse in the eyes of today’s GOP faithful, she joined Illinois Rep. Adam Kinzinger as the only other Republican on the Jan. 6 House select committee to investigate the 2021 attack on the Capitol. Kinzinger decided not to run for reelection after Illinois’ Democratic lawmakers redrew his district.
By then, Cheney was stripped of her House leadership position, expelled by her state’s GOP and essentially rendered a nonperson in party circles for having the audacity to stand up for American democracy against Trump’s creeping autocracy, as revealed by testimony in the Jan. 6 committee hearings.
What next? Both parties are asking that question amid others, such as Democrats’ questions as to whether Biden should run again. His newly signed Inflation Reduction Act, along with falling gas prices, gives the party something to sell in this year’s midterm campaigns as Biden’s approvals wobble.
On the Republican side, polls that show half of Republican voters want to move on from Trump to alternatives have been upstaged by another surprise: The FBI’s search of his Florida estate for presidential documents, some of them classified, that he failed to return as promised to the National Archives.
What a gift, many say. It was just the sort of controversy around which Trump and his supporters could immediately lock arms, unify and claim “presidential harassment” and the like, putting aside whatever misgivings some might have about why Trump, once again, was defying norms and precedents observed by previous presidents.
Conservative friends advise me to back off my scolding of Republicans for the questionable choices they have made in defending Trump, since it will only make them lock arms even tighter. Maybe. But that’s their choice to make. I call things as I see them and I don’t see Trump’s big election lies as good for our nation’s future.
Sure, I’m confident that most Republicans don’t believe all the conspiracy-minded talk about Biden’s supposedly “stolen” election. I’ve been hearing election fraud charges all my life against both parties, although almost always from the losing side.
As long as one side can use such allegations for political leverage, I expect to hear more allegations. They all should be taken seriously and properly investigated and, if warranted, duly prosecuted. But at some point we have to declare a winner and move on to the business of governing.
That’s why I look forward to the return of Cheney and Kinzinger to America’s airwaves in September as the new season of the Jan. 6 committee hearings open. Somebody has to care about accountability or we all lose our way.
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Clarence Page, a member of the Tribune Editorial Board, blogs at bancodeprofissionais.com/pagespage.
Twitter @cptime
