Everybody still hates Liz Cheney

Now, one of the more basic requirements for publishing a think piece about what this or that portion of American society thinks about X is, in theory, finding at least one legitimate member of the group you’re talking about who can attest to having the opinion you think they do. In practice, a casual glance at The New York Times on any given day will tell you that this is purely optional. There are only two ways any political reporter can suss out what the American electorate is thinking, and the first is to plant yourself down in an all-white Midwest diner during the late morning and interview whichever locals have enough time on their hands to be bleeding their day away picking over the remains of two eggs and four cups of coffee. The second is to just wing it, because who’s gonna know?

It feels like the single biggest reform we could make to modern journalism is to start a Rent-a-Liberal service so that top news organizations could have a liberal American delivered to them for sounding things out. Is Mitt Romney good now? Will you miss hamburgers when [scary non-Republican name] bans them? For a small fee we will arrange for a liberal American to show up at your desk and you can just ask them this crap directly rather than relying on Chris Cillizza to summarize what a House Republican who has clipped out a Charlie Sykes column thinks liberals are Currently Thinking, or however this game works now.

Though I’m a bit late to the party, let me offer up some informed wisdom: Nobody likes Liz Cheney. Based on extensive personal research, I can declare that at no point has anyone liked Liz Cheney during the entirety of her political career. She just showed up one day, declaring herself relevant, and carpetbagged her way to the easiest-to-win slot she could find at the time. Her political ideology consists of (1) supporting whatever evil acts her powerful political dad slithered through during his own career of dirty tricks and war-for-profit, and (2) the belief that Liz Cheney is better than you, and should be in charge of more things than you. None of this has been subtle, because members of the Cheney family would rather stick live lizards under their eyelids than make do with something subtle.

Liz Cheney is a neocon. A neoconservative. That’s her thing. The neoconservative vision for America is one of benevolent empire, in which we use our military to subjugate each portion of the world that doesn’t like us and establish new client states willing to hand over their resources at cheap prices and with a minimum of future fuss. Liz Cheney is part of a movement that had planned for decades how exactly this utopia could be brought about, only to see those plans crushed when America’s neoconservatives actually got to try it and, in the bloody aftermath, Republicanism quickly moved on to instead support isolationist, white nationalist Clownhead Fascism. Suddenly, Liz Cheney’s dream of running the whole Republican show began to get trampled by a House caucus newly enamored with Child Sex Trafficking Guy, Molestation Enabler Guy, and every last conspiracy crackpot state parties could scrape up and send to Washington.

To begin with, then, Liz Cheney has a more personal reason than most to want her party to abandon its cultish devotion to a television reality star who both mocked everything she spent her life building up and, even more notably, is not named Liz Cheney. There are political calculations afoot even here, to be sure. But:

The thing of it is, decrying propaganda-based fascism is the correct thing to do.

It’s not a liberal thing to do, or a moderate thing to do. It is literally the only available position for anyone who still believes that the United States should be a democracy, that elections should still matter, and that political leaders are not allowed to manufacture false propaganda for the purpose of nullifying those elections.

No matter how Liz Cheney got there or how much of it is based on personal revenge, she arrived at a point of basic courage that not one other powerful Republican has been able to muster. House Republicans, Senate Republicans, statehouse Republicans, the Republican National Committee: All of them have either explicitly promoted false hoaxes declaring the illegitimacy of an American election or, at best, have quietly mumbled about how we should all just put the resulting insurrection behind us and get on with, say, new restrictions on who should be voting next time around.

The number of supposedly “conservative” Republicans in positions of power who have been willing to all-out condemn the sabotage of American elections to appease the ego of an incompetent megalomaniac blowhard can be counted on one hand, and can still be counted on one hand by those who have been injured in some pretty serious farm accidents. That is precisely why we are in crisis.

This is the nuance that seems impossibly mysterious to a great many political pundits, which is extremely alarming but not terribly surprising. Whether anyone supports or does not support Liz Cheney’s ideologies is not part of the debate here. Liz Cheney is a person with horrific and dangerous policy ideas and seedy politics, and she is all-around loathsome. Liz Cheney also met a test that has left the rest of her party in collapse: She has mounted a direct, no-nonsense condemnation of Republican-promoted propaganda falsely claiming the outcome of the last election to have been crooked. A flat rejection of a Republican-backed, Trump-premised hoax that led to a violent insurrection and deaths only steps from where lawmakers stand to preach these things.

If the most terrible person you know does not shoot their neighbor in the head during a lawn care argument, that does not make them a new national hero. It just means they are a better person than those who could not manage to say the same. And we are now at the point where the Liz Cheneys of the party, the Republicans who were once closest to positions of power before orchestrated disinformation and crackpot fascist bile became the only remaining party plank, are the most decent people in the party simply because all of the rest of Republican leadership slid into something much, much worse. She is one of a handful of Republican lawmakers not directly supportive of a coup attempt.

If the Republican Party is going to survive as anything but the mechanism for a new era of terrorism, insurrection, and fascist dominance, it will require other Republicans to do what Liz Cheney did. They likely will not, either through cowardice or because they would rather be footsoldiers for dismantling democracy than ostracized for defending it. That does not mean Liz Cheney Is Good Now. Liz Cheney is a neoconservative, part of a Republican movement that itself weaponized disinformation to push the public into a falsely-premised and murderous war. But every other Republican is now something worse.

There aren’t going to be any monuments to Cheney when this is all over. She and her sneering-at-the-law allies will be remembered as the conservatives who mainstreamed many of the current movement’s fascist techniques into national offices. There is a direct line between Iraq War disinformation and the election version, one in which the party’s top leaders decided that if evidence was insufficient to achieve their desired outcome they would simply massage the evidence into a form that might.

But when push comes to shove, Liz Cheney is not a fascist. That is something Kevin McCarthy can’t say. Liz Cheney is not a child sex trafficker; that does not make her noble, it just makes her not an oozing pustule of corrupt perversion. Liz Cheney does not appear to have ever intentionally welcomed Russian intelligence disinformation in an effort to promote frauds against her political enemies; once again, we find she has passed over a bar some of her top colleagues could not reach.

It is perfectly possible for often-horrible people to do decent things. In prior eras, it was generally a given that they would at least try. During a time of crisis like this one, when not a damn member of her party can muster up a rejection of an unbearably dangerous hoax, it even counts as courage. We can all give credit for that. We should. That does not mean Liz Cheney, neoconservative torture advocate, will find herself surrounded by new “liberal” fans. It just means that she has more integrity than her lying, propagandizing, disinformation-spewing quisling colleagues.

Donald Trump is a traitor to his country. Those helping him fan violence for the sake of soothing his scraped ego have put party over country, yet again. Nobody has ever once liked Liz Cheney, but she answered the fascists’ question with the only possible answer. The torture apologist and war promoter, it turns out, still loves her country more than they do.