The GOP Cannot Save Itself

Liz Cheney's primary says a lot about the state of the Republican Party, but the story she's telling is misleading and simply untrue

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On Tuesday night, Wyoming representative Liz Cheney was summarily drummed out of office. The defeat was expected following Cheney’s leadership in the January 6th Commission and outspoken critiques of former president Donald Trump, but the results were no less surprising. Challenger Harriet Hageman, a Trump-loyalist who accused Cheney of “betraying” the country, bested her by nearly forty points. Defiant, Cheney took the podium to concede the race and promised “our work is far from over.”

Cheney’s address made it clear that her focus is shifting nationally. Using a new PAC, she’ll continue taking the fight to Trump while positioning herself as a redeemer figure in the GOP presidential primary leading into the 2024 election. What Cheney spoke to, both in her remarks and continually in her work for the commission, was a political party adrift and growing more radicalized with every news cycle. She referenced Abraham Lincoln’s record of losses, surely linking her plight to his and, with an eye toward history, casting a casual reference to the period surrounding the Civil War in which tensions and divisions could have destroyed the country were it not for the courage of convictions.

I want to make this clear: what Cheney has done is absolutely courageous. Her defeat was a result of pushing against a very strong tide within the GOP that has swept away many, many people who absolutely knew better, who knew Trump was toxic and dangerous, but decided their political fortunes were worth more than their souls. Cheney lost her seat, her standing in the party, and has put herself and her loved ones in danger, all to stay true to her principles.

History should remember her positively in that regard.

But to pretend as if Trump is an aberration, that any of his corruption is isolated, that his emergence as the head of the GOP was a momentary problem instead of a symptom of a much larger and consistently present issue, is to spin a fairytale that is, simultaneously, delusional and dangerous.

Simply put, the Republican Party cannot save itself.

It has reached a terminal point wherein its principles have been exposed as nonexistent and simply cudgels in the pursuit of power and enrichment and its entire body, from the bottom up, has been infected with a gangrenous rot of white supremacy, patriarchal anger, and conspiracy theories meant to facilitate authoritarian overreach.

Liz Cheney cannot save the GOP.

No one can.

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In an environment where democratic impulses are stymied intentionally and we are left to believe we are alone and powerless, we tell stories about how power functions and what it might do beyond our purview. This environment is one of mythological tales, of heroes and villains, of plots and counter-plots, that hides the very real and pressing issues of the moment. Within this sphere, Liz Cheney has emerged as an unlikely “hero,” one of the “reasonable Republicans” who gives hope to observers that the situation within the GOP might be bad - terrible, even - but there are still holdouts. This role includes other, like Mitt Romney and Susan Collins, but obfuscates that Romney licked Donald Trump’s boots and the faith placed in Collins to somehow save Roe V. Wade was wildly misplaced.

Cheney has grasped this mythology better than most. Her tenure on the January 6th Commission has been an incredible performance of narrative weaving as she has ceaselessly trained her focus on Trump and his cronies, creating a story that their crimes and activities brought the country to the brink, but that, fundamentally, the institutions and parties are fine once taken from their proximity to the criminal former-president. As I had warned about since the beginning of the hearings, there was almost no chance whatsoever that Cheney, or anyone else for that matter, would spend any of the hearings’ time on exposing the vast Right-Wing donor network that funded January 6th, organized it, or continue their assault on liberal democracy.

The story is effective because it plays on a desire by the American people to a. find a solution to the issue and b. make it as simple and as powerful as possible. Trump makes for an easy target because he is an aberration, at least in terms of presentation and presence within the system. The GOP would much prefer to move away from Trumpian antics and its accompanying lack of predictability or decorum. But Trump is not the problem, he was simply the actor who revealed a larger systemic rot in our institutions and political culture in totality.

Fully grasping this point requires a brief bit of reckoning with the recent past. In the lead-up to the January 20th, 2021 inauguration of President Joe Biden, our media and political culture was quick to note that Trump refused to appear at the ceremony while former presidents Barack Obama, Bill Clinton, and George W. Bush were there to mark the occasion. Perhaps no one has politically benefitted from Trump’s presidency more than Bush, a disastrous president who set off a worldwide war that cost upwards of a million lives, tanked the economy, empowered reactionary evangelicals, and oversaw the construction of a disturbingly powerful surveillance system that continues to threaten all of us.

And with him, of course, was Dick Cheney, Liz’s father, who recently recorded an ad calling Trump the greatest threat to the republic.

It should be noted that Dick played a massive role in the redistribution of trillions of dollars from the bottom up as part of the GOP’s push for neoliberalism and was present in one insane-making power-play and transgression after another. To trot him out as some kind of old, trusted hand in painting Trump as the problem with the party is such a repulsive idea that the mind reels in horror.

To live in this moment is to continually be faced with these notions that the Never-Trump Republicans are somehow blameless in creating the culture that birthed or aided him. Trump was not the first Republican to traffic in racist appeals or conspiracy theories or antidemocratic actions. Bush and Cheney couldn’t have enjoyed eight years in power had the GOP not effectively carried out a coup in 2000 with the help of the Supreme Court.

The GOP has preached it was a party of small government and fiscal and social conservatism, all while expanding governmental power into people’s lives and bedrooms, running up record deficits, and engaging in exactly the type of behavior they claim to condemn. And why? Because the Republican Party, as it has been constituted for decades now, is an entity explicitly concerned with one thing and one thing only: power.

It has relied on white supremacist paranoia, patriarchal anger, and antidemocratic leanings to forward the interests of a small group of cultural and economic elite. Their actual support is historically small, but relies on people who are Trump supporters for their numbers and base, always hoping their anger rages while they remain under party control. The process of shedding support in a rapidly changing world and glimpsing the possibilities for authoritarian control through Trump’s activities created a perfect opening for the true nature of the party to emerge.

There is no Trump without the authoritarian lurch of the party, and there is no authoritarian lurch without Bush, Cheney, and a whole host of others, many of whom are busy making millions by marketing themselves as Never-Trumpers and pretending that they played no role in creating this mess.

Ideologically, the GOP is spent. There are no professed principles anymore. They have become a rage manufacturer that represents the public relations front for their donors and the wealthy they depend on. Any of the principles that supposedly made up the party that Cheney, her father, and Bush and the media now mourn and call for a return to, were lies in the first place. What Trump did was expose them as hollow and eventually unnecessary.

Again, congratulations to Liz Cheney for her acts of courage. And to all of the Republicans who have critiqued Trump and paid their own prices. But the price was theirs to pay. They created this situation, they participated in it, cultivated it, and embodied it. Soaring rhetoric and fairytales about a “lost party” can’t do anything but hide the very real factors that led us here and delay the very necessary political death of a party well past its expiration date.

The only answer now is to defeat the GOP electorally until the brand itself is so toxic and dead-on-arrival that no one will ever want to put an R next to their names again. And, as that is done, we have to answer the very real problems that have led us here, that have eroded the foundations of the country and led to a moment of extreme exploitation and authoritarian energies. But the GOP can’t play a role in that answering.

It’s time for them, like Liz Cheney, her father, George W. Bush, and the other Republicans who led us here, to leave the stage.