Liz Cheney - as conservative a member of Congress as you are likely to find - is going to be bounced from her leadership position. As this reader notes, Trump has largely and mercifully receded from most people's minds. He's just...gone. Yet, for the Republican Party, he remains the essential figure, the center of gravity for the entire party.
This is the party, of course, whose platform in 2020 was simply "Trump is our living god!" Every opportunity to put this treasonous, grifting fucktwaddle in the rearview mirror has largely been put aside. Liz Cheney is not being heroic in opposing Trump's Big Lie that he won the election that he clearly lost. She is sticking to her principles that coups are bad and counting votes is good, which used to be a completely uncontroversial opinion in America. It's as if Cheney came out foursquare in support of puppies and the rest of the GOP disowned for for that.
Focusing on Cheney as a symbol of all that has gone wrong with the GOP does not - as some people on Twitter have suggested - mean lauding Cheney. I suppose I admire her decision to make a stand on principle, even though that principle should not require taking a stand that will cost her.
That the GOP can turn on and devour the daughter of a former Vice President and a stalwart conservative because she isn't sufficiently loyal to Trump is entirely a story about the degradation of the Republican Party. Its collapse into an authoritarian personality cult is largely complete.
When my Dad was still alive we would argue politics a LOT. I think back on those arguments and realize that more often than not, I was right (which I can say, because he can't argue back). Every bad thing I said the Republican Party was...it has shown itself to be. It is the snarling, ignorant viciousness of Donald Trump and Tucker Carlson. In his last months in 2017, he sort of admitted that my basic criticisms were right, and I have to think he would be appalled at what one of our parties has become. He would have been opposed to much of the direction of the Democratic Party on cultural issues, which he had the luxury of not having to care about, but I wonder where he would have landed.
There are likely a few people out there like my father, who can't find a home in either party. Ideally, they splinter off into a third party. My father voted for Gary Johnson in 2016. Johnson is a flake, but he's not a fascist. If George Soros really wanted to spin a conspiratorial web, he would be creating a viable Center Right party that would appeal to people like my Dad, not to win elections, but to splinter the Right and prevent the nightmare of a return to power of someone like Trump in 2024.
Back in 2016, I was asked if Trump could win, and I answered that he could, because he was the nominee of a major party, but that he was unlikely to. Like so many, I missed his appeal to Karl Rove's "Missing White Voters." Still, he was never able to win a plurality of support either in voting or in polling. In 2016, we assumed that the GOP establishment could force its voters to swallow Jeb Bush, but those voters rebelled and have discovered the splenetic power of having a standard bearer of pure, unadulterated hatred towards their enemies.
We are destined, due to our electoral system, to have two parties. We are not destined to have THESE two parties. It is critically important that the party that would purge Liz Cheney, of all people, because she will not bow down to a graven image, carved from margarine and dipped in fake gold, is not allowed to hold the levers of power until they get their shit together. Starting a spoiler third party is a necessary first step.
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