Establishment Republicans love to blame Donald Trump for their losses, but they are their own problem
By: Rachel Marsden
Anti-Trump crusader Liz Cheney didn’t lose her state primaries because of the former president
Rep. Liz Cheney – the daughter of former US Vice-President Dick Cheney, of the
President George W. Bush era – had publicly positioned herself as chief
co-prosecutor of former President Donald Trump in the congressional hearings
into the events around the storming of the Capitol on January 6, 2021. But that
isn’t why she lost this week’s Republican primary in the state of Wyoming and
the chance to run for re-election.
The Western mainstream media is portraying Cheney’s loss of her congressional
seat this week as the result of her firm stance against Trump and his behavior
in egging on his supporters as they sought to interrupt the process by which the
2020 election would be certified by US lawmakers.
But Cheney didn’t lose just because she’s a prominent Trump critic. She lost
because she routinely defends and proudly represents a broken establishment that
voters in America’s heartland are increasingly rejecting.
Just ahead of Cheney’s highly anticipated loss, Meghan McCain – the daughter of
neoconservative war hawk and late Senator John McCain – Tweeted: “Liz Cheney has
guts, is an original and goes against the grain and MAGA kool aid drinking group
think that’s a cancer in GOP leadership.” Reducing Cheney’s 66% to 29% defeat by
Harriet Hageman – a lifelong Wyoming local and lawyer who has represented
ranchers and the energy industry – to the mere fact that Trump had endorsed her
opponent, is an insult to Wyoming’s voters. McCain’s framing also conveniently
allows for both the Washington and Republican establishments – of which the
McCains and the Cheney’s are essentially royalty – to avoid addressing the
inconvenient, underlying reasons for the loss.
One of Cheney’s biggest problems is that, like the McCains, she’s a
neoconservative who has consistently advocated in favor of greater American
interventionism and belligerence around the globe – from Ukraine to Iran and
beyond. She wants to dump ever more weapons into Ukraine, apparently oblivious
to the potential blowback from this recklessness. She even co-authored an
opinion piece for the Washington Post with Massachusetts Congressman Jake
Auchincloss, in which she wrote that Ukrainians “are not just fighting for their
own freedom. They are fighting for ours, too.” Ah, the classic neocon trope –
that America has to meddle everywhere around the world in the interests of
“freedom”! Funny how that “freedom” is only ever needed in places that either
have lots of natural resources or else just happen to be at or near somewhere
that Washington wants to regime change.
Wyoming Republicans are the kind of “live and let live” sort of people who are
strongly against the government running much more than a lemonade stand. A
whopping 70% voted for Trump in the 2020 presidential election while just 27%
chose Joe Biden. It’s no coincidence that Trump has the backing of Wyomingites
when he was not only the first modern president to not start a new foreign war
while in office, but also worked at reducing big government.
Trump’s election in 2016 was the result of general exasperation with the corrupt
establishment running the country, and that exasperation persists, particularly
on the Republican side of the aisle. Although Trump no longer serves as an
electoral vehicle for voters to channel those frustrations, results like
Cheney’s defeat are nonetheless symptomatic of a persistent desire for systemic
reform. It’s the proverbial tip of the iceberg that occasionally breaks through.
The Republican Party base is no longer what it was back in the days when
right-wing voters elected Republican candidates with Washington establishment
pedigrees. Cheney represents that old guard. Her tone deafness to that fact on
the campaign trail included dragging her 81-year old father to whistle stops,
who’s synonymous with establishment special interests in sectors ranging from
energy to defense, which were routinely evoked during his vice-presidential
tenure as alleged pretexts for his drive to war, having previously served as
Chairman of the oil company, Halliburton, and as the Secretary of Defense in the
George H.W. Bush administration.
Liz Cheney has arguably spent considerably more time in Washington than in
Wyoming. She cut her political teeth inside the Republican establishment,
serving in Bush Jr’s state department, and previously as an aid officer to the
CIA-linked USAID program in Poland and Hungary in the wake of the Cold War.
While Cheney has also been vocal against cancel culture and high taxes, that’s
now the very basic minimum requirement to be considered for Republican candidacy
in this era of reckless fiscal spending and societal erosion. By no means should
passing such an elementary litmus test constitute a high bar for winning the
support of Republican voters or that of anyone else fed up with the corruption
of the American system and way of life.
Cheney proudly positions herself as a gatekeeper of that corrupt, broken system
and as one of its staunch defenders. She mistook it as a virtue, and the GOP
primary voters who sent her packing have just conveyed that they want her and
other establishment fixtures like her to get out of the way.
COPYRIGHT 2022 RACHELMARSDEN