Republicans’ descent into cult of personality
(GOP) INCREASINGLY SMALL, PARANOID AND UNPRINCIPLED. — SEAN SPEER
It wasn’t that long ago that Dick Cheney represented the centre of gravity in Republican politics. His 35-year political career — including as chief of staff to President Gerald Ford, a stint as a Member of Congress, defence secretary for Ronald Reagan and vice-president under George W. Bush — basically tracks the party’s modern history prior to Donald Trump’s ascendancy.
At the same time that Trump was defeating establishmentarian presidential candidates like Marco Rubio, John Kasich and Jeb Bush, Cheney’s daughter, Liz Cheney, was following in her father’s footsteps by first getting elected in a Wyoming district in 2016 and then climbing to the third highest-ranking member of the House Republican caucus roughly two years later.
It’s since been widely speculated that Cheney’s ultimate goal is to become the first female Republican Speaker in U.S. history.
Yet that prospect is now fading and may be fully extinguished next week when the House Republican Conference meets and she’s expected to be ousted from her current leadership position.
Her transgression? It’s not an ethics violation or a series of high-profile policy disagreements or a case of overarching ideological infidelity. Cheney’s Republican colleagues are determined to get rid of her for one reason: she refuses to say that Trump’s 2020 defeat was the result of fraud and malfeasance.
In today’s Republican party this is an irredeemable offence. Uncompromising loyalty to Trump seems to be its only remaining animating principle.
The main proof point: Trump and congressional Republicans are coalescing around Elise Stefanik, a young Republican congresswoman from upstate New York, to replace Cheney in her leadership post even though she voted less reliably with the Trump Administration and her overall record is far less conservative than Cheney’s.
Yet Stefanik has come to distinguish herself in recent years by adopting Trump’s political mannerisms and persisting in the falsehood that the election was stolen. As the editors of National Review, the influential conservative magazine, wrote earlier this week: “It’s a sad commentary on the state of the House GOP that this has now become a condition of advancement.”
The best gloss on a Stefanik-for-cheney swap is that it holds out the potential for a new synthesis between the party’s traditional conservatism and its recent populism. Stefanik, whose district borders onto eastern Ontario, represents the types of working-class, deindustrialized communities which have become so core to contemporary Republican politics.
Her rise to the congressional leadership could, according to conservative writer Henry Olsen, “lead the GOP to a new consensus that reflects the totality of its current and potential voter base.”
But this mostly seems like an exercise in rationalizing the Republican party’s descent into a cult of personality. Although Trump may be banned from social media, he continues to loom large over its intra-party politics. Polling shows that he remains highly popular among self-identified Republicans and the presumptive front-runner if he chooses to run for the party’s presidential nomination in 2024.
That Republican minority leader Kevin Mccarthy and minority whip Steve Scalise have been more outspoken in their criticism of Cheney in recent days than they ever were with Trump is rather telling. Criticizing the former president for inciting a riot at the Capitol Building is apparently a greater offence than actually inciting a riot.
It’s sort of confounding how the Republican party has reached this point. Trump’s weird mix of celebrity culture and an “own the libs” ethos seems to be a powerful yet toxic combination in a political context of polarization and stasis. That the right sort of people loathe him seems to matter more than what he believes, says or does for a large swathe of the Republican electorate.
This is a far cry from the Republican party that Dick Cheney helped to shape in the late 20th century. It was a transformative time as the case for free market reforms took hold at the domestic level and the strategy of a harder line in the Cold War became broadly accepted in the geopolitical realm.
Republicans were largely responsible for these ideational developments. Former Democratic Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who was himself an intellectual heavyweight in this era, once referred to them as the “party of ideas.”
Today’s Republican party is failing to live up to this historical tradition. It’s increasingly small, paranoid and unprincipled — just like the man to whom it pledges allegiance.
This is not only bad news for its own, long-term electoral viability but also for the economic and social well-being of the country. America needs a serious and sensible conservative party now more than ever as the Biden Administration ramps up federal spending to unprecedented levels and begins to indulge the excesses of cultural progressivism.
Yet the Republicans cannot effectively confront the administration’s agenda until they begin to address their own institutional failings.
Their party is, as Cheney recently wrote in an op-ed for the Washington Post, at a turning point. They need to decide if they’re going to be a party of ideas or the party of Trump. Ousting Cheney for telling the truth may represent an irreversible slide in the latter direction.