I have bad news for the progressives currently beguiled by Liz Cheney’s deft skewering of her erstwhile Republican colleagues: She is not going to love you back.
Cheney’s new book, “Oath and Honor: A Memoir and a Warning,” has become an immediate bestseller based on its promise to bring even more receipts to the Trump indictment party. (And she does have receipts.) Her message to anyone who has ever knitted a “pussy hat” hits right in the feels: Donald Trump is a “grave threat” to American democracy, a man “willing to torch the constitution,” and thus “[h]e has to be defeated, and people can’t be bystanders.”
Ironically, her last book had an equally dire warning — about Democrats post-Barack Obama.
Ironically, her last book had an equally dire warning — about Democrats post-Barack Obama. “Our next president must be committed to restoring America’s power and strength,” she and her father, former Vice President Dick Cheney, wrote in “Exceptional: Why the World Needs a Powerful America.” “Our security and the survival of freedom depend on it.” It’s almost as if they were calling for our next president to make America great again.
Others have illustrated the straight line that connects the rabid anti-Obama xenophobia and racism of the tea party movement — a movement Cheney embraced — and the mob that forced its way into the Capitol on Jan. 6. That ideological genealogy doesn’t make Cheney responsible for Jan. 6. Nor does it mean we shouldn’t take her current warnings less seriously. But it should temper the applause she gets in 2023 for making the same observations that plenty of people made in 2015. Democrats should be wary of investing this much political capital in a politician who is all but telling them about her intention to eventually betray them.
Cheney’s political transformation isn’t, in fact, very transformative. It’s one thing to have the scales fall from one’s eyes completely — to stumble…
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