[In sending incumbent Liz Cheney to her premature retirement in
Tuesday’s primary, Wyoming struck a blow against conservatism. Her
defeat is the latest demonstration that Trumpism now eclipses
conservatism as the reigning faith of the Republican party]
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LIZ CHENEY’S LOSS IS A DEFEAT FOR CONSERVATISM  
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Timothy Noah
August 16, 2022
The New Republic
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_ In sending incumbent Liz Cheney to her premature retirement in
Tuesday’s primary, Wyoming struck a blow against conservatism. Her
defeat is the latest demonstration that Trumpism now eclipses
conservatism as the reigning faith of the Republican party _

Rep. Liz Cheney after her defeat by a Trump-endorsed candidated in
the Wyoming primary on Tuesday., Photo credit: Cody Godwin / USA Today


 

Wyoming is a very conservative state. Forty-six percent of its adults
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as conservative, as opposed to moderate or liberal; only Mississippi
claims a higher percentage. But in sending incumbent Liz Cheney to
her premature retirement in Tuesday’s primary
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Wyoming struck a blow against conservatism.

Cheney’s defeat is just the latest demonstration that Trumpism now
eclipses conservatism as the reigning faith of the Republican party.
Compare the 46 percent of Wyoming’s adults who self-identify as
conservative to the 57 percent
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its adults who are Republican or lean Republican, according to Pew.
That makes Wyoming more Republican than conservative; indeed, it’s
the most Republican state in the union. More to the point, Wyoming is
in thrall to the cult of Donald Trump. Trump’s share of Wyoming’s
vote in 2020 was 69.9 percent
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more than 23 points higher than Trump’s national average and the
largest share of any state.

It’s become shorthand for reporters to gauge how conservative a
political candidate is by how slavishly devoted that person is to the
Trump line. I’ve probably done it myself once or twice. But the
Trump political scorecard is not a conservative one. Even before
Trump’s loyalty test became a professed belief that Trump won the
2020 election, Trumpery
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mishmash of nonideological vices: rank bigotry, xenophobia,
authoritarianism, greed, and a gleeful breaking of rules and ethical
norms large and small. Mix in nativism and trade protectionism, then
top off with positions with which Liz Cheney would never quarrel—the
standard GOP trinity of opposition to abortion, taxes, and regulation.
(Cheney’s National Taxpayers Union score, 72 percent
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points behind Speaker-in-Waiting Kevin McCarthy
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and her Planned Parenthood score is a respectably low 20 percent
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There is nothing remotely conservative
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in the classic limited-government sense, about denying women the
freedom to have abortions. There is nothing intrinsically conservative
about keeping taxes so low that they enlarge budget deficits, as
Republicans have for 40-odd years. Indeed, the late libertarian
economist William Niskanen, evaluating the “starve the beast
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to reduce government spending, concluded in a 2006 paper
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cutting taxes without cutting spending actually encouraged Congress to
spend more, because when you lower the cost of something, people will
buy more of it. You can even make a conservative case for regulation
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Still, these are the accepted ways by which we’ve defined
conservatism for the past half-century, and by these standards Liz
Cheney is _very _conservative. By the older standard of fiscal
responsibility, Liz Cheney is more conservative than her father, Dick
Cheney. As vice president, Cheney famously told then-Treasury
secretary Paul O’Neill that “deficits don’t matter
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Liz Cheney, by contrast, has said
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growing government debt will “endanger our economic and national
security.” Going back still further, there’s strong evidence that
a young Dick and Lynne Cheney conceived
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in order to dodge the Vietnam draft. Liz Cheney’s very existence
therefore constitutes at least a mild rebuke to her father’s lesser
steadfastness to conservative principle. I blush to confess
Cheney _père _brought a tear to my eye with his TV spot
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and Lynne were of their daughter for “doing what’s right … when
so many in our party are too scared to do so.” I can’t recall the
old man ever doing the same.

The candidate who beat Liz Cheney in the primary on Tuesday, Harriet
Hageman, previously recognized the distinction between conservatism
and Trumpism. In 2016, Hageman endorsed Cheney’s first congressional
bid and said
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“I know that Liz Cheney is a proven, courageous, constitutional
conservative.”

“There have been,” she continued, “and will continue to be
concerted efforts to force true conservatives to sit down and shut up.
Those efforts have never worked on me and I know that they will not
work on and have no effect on Liz Cheney.” At the time, Hageman was
convinced that Trump was (in her words) “racist and xenophobic,”
and tried that year to block
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nomination on the convention floor.

Six years later, those efforts to force true conservatives to sit down
and shut up have caught up with Hageman. Today she says Trump,
who endorsed
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a year ago, is “the greatest president of my lifetime.” Hageman
will be 60 in October, so her lifetime would include the presidency of
Ronald Reagan. I’m no great fan of the Gipper, but it seems to me
that anyone who prefers Trump to Reagan puts her conservative bona
fides in question.

Hageman’s website
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solidly behind Trump on support for voter suppression (“We must put
a stop to things such as blindly mailing ballots”), Russiagate
(“the Russia hoax”), and imposing restrictions on immigration
(“We are destroying our country’s sovereignty and squandering the
future for our children and grandchildren”). Reagan, by
contrast, signed reauthorization
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the Voting Rights Act in 1982, called Russia an “Evil Empire,” and
in 1986 signed an immigration bill that gave green cards
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2.7 million undocumented immigrants.

There can surely be nothing more conservative than a firm commitment
to preserving the integrity of United States elections. In a June
debate, Cheney taunted Hageman about her unwillingness to say whether
the 2020 election was stolen; Hageman wouldn’t answer, Cheney said,
“because she’s completely beholden to Donald Trump. And if she
says it wasn’t stolen, he will not support her.” Earlier this
month, Hageman made her surrender to Trump complete and said
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“Absolutely the election was rigged. It was rigged to make sure that
President Trump could not get reelected.” Never mind that Bill
Stepien, whose firm _ran Hageman’s campaign_
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January 6 select committee, of which Cheney was vice chairperson, that
after serving as Trump’s campaign chairman he stepped away because
he didn’t think Trump’s efforts to challenge the election results
were “honest or professional.”

We hear a lot these days that liberalism is under threat; in some
ways, I suppose it is. But in recent years, the political faith
that’s really gotten the stuffing knocked out of it is conservatism.
It didn’t begin with Trump, but Trump made matters significantly
worse by forcing Republicans to choose between defending the
traditional pillars of democratic governance and subverting these to
Trump’s will. Almost uniformly, Republicans bent the knee. Liz
Cheney did not. She made the honorable choice and took the
consequences. And though I still can’t stand her conservative
politics, I admire very deeply her adherence to principle. She is a
courageous person. Her party is in desperate need of more.

_[Timothy Noah is a New Republic staff writer and author of The
Great Divergence: America’s Growing Inequality Crisis and What We
Can Do About It
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@TimothyNoah1 [[link removed]]]_

* Liz Cheney
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* GOP
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* Donald Trump
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* Trumpism
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* MAGA
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* 2022 Elections
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* 2024 Elections
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* Republican Party
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* Jan. 06
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* Capitol coup
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* Insurrection
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* Capitol riot
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* US Rule of Law
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* Wyoming
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