The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

R.I.P., Republican Establishment

Posted on | August 16, 2022 | Comments Off on R.I.P., Republican Establishment

Cause of death? Trump Derangement Syndrome:

By later this evening, Liz Cheney will lose her Wyoming Congressional seat and, in the eyes of the Beltway pundit and media class, ascend to a heroic political martyrdom for the ages.
For the partisan press, it’s an alluring story: nearly alone in her party, Cheney was willing to become the outspoken and enthusiastic tip of the spear against the spectre of Donald Trump, even as she is rejected by Republican voters. Hers has been the most prominent face on the farcical January 6th Commission, lending it the kind of faux-solemn legitimacy it was impossible to stage with hyperventilating Democrats or the tearful Adam Kinzinger.
Liz Cheney’s martyrdom is catnip for a dwindling number of Republicans who, unable to recognize what time it is, prioritize performative virtue in politics. These people — nearly all suburban, moderate, establishment Republicans employed as conservative columnists — seek their reflection in the politicians they support, because their heroes’ supposedly superior virtue reflects back on them. . . .

Read the whole thing. His point about Republicans who are “unable to recognize what time it is” relates to what Ace of Spades often says about the #NeverTrump crowd acting under the apparent delusion that it’s still 2003, that the shallow patriotic buncombe of Bushism could still muster a “center-right” majority, as if nothing had happened in the past 15 years that might render their core political assumptions invalid.

Let us give some credit to the “New Right” types — including the more zany extremists among them — for at least recognizing that the demographic trend required a reorganization of the forces opposed to liberalism. The beliefs and rhetoric which had commanded landslide majorities in the 1980s simply were not working, as a political platform, by the second decade of the 21st century. Something different had to be done to bring into the Republican coalition those alienated lower-income white voters who identified the GOP as the “rich man’s party,” indifferent to the social and economic realities of life outside the college-educated middle-class suburban world that the political elite think of as The American Dream. And, everyone must admit, Trump was different.

How strange it was that Liz Cheney, allegedly representing Wyoming in Congress, should be anti-Trump, when no state in the Union gave a greater share of its vote to Trump in 2020 than Wyoming, where Trump came within a statistical eyelash of getting 70% of the vote. In essence, Liz Cheney has been waging war on her own state’s voters.

She will lose tonight, and lose badly — her primary challenger Harriet Hageman might pile up a 30-point margin tonight — and yet Cheney will learn nothing from her defeat. She actively hates the people of Wyoming, just like she hates each and every one of the 74 million Americans who voted for Trump. Hatred is always irrational, and in surrendering to this hatred, Cheney has become utterly mad, just like all the other kooks (e.g., David French) who joined her on the USS Never Trump cruise.

Bon voyage, Liz Cheney.

UPDATE: Welcome, Instapundit readers!




 

Category: Wyoming

Comments

Comments are closed.