Liz Cheney’s courage is a wake-up call to us all

David Aaronovitch

In defying Donald Trump’s lies the Republican congresswoman underlines the cowardice of all too many politicians.

On Tuesday a candidate addressed her supporters after being massacred at the polls. “Two years ago I won this primary with 73 per cent of the vote,” Wyoming congresswoman Liz Cheney told the crowd. “I could easily have done the same again. But it would’ve required that I go along with President Trump’s lie about the 2020 election [and] enable his ongoing efforts to unravel our democratic system and attack the foundations of our republic. That was a path I could not and would not take.”No one seriously disputes that Cheney’s ousting by registered Republicans owed everything to her defiance of Trump. Though she voted against impeaching him over his endeavour to use the president of Ukraine to help him in his battle with Joe Biden, his refusal to accept the result of the 2020 presidential election and his subsequent attempt to reverse it was too much for her. Which was why she agreed to be part of the congressional inquiry into the January 6 assault on the Capitol. Agreed whence almost all other Republicans had fled.

Democracies aren’t just regulated by laws but by behaviour. There is no statute in any democracy as far as I am aware requiring losing politicians to concede defeat to their rivals. But as Cheney observed while congratulating her opponent, the Trump-backed Harriet Hageman, “Our republic relies upon the goodwill of all candidates for office to accept honourably the outcome of elections.”

In 2000 Al Gore, though winning a narrow plurality of votes in the presidential election, lost by 271 electoral votes to 266, the result turning on an incredibly narrow result in Florida. There followed a series of legal battles over a recount in that state. But five weeks later Gore conceded the presidency “for the sake of our unity as a people and the strength of our democracy”.That is how democrats do it. In 2020, however, Trump received over seven million fewer votes than Biden and lost the election by 306 electoral college votes to 232. And he has never conceded. Instead he and his supporters constructed the fiction of a stolen election — a fiction that has led to violence and insurrection. And, terrifyingly, he now seems to have taken most of the Republican Party with him. As Cheney pointed out, because Trump-backed candidates in Republican primaries have won most of their contests, future elections in some states will be supervised and presided over by people who have never accepted the 2020 result.

The extreme plasticity of many office-seeking Republicans in the face of the Trump supremacy is well illustrated by Cheney’s victorious opponent. In 2016 Hageman was not a Trump fan. She described him as “racist and xenophobic”, which even allowing for the vagaries of Wild West politics is unlikely to have been a compliment. But by 2022 she had remoulded herself to fit the needs of the moment. She had been wrong about Trump, she explained, having been led astray by lies told by “the Democrats and Liz Cheney’s friends in the media”. The reader, even if unimpressed by Hageman, may object that such behaviour is not uncommon in the political world. Closer to home in the past few days, several senior Conservatives have belatedly discovered that Rishi Sunak is not after all the person to unite the party and lead the nation, and that instead Liz Truss better embodies these aspirations.

The first cabinet member to make this journey was the Welsh secretary Sir Robert Buckland. “I backed Rishi Sunak as I felt that he was at that stage embodying what was needed . . . As the campaign moved on . . .” Let’s stop there. We all know what happened as the campaign moved on. Liz Truss’s big polling lead happened. You have to wonder what Sir Robert and the other Late-Trussers see when they look in the mirror. What profiteth a man and all that — but for Wales, Sir Robert. There is a quotidian cowardice about this, but in Buckland’s defence, as Falstaff says on the battlefield of Shrewsbury: “What is that ‘honour’? Air. A trim reckoning! Who hath it? He that died o’ Wednesday.”

Honourable politicians died in their droves following the Brexit vote. Those prepared to stand up to their parties, or even to take the risk and leave them, were eventually slaughtered at the polls or forced from the field. Some of the best, most honest and competent of our moderate politicians: Rory Stewart departed; others — Dominic Grieve, David Gauke, Chris Leslie, Anna Soubry, Luciana Berger among them — went massively unrewarded by a polarised electorate. Meanwhile, for their surviving peers Johnson was just marvellous until he wasn’t and Corbyn could be tolerated until he couldn’t.

It was bad and we suffer the loss still. Even so the cowardice displayed by many Trump-supporting Republicans leads to a different category of damage. For all that a liberal like me abhors many of the political stances of someone like Liz Cheney, in the matter of maintaining democracy she is on my side and I on hers.Bizarrely this is not a message that the Democratic Party seems to understand. Earlier this month in Michigan another Trump-backed conspiracist John Gibbs won his primary against a sitting anti-Trump Republican, Peter Meijer. Democrat leaders, reckoning that an extremist would be easier to defeat in November’s midterm election, spent over $400,000 on ads designed to boost Gibbs. It was a move lacking in all principle and helping to weaken the very thing that true democrats should want urgently: a return of the Republican Party from the Mar-a-Lago Hades.From January, Wyoming will have a coward for a congresswoman. But that’s not the worst of it. Grandmother-sellers rarely vend just their own relatives. So while Hageman almost certainly doesn’t herself believe the “stolen election” conspiracy, many of the new Republican representatives do, and she and others have helped them indulge their dark fantasy. It’s a fantasy that could well lead to civil disaster.All is not lost though. Trump’s support has taken a hit among the electorate due to the January 6 hearings. And although in his charmless way he predicted this week that Cheney would “finally disappear into the depths of political oblivion”, she is entirely free to put herself forward as a potential candidate for her party’s nomination for president in 2024, and to appear in all those debates he so enjoys.

That woman has the guts to do it. The rest of us need to wise up.

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/liz-cheneys-courage-is-a-wake-up-call-to-us-all-jksc0jgnx