Liz Cheney and the Problem of the Anti-Trump Republican

Republicans who hold the line against Trump deserve respect. But champions of egalitarian, pluralistic democracy they are not - and that also matters

Liz Cheney acting as vice chairwoman of the Committee during the January 6 hearings in 2022 - credit: J. Scott Applewhite, Associated Press

“We may have set a record for Republicans speaking at a Democratic convention,” Pete Buttigieg proudly proclaimed in an interview on the Colbert Show during last month’s DNC. Colbert had asked him whether he thought it was still possible to persuade people – conservatives, he meant, people who had identified as Republicans all their life? According to Buttigieg, Democrats had just proven exactly that.

The presence of several Republican speakers was indeed one of the most striking features of the Democratic Convention in Chicago. Across the board, they presented their endorsement of Kamala Harris as a patriotic act. National security official Olivia Troye, for instance, who served as an advisor to Vice President Mike Pence, addressed her “fellow Republicans” and told them: “You aren’t voting for a Democrat, you’re voting for democracy. You aren’t betraying our party, you’re standing up for our country.” Geoff Duncan, the former Lieutenant Governor of Georgia, directed his remarks at the same audience: “If you vote for Kamala Harris in 2024, you’re not a Democrat, you’re a patriot.” Finally, Adam Kinzinger, who rose to prominence as one of the few Republicans in the House who voted to impeach Trump and one of only two to serve on the January 6 Committee, declared that “We must put country first.”

Since the Democratic Convention, a lot more Republicans have come out publicly in support of Kamala Harris. On August 23, a dozen lawyers who were part of the Reagan and both Bush administrations endorsed her. Just three days later, 200 former Republican officials who had worked for, amongst others, John McCain and Mitt Romney published an open letter announcing they would be voting for the Democratic candidate. Moreover, Harris has also received some high-profile endorsements from conservative commentators and intellectuals. New York Times columnist David French, for instance, wrote a piece titled “To Save Conservatism From Itself, I Am Voting for Harris.” French has been one of the country’s more prominent Never Trumpers since 2016 – a path that has now led him to openly endorsing a Democrat.

Is Trump’s power over the Republican Party waning, is Trumpism disintegrating? Let’s slow down a little bit. It’s important to note that almost all of these public defections are coming from relatively low-level and / or *former* Republican officials. Trumpism is still firmly in charge of the power centers of conservatism and dominates GOP politics. And yet, there was no comparable level of open dissent prior to the 2020 election; and in 2016, the opposite happened, as there was considerable hostility towards Trump among Republicans and leadings conservatives initially, right after Trump had come down the golden escalator to announce he was running for president – yet by the time of the election, almost all of them had united behind Trump as the undisputed leader of the Right.

This is, as of right now, certainly not a game-changing development in American politics – but it is also not nothing. And Democrats are trying to capitalize on this: The Harris-Walz campaign has officially launched “Republicans for Harris.”

Until last week, one anti-Trump Republican was noticeably absent from the list of conservatives who were vowing to support Harris: Liz Cheney. Because she played such a key role on the January 6 Committee – not only as vice chairwomen, but also as its public face –, and because she has been so vocal about being willing to do whatever it takes to prevent Trump from ever getting back to power, Cheney has arguably been Trump’s most prominent foe from within the GOP. One might have therefore expected her to appear as a speaker at the DNC. Reporting from early September indicated that her absence was mostly tactical – a deliberate decision to wait until after the convention to enter the fray on behalf of Harris. During an event at Duke University last Wednesday, Cheney finally declared her intentions: “As a conservative, as someone who believes in and cares about the Constitution, I have thought deeply about this. And because of the danger that Donald Trump poses, not only am I not voting for Donald Trump, but I will be voting for Kamala Harris.” In response, the Harris campaign lauded her as “a patriot who loves this country and puts our democracy and our Constitution first.”

Remarkably, on Friday, life-long Republican hardliner Dick Cheney, most infamous for his role as one of the key architects of the Iraq invasion during his time as Vice President under George W. Bush, joined his daughter in endorsing Kamala Harris. In a statement, he declared his “duty to put country above partisanship to defend our Constitution,” arguing that Trump “can never be trusted with power again.” That same day, Liz Cheney called Trump and JD Vance a pair of “misogynistic pigs” while speaking at an event at Austin, Texas.

The Cheneys siding with the Democratic leader, united in a public fight against the man who has dominated their own party for nearly a decade. What a strange time to be alive.

We will need to accept a little bit of cognitive dissonance

Republicans defecting from Trump is a good thing. Let’s start there. Trump is an immediate threat to democracy and constitutional self-government. From a (small-d) democratic perspective, he needs to be defeated in the upcoming election. And defeating him requires a broad coalition of voters – not all of whom will be big fans of Kamala Harris or the Democratic Party. While it is hard to predict and impossible to measure precisely, (former) GOP lawmakers and officials not just voicing their critique of Trump but actively announcing their support for Harris *might* impact the voting decision of people who identify as independent or Republican.

And yet, the question of how Liberals, Democrats, people on the Left, and anyone rooting for America to a) stave off the current authoritarian assault and b) finally become the egalitarian, multiracial, pluralistic democracy it never has been yet should treat these endorsements, and what role and status should be awarded to high-profile anti-Trump Republicans, merits serious reflection. Let’s put it this way: The answer to “Is Liz Cheney good now?” is actually complicated. We’ll be required to hold two thoughts that are in tension with each other.

What these prominent Republicans do in not just publicly siding against Trump, but supporting the Democratic candidate in a presidential election deserves appreciation, as they draw a line against autocracy, at considerable personal cost – a line that must be held if democracy is to have any chance at survival. At the same time, we must not help perpetuate their deeply flawed diagnosis of Trumpism as a mere aberration from an otherwise noble conservative tradition and venerable Republican Party – a type of nostalgic myth that, not coincidentally, tends to obscure their own role in tolerating and condoning the forces that have fueled Trump’s rise and their own complicity in elevating extremism within the GOP.

Most importantly, there are two conflicts playing out simultaneously that will determine the future of American society. There is the struggle to protect democratic self-government against a rightwing authoritarian assault led by Trump – and in that struggle, all (small-d) democrats now find themselves on the same side with the Cheneys. But there is also the fundamental conflict over *what kind* of democracy America should be – over how much democracy and for whom. And in that struggle, the fault lines are different, as most prominent anti-Trump Republicans have always pursued a vision of continued wealthy white elite domination that is incompatible with the egalitarian idea of multiracial pluralism. We therefore need to be careful not to lionize them to the point where it becomes harder to realize the promise of a democracy in which the status of an individual is no longer determined significantly by race, gender, wealth, or religion. Liz Cheney, to put it bluntly, should not be allowed to define the boundaries of American democracy going forward.

Republicans who hold the line against Trump deserve respect

There is ample reason to be skeptical about the elevation of anti-Trump Republicans to Heroes of the Republic. In an interview in late August, Kamala Harris told CNN that, in the spirit of “inviting diversity of opinion,” she would like to include a Republican in her cabinet if she were to win the election. Such commitments to bipartisanship are, at the very least, in tension with the idea that the Trump-led Republican Party constitutes an acute threat to democracy. The recent history of such gestures is certainly not great. Barrack Obama insisted on including several Republicans in his cabinet – yet there was still no measure of bipartisan cooperation to be had from the GOP and it certainly didn’t keep the Right from spending the next eight years demonizing him as a radically Un-American threat. Joe Biden came into office vowing to leave the Trump chaos behind, return the country to “normalcy,” reach across the aisle, and restore unity – and yet the Right responded by accelerating its anti-democratic radicalization.

We should also reserve the right to ask critical questions about the redemption arcs we are being presented in the stories the anti-Trump Republicans tell about themselves. For instance, one of the speakers at the Democratic Convention was Stephanie Grisham, who prided herself as “the first senior staffer to resign” on January 6, as she “couldn’t be part of the insanity any longer.” In her DNC speech, Grisham claimed she was taking a stance against Trump because “he has no empathy, no morals, and no fidelity to the truth.” And yet, she served as White House press secretary and communications director from July 2019 to April 2020 and was chief of staff for Melania Trump thereafter through the day of the Insurrection. Was it not brutally evident that Donald Trump doesn’t care about empathy and morals more than halfway into his presidency, when Grisham started working for him? If someone really cares about “fidelity to the truth,” how do they become not just a supporter, but – in Grisham’s own words – “a true believer,” so much so that “the Trump family became my family”?

Despite all these reservations, the fact remains that these anti-Trump Republicans stand out in comparison to a lot of other prominent people who the broader public and media discourse too often insists on treating as “respectable conservatives”: The radically disingenuous anti-anti-Trumpers like National Review editor-in-chief Rich Lowry, for instance; people like former attorney general Bill Barr, who admit that Trump is manifestly unfit to serve as president and tried a coup on January 6, yet still support him in the election because they insist “the Left” is the bigger threat somehow; or your friendly elite conservative pundit who, like Ross Douthat in the New York Times, will pretend to be opposed to MAGA while constantly presenting their mainstream audience with a bizarrely sanitized version of the Right and calling Trump a “man of destiny.” In stark contrast to all those factions, people like Liz Cheney and the Republicans who spoke at the DNC are trying to do their part to defeat Trump. Instead of obscuring the line between democracy and autocracy, they have decided to hold it. Let’s not collapse that fundamental difference.

There are two more points of criticism often directed at anti-Trump conservatives and Republicans worth discussing: that what they are doing is self-serving, as it guarantees them admiration and attention from the mainstream media and public; and that it is rather pointless and doesn’t actually move the needle electorally.

There are certainly benefits to coming out against Trump as a Republican or someone with conservative credentials: They get hired as opinion columnists by the nation’s leading papers, they get invited on liberal talk shows and appear as guests on late night shows, they get book deals… But they are also paying a real price. Republicans who stand up to Trump usually have to relinquish power – Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger have been ostracized from their party (Cheney ran again in Wyoming in 2022, but lost in a landslide in the Republican primary to a Trump-endorsed candidate; to prevent a similar fate, Kinzinger didn’t even try). More importantly, they are all facing abuse and violent threat from MAGA world – something that deeply affects their lives, the lives of their families, their children. It takes guts to stand up to the leader of a fascistic movement with a radicalizing following, in a situation in which all strands of the Right – Republican elected officials, the media machine, the reactionary intellectual sphere, the conservative base – are embracing rightwing vigilante violence in an increasingly open and aggressive fashion. And they are also doing it at a moment when it is not at all clear if Trump will be defeated.

Will any of this influence the outcome of the election in a significant way? Who knows. At the very least, however, these public announcements are evidence that a certain type of Republican official, however few of them there are, a certain type of conservative has now reached the point where the acute threat of a Trumpian takeover of government weights heavier than all other considerations. That itself is significant. These anti-Trump Republicans are publicly rejecting the permission structure that has governed conservative politics for far too long: that all measures, regardless of how extreme, are justified in the struggle against what the Right regards as a fundamentally Un-American leftist enemy, that radical measures are indeed necessary in the supposedly noble fight for the survival of “real” America.

Beware of the mythical tale of Trumpism as a mere aberration

While the anti-Trump Republicans deserve respect for putting themselves out there in the struggle against Trumpian extremism, their diagnosis of how we got to where we are today is misleading in problematic ways. If American democracy is to claw its way out of this crisis to something better, an honest assessment and adequate diagnosis of what Trumpism is, where it came from, and what fueled its rise must form the basis for accountability and progress moving forward. The anti-Trumpers, however, are offering something very different. 

In their standard tale, Trump successfully executed a hostile takeover of the GOP. He came from the outside, more like a virus infecting this formerly great Republican Party – “an illness,” as Adam Kinzinger put it in his DNC speech, “sapping our strength, softening our spine, whipping us into a fever that has untethered us from our values.” In this interpretation, Trump quickly turned the GOP into something that has nothing to do with the party’s former real self, something the anti-Trumpers often describe as “Reagan Republicanism” as they almost invariably look back to Reagan as the standard bearer of a noble, honorable tradition. “I was just a kid when I was drawn to the party of Ronald Reagan, to his vision of a strong America, the shining city on a hill,” Kinzinger declared in Chicago. But that was before Trump “suffocated the soul of the Republican Party.” David French offered a similar interpretation as an explanation for why he was endorsing Kamala Harris: “Since the day Donald Trump came down that escalator in 2015, the MAGA movement has been engaged in a long-running, slow-rolling ideological and characterological transformation of the Republican Party. At each step, it has pushed Republicans further and further away from Reaganite conservatism.”

Two diametrically opposed narratives quickly emerged in response to Trump’s rise before the 2016 election. The one Kinzinger and French are propagating is the aberrationist tale, according to which the venerable tradition of principled American conservatism has been hijacked by an utterly unprincipled demagogue; Trumpism, in this interpretation, is fundamentally not conservatism, entirely separate from what came before, an accident, an insurgency, something hostile to the “soul” of the GOP. This narrative has a specific political valence: It allows “moderate” conservatives and Never Trump Republicans to self-exonerate and avoid difficult questions about their complicity in Trumpism’s rise.

On the other end of the spectrum, there is an interpretation claiming that Trump’s rise was really no big surprise: This is what American conservatism, at its core, had always been – a reactionary movement, fueled by racial and cultural grievance, held together by anti-liberal sentiment. Everything else was just a front, a veneer of intellectual depth and respectability. There had been no venerable tradition to begin with, rather a fairly straight line from William F. Buckley (or perhaps even much earlier than that) to Ronald Reagan to Pat Buchanan and Newt Gingrich to Sarah Palin to, finally, Donald Trump.

Serious scholars and observers of the Right agree that neither the continuity nor the aberration narratives stand up to serious scrutiny in their most simplistic forms. The challenge is to grapple with both the recent radicalization, but also the long-standing anti-democratic tendencies and impulses on the Right – to acknowledge both the extent to which far-right factions and ideas have recently managed to take over the power centers of conservatism, but also the fact that extremism has always been an influential feature of the rightwing coalition.

In many ways, Trump’s rise is more a manifestation and the result rather than the cause of the Right’s increasingly open and aggressive embrace of authoritarian minority rule. Modern conservatism as a political project arose in the middle decades of the twentieth century as an alliance between different factions who agreed that a fully realized democracy was the enemy. They staunchly opposed any attempt to level entrenched hierarchies of race, gender, religion, and wealth, which they saw as the “natural” and/or divinely ordained order. The central conflict on the Right has always revolved around the question of how far conservatives had to go to preserve this “natural” order. Some parts of the Right were never content with accepting the post-1960s reality and railed against what they saw as the acquiescence and appeasement of the forces of multiracial pluralism. They pushed for a more radical politics and more drastic action – for a reactionary “counter-revolution” when “conservatism is no longer enough.” GOP elites and more “moderate” conservatives have often tried – and always failed – to harness these extremist, far-right popular energies that ultimately fueled Trump’s rise. They have never been able to control the accelerating radicalization that is now threatening constitutional government in America

This interpretation stands in stark contrast to the self-serving aberrationist tale of Trumpism as an accidental departure. And it has profound implications for a society that will have to find a way to contain and overcome Trumpism. Things would be so much easier if Trump really was the cause, rather than himself a symptom – if all we had to do was to get rid of Trump and let the country, and the Republican Party, revert to “normal.”

But if the rise of Trumpism is more in line with long-standing extremist tendencies, a result of much broader, much more structural ideas and forces, a manifestation of a deeply entrenched anti-democratic political culture, then merely turning the clock back to a pre-2016 “normal” that allowed Trump to swiftly take over the Republican Party and the Right more broadly can’t possibly be the answer. At least not if the goal is for a stable democracy that truly deserves the label to emerge out of the current mess.

What, to the anti-Trump Republican, is “democracy”?

The prominent conservative and Republican officials who have come forward against Trump have – to varying degrees, in very different ways, but often until quite recently – played a part in a story that led to where the American Right is today. They may have willfully ignored or actively condoned an increasingly toxic political culture that has come to fully dominate the GOP. They may have been hoping to make use of the extremist tendencies and populist energies for their own “noble” purposes. They may have shared at least some of the anti-democratic reservations, assumptions, and convictions and therefore believed it necessary to make common cause with people on the radical Right against what they perceived as an overwhelming liberal onslaught.

Does any of that matter right now, mere weeks before a presidential election that may catapult Donald Trump back to power? I believe that it is precisely because the struggle over democracy defines the political conflict that it is only fair to ask: What is the anti-Trump Republicans’ relationship with democracy, what characterizes the kind of democracy they are trying to defend, what is their vision of a democratic America?

As her public opposition to Trump has received the most attention and admiration from Liberals, let’s talk about Liz Cheney. Her disdain for Trumpism is sincere – but so is her opposition to realizing the ideal of egalitarian democracy. Good on her for refusing to cross over into open authoritarianism; but a defender of multiracial pluralism she is not.

In terms of her policy ideas and, more profoundly, her defining worldviews Cheney is no moderate. She holds fairly reactionary positions across the board and it is not a coincidence that as a member of Congress, she voted with Trump basically all the time. She also supported Trump in both the 2016 and 2020 presidential elections.

In fact, Cheney shares many of the anti-democratic tendencies and impulses that have defined modern conservatism since its emergence. She has never opposed the ongoing Republican attempts to subvert democracy in more “traditional” ways: She has demonstrated no desire to protect voting rights against the hundreds of voter suppression bills introduced by Republicans on the state level since the last election, or to outlaw the type of aggressive partisan gerrymandering that is being pursued in GOP-led states.

Nor has Cheney ever seemed concerned about the Supreme Court acting as the institutional spearhead of the broader anti-democratic project. Interestingly, in April, Cheney implored the Court to swiftly and without further delay squash the idea that Trump was immune from prosecution in a guest essay for the New York Times. “It is likely that all – or nearly all – of the justices will agree that a former president who attempted to seize power and remain in office illegally can be prosecuted,” Cheney confidently declared. After all: “It cannot be that a president of the United States can attempt to steal an election and seize power but our justice system is incapable of bringing him to trial before the next election four years later.” And yet, a few weeks after Cheney wrote this, after maximally delaying its verdict, the rightwing majority actually did declare Trump basically immune from criminal prosecution, thereby not only making it nearly impossible to hold him accountable for January 6, but also preemptively giving a future Trump administration the green light to ruthlessly pursue its revenge-fueled authoritarian goals. As far as I can tell, Cheney has not criticized the Court’s majority for this truly extreme, brutally anti-democratic decision; she certainly has not joined forces with the people who demand something must be done about this rogue Court.

Cheney undoubtedly despises Trump, and she really believes he is dangerous and therefore must never again be given the awesome powers of the American presidency. She was very effective at making that case against Trump as vice chairwoman of the January 6 Committee in 2022. But she was also instrumental in making sure the Committee kept a narrow focus on Trump, a very small number of unhinged people around him, and fascistic militants like the Proud Boys – rather than exploring the complicity of GOP elected officials and rightwing elites more broadly. This manifested, for instance, in her refusal to investigate Ginni Thomas, the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, for her role in January 6, as she was actively involved in the multi-level scheme to nullify the results of the election. To Cheney, Clarence and Ginni Thomas are not the enemy, despite their open, aggressive disdain for democracy. They – and the reactionaries who hold the majority on the Court more broadly – remain allies.

This also explains her pre-January 6 relationship with Trump. Cheney supported Trump in 2016 for much the same reasons many Republican elites did: They wanted a brawler to fight back against the “leftist” menace that the Democratic Party supposedly represented. In 2019, for instance, she called Democrats “the party of anti-Semitism, the party of infanticide, the party of socialism.” That’s not a statement that is adequately described as “conservative,” it has nothing to do with tax policy or market concerns. Cheney was actively contributing to the demonization of the political opponent, to propagating the idea that Democratic governance was fundamentally illegitimate. She was not a bystander to the creation of the kind of militant, (small-d) antidemocratic culture on the Right, she advanced and assisted it.

Cheney’s vision for America is one of continued traditional elite dominance. Republican elites like her wanted someone who could harness the extremist, far-right popular energies on the base to prevent egalitarian, multiracial, pluralistic democracy from ever upending traditional hierarchies. That was the promise of Trumpism.

Crucially, however, it is not just Cheney’s fairly reactionary vision that defines her, but also how far she is willing to go to impose that vision on the country. What sets her apart from those who are currently in charge on the Right is that she accepts that there is a line that must not be crossed. It says a lot about the state of today’s Right that this is what distinguishes her.

The key conflict on the Right is between those like Cheney who want to uphold white Christian elite rule from within the confines of a narrowly restricted version of democracy and those who want to impose reactionary minoritarian rule by whatever means – by embracing increasingly open and radical forms of autocracy, authoritarianism, and militant extremism. Both of these positions are in line with anti-democratic traditions in conservatism. The key question on the Right has never simply been democracy or authoritarianism – but rather: How much authoritarianism is necessary to prevent too much democracy for too many people?

The position Cheney and a few others are trying to hold has become untenable. The days of white elite rule within a system of restricted democracy are probably over – America will either slide into authoritarianism or make the leap to multiracial, pluralistic democracy. But still, it matters that Cheney has refused to cross the line. It matters whether or not a democratic framework remains in place because, no matter how imperfect, it provides basic protections and some room for real democratization as well as racial and social progress.

Two distinct conflicts: Against Trumpian authoritarianism – and for egalitarian democracy

Two overlapping struggles are currently playing out at the same time in America, and it causes a fair bit of cognitive dissonance, as this situation produces conflicting alliances and fault lines. One is the struggle to uphold democratic self-government and the rule of law against the onslaught of autocracy and militant extremism. In this conflict, prominent anti-Trump Republicans like Liz Cheney are on the side of democracy.

There is also, at the same time, a real conflict *within* the anti-Trump alliance over the meaning of “democracy,” as those who have come together under the banner of defending it are animated by widely differing ideas of who should actually be allowed and enabled to participate in the political process as equals – and even more so with regards to whether or not the democratic promise should be extended to other spheres of life beyond politics, to the workplace, the family, the public square. In that struggle, the battle lines are drawn differently. And it is not some secondary question that we can simply ignore for the time being (those who seek to curtail abortion rights or refuse to accept the human rights of trans people certainly aren’t suspending their crusade…).

The anti-democratic radicalization of the Right is progressing so rapidly, so pervasively, that all those in the (small-d) democratic camp need to accept alliances with those who object to authoritarianism. At the same time, however, those who seek to establish a fully realized democracy in the United States need to make sure that those alliances do not lead to a wholesale rehabilitation of people who have been deeply complicit in Trumpism’s rise. Most importantly, if the promise of multiracial, pluralistic democracy is to be realized, we need to reject any attempt to entrench ideas that are incompatible with that truly egalitarian vision – even if they are being pushed by people with whom we are currently finding ourselves fighting side by side against the Trumpian menace.

Liz Cheney’s struggle against Trump deserves respect and support. But she should not be allowed to define the boundaries of the “respectable” spectrum of U.S. politics or the contours of American democracy.