This is a fair point. This is but one race and throughout this midterm cycle, the GOP primaries have been a mixed bag fo Trump aligned candidates. It’s tough to draw a data driven conclusion from it about his hold on the party, but my gut tells me that Trump’s endorsement doesnt carry much weight, but him directing his ire at a candidate does. That leaves a fine line to tread, for how to be non-aligned while not outright critical of Trump. I think in a lot of cases though, the supposedly non-MAGA candidate who wins who is a lot closer aligned to the MAGA movement with the main stream press is willing to admit, they just do it with more of the decorum we expect of politicians (see Younkin in Virginia).
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You are right about Cheney snr, of course, and the Bush administration is largely responsible for the mess the US is in right now. However, in terms of the present day Republican party, she is a moderate. That’s just another sign of the appalling state of US politics.
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She isn’t moderate at all. But she isn’t in the populist ilk either. Just not many of that kind of Republican left.
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That depends on the rules of the particular state. I have no idea how difficult it is for an Independent candidate to get on the ballot in Wyoming. However, it would not likely be relevant in Wyoming. The GOP usually wins by a margin of 40-50%. They would win comfortably with just half of their vote, and Cheney did not split it.
Wyoming is an odd state for the House, in some ways the worst job in Congress. The state has so few people it only has one Representative but two Senators. Cheney was likely waiting for the next shot at one of the Senate seats.
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Moderate now means “believes in objective reality”.
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Like not believing the FBI is some sort of radical left-wing activist group.
I do think the media are still framing this incorrectly. Trump doesn’t matter. It’s not that Hageman, or any other politician, is Trump-backed - the important thing for those people is the belief in “The Big Lie”. It’s so much bigger than Donald Trump now. Trump was a gateway into allowing politics to be overtaken by a denial of reality, living in sort of parallel universe.
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Same words mean different things nowadays… I’m becoming old… 
Liz Cheney is a staunch conservative, more so than Trump, and her voting record shows that. She is right down the line on all the usual Republican points… until Trump came along.
Liz Cheney holds principled positions and will argue the issue. I would disagree with her on a number of things, but that’s how the political discourse has to be. Make your case. Ok, roll around in the mud a bit as it’s a dirty game, but then win the votes, and govern.
Since the advent of Trump there are no standards at all, and yes, the Republican Party has largely become a personality cult in a post truth climate.
Cheney sees the danger to Democracy, as if nothing is rooted in any semblance of truth, then the game is over.
So she took a stand against Trump. For that, I respect her. She has way more of a spine than 95%+ of her Republican colleagues. Unfortunately she lost to the Trump backed candidate.
My best guess is this is far from the end for Liz Cheney. She will now double down to defeat Trump in whatever way she can. She may run for another office, or she may try to form a coalition, or she may try to flood the airwaves with her message. Whatever she does, she will seek to undermine Trump, as she has come to the belief that Democracy in America is in great peril should Trump prevail.
It will be interesting to see what happens. Interesting isn’t even the right word, as the implications of this tussle are vast.
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For Cheney see Brad Raffensperger in Georgia. There is a group, the types best represented by mainstream media, those who who identify as centrist (in the absence of any sort of ideological anchor), or liberal but think AOC advocating for definding hte police is a problem that force them to not vote of Democratic party president. People in this group have a terrible tendency of over egging the decency credentials of anyone who ever opposes Trump. John Kasich is another one. He is a textbook moral majority Bush Republican, yet I had “liberal” friends falling over themselves to praise him as a “decent normal republican I could vote for” because they couldnt tell the difference between someone who opposed Trump and someone who was worthy of a vote.
Raffensperger is presented by many as one of the heroes of the 2020 election, but he is no friend to democracy. He simply is an advocate of a more sophisticated traditional form of anti-democratic actions and didnt get on Trump’s plan because he thought it was shit, not because he was opposed to the ends.
Likewise with Cheney. She deserves respect for being willing to take the hits she taken for, in this case, doing the right thing. I also think she deserves praise for her performance in doing so and has been pretty much note perfect. But make no mistake, in almost every other way she opposes almost everything that even those in center value. People need to remember that this alliance is very very very limited in scope.
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As an aside, I think an interrogation of what this term means is valuable. Matthew Continetti is one these “conservative” intellectual voices you’ll be familiar with from the various news talk shows, and I agree with on almost nothing. However, he’s recently written a book about what the American Conservative movement actually is and has done a few interesting podcasts in support of the book. His premise is that as an NYT style intellectual conservative, his personal brand of Conservatism is the Paul Ryan, traditional GOP version. This is not Trump’s politics and so people say he “isnt really conservative” but Continetti reluctantly concludes that Trump’s conservatism is actually the dominant form in 20th-21st century American politics and his it the outlier. Essentially, Conservatism in this country has always been racist and willing to suck the government tit as long as it benefits them and brown people dont get the benefits. The fact we all view Trump a a break from Conservatism rather than a restoration of it is an example of how often framing of situation you see in things like the NYT or WAPO missunderstand the situation yet dictate how the national conversation about is had.
Ezra Klein was one of the podcasts. I think Chris Hayes was another I heard him on. Very similar conversations but they’re worth checking out.
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Good point, thanks. Im familiar with Klein and Hayes, and what passes for conservatism today is indeed different to what went before. If Trump prevails I think all bets are off as to how far gone he will take the country.
Trumps brand of ‘conservatism’ is personality cult with strong leanings in the direction of fascism. If I voted for him I would want to call it conservatism too!
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I just hope that a majority of US voters realise that if Trump gets his foot in the White House door, he’ll never leave. He will fill all relevant national and state electoral offices with his cronies, the following election will be declared null and void and he’ll remain in power.
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Bunch of hypocrites called out on their bullshit
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Umm it’s straight up fascism
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No real argument from me against that.
Interestingly, Biden used the word fascism yesterday, to describe the extremist MAGA brand of the Republican Party, and he is being misquoted and pilloried for it. He was careful to legitimize Democrats, Libertarians and also the traditional conservatism of principled Republicans, but then he drew a line between the latter and the MAGA movement. He was spot on in calling it out and saying it is a form of fascism.
Far right? Check.
Ultranationalist? Check.
Dictatorial leader? Check.
Autocracy? Check.
Militarism? Check.
Forcible suppression of opposition? Check.
Belief in a natural and social hierarchy? Check.
If it waddles like a duck…
Some of the Republicans that have been squashed by this are speaking out, but it feels very much as though they are being consumed by an angry tide, and if it isn’t defeated, I am concerned for where it will take America.
As an Englishman who has lived here for 12 years now, I always had in mind that Americans were our cousins, a little different in their ways, but essentially cut from the same cloth.
The longer I’ve been here the more I see that gap widen.
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Who’s he being pilloried by?
Just watching a couple of news channels last night, don’t know their names, but Republican politicians, who were misquoting what he said, and likening it to Hillary’s deplorable comment.
Basically, they were saying that Biden was saying all Republicans are fascists, and he was very careful to not say that.
Although, as long as they don’t speak out against the Führer, they are aiding and abetting fascism.
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I was in the US from 2000-2005 and my take on it even then was that the US culture and its people were very different to the that of the UK. This was possibly magnified by the expectation that it would be a lot closer. Indeed the Brits I knew there almost exclusively associated (socially) with other Brits or (heaven forbid) fellow Europeans. When politics was discussed at work or socially, the (vast) majority (US or Europeans) aligned with Democrat values.
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