In praise of Liz Cheney. May we have more
politicians like her
Robert
Reich
We need more politicians who stand by their
principles, even if it costs them everything
‘If the only way to get or keep power is to betray
your principles, what’s the point of having power?’
Tue 16 Aug
2022 11.13 BST
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/aug/16/liz-cheney-politicians-stand-by-principles
On Tuesday,
Wyoming Republicans determine the fate of Representative Liz Cheney, the
putative leader of the anti-Trump forces in the Republican party.
Six days after
the 6 January 2021 attack on the Capitol – when no other Republican in the
House or Senate was willing to rebuke Trump – Cheney charged on the House floor
that “the president of the United States summoned this mob, assembled the mob,
and lit the flame of this attack. Everything that followed was his doing.”
The next
day, Cheney joined nine other House Republicans and 222 Democrats in voting to
impeach Trump.
So far,
three of these 10 principled Republican lawmakers have lost their primaries.
Two have won them. The remaining four are retiring.
As
vice-chair of the House of Representatives’ January 6 committee investigating
the causes of that attack, Cheney has ceaselessly and tirelessly helped lay out
the case against Trump during eight public hearings held in June and July, with
more to come.
In
response, Trump has done everything possible to end Cheney’s career. He made
sure House Republicans revoked her status as the third highest-ranking leader
of the Republican caucus, and that Wyoming Republicans censured her.
Trump also
selected Cheney’s opponent in Tuesday’s Republican primary, Harriet Hageman –
who has rallied behind Trump and amplified his false claims that the 2020
election was stolen.
Hageman has
a commanding double-digit lead over Cheney. (According to some reports, Cheney
has been reluctant even to venture into Wyoming to campaign, due to death
threats.)
If Liz
Cheney loses her House seat, as seems likely, I hope she doesn’t disappear from
public life. Although her views on countless substantive issues are the
opposite of mine, I salute her.
She has
displayed more courage and integrity than almost any other member of her party
– indeed, given the pressure she was under, perhaps more than any lawmaker now
alive.
The role
Cheney has played raises a larger question about the meaning of representative
democracy. Is it the responsibility of elected officials to represent the views
of their constituents or their own principles?
The
question isn’t limited to Republicans. As the midterms draw closer, some
Democratic operatives and pundits argue that Biden and the Democrats must move
to the “center” to win.
But where
is the center? Halfway between democracy and fascism? And if Democrats must go
there to win, what’s the point of winning?
I call this
the Dick Morris paradox.
In early
1996, Bill and Hillary Clinton summoned pollster Dick Morris to the White House
to make sure Bill Clinton would be re-elected.
Morris’s
advice to Clinton was to move to the center (“triangulate”) and say nothing in
his re-election campaign except that the economy was terrific and would be even
better in the second term.
Whenever I
ran into Morris slithering around the West Wing, I suggested he urge Clinton to
advance some policies for the second term’s agenda – a hike in the minimum
wage, universal pre-K, paid family leave, Medicare for all.
Morris’s
invariable response: “If Clinton pushes any of these, there won’t be a second
term.”
I said
there was no point in having a second term without an agenda to do something
important in the second term. He argued back that there was no use having an
agenda without a second term.
But if the
only way to get or keep power is to say nothing to the public about what you
believe or intend to achieve, or to mislead the public, what’s the point of
having power?
To Morris
and most other political operatives, this question makes no sense. Politics is
about getting and keeping power. Principles have nothing to do with it.
To Dick
Morris operatives, politicians have a responsibility to mirror whatever the
public wants or believes.
But what if
the public has been lied to by a conman who tells them the last election was
stolen? What if he has cynically exploited their bigotry, ignorance or
distrust?
Should
candidates merely reflect what the conman has stirred up, as Hageman has done in
Wyoming and other Republican candidates are doing with Trump’s “big lie”
elsewhere?
Or should
candidates risk losing political power (or never gaining it) by standing on
their own principles?
The dilemma
on the Democrats’ side is not nearly as dangerous for the nation, but it
exists, nonetheless.
Some of
today’s Democratic candidates are moving to the so-called “center” because
they’ve convinced themselves they must do so to gain or hold power, which is
better than not having any.
But is
gaining or holding power more important than telling the public what one truly
believes, and speaking truth?
Robert
Reich, a former US secretary of labor, is professor of public policy at the
University of California at Berkeley and the author of Saving Capitalism: For
the Many, Not the Few and The Common Good. His new book, The System: Who Rigged
It, How We Fix It, is out now. He is a Guardian US columnist. His newsletter is
at robertreich.substack.com
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