Goodbye Liz Cheney: Where Will the Next Generation of GOP Leadership Come From?

Hopefully, for the good of the nation, the party will reject its most extreme billionaires and politicians and return to the classically conservative side of true American values...

The song that was inspired by this article is available here.
My reading this article as an audio podcast is available here.

Liz Cheney — a member of multi-generational Republican royalty — didn’t just tell Republicans this week they shouldn’t vote for Trump. That would have been easy; he’s manifestly unfit for office and a danger to our republic.

Instead, though, she took a huge step beyond that, saying that she was voting for Vice President Harris and Governor Walz — openly implying that every decent, America-loving Republican should do the same.

“As a conservative,” she said, “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.”

This could represent the earliest leading edge of a critical turning point for a GOP that has lost its way and, in the process, become an actual threat to our nation, peace in the world, and our children’s future.

The Republican Party wasn’t always this way.

At the risk of sounding hopelessly old, I remember Dwight Eisenhower’s 1956 re-election campaign. I remember my dad proudly wearing his “I Like Ike” button and the yard sign in front of our house. I remember the TV ad with a cartoon elephant and his marching-band bass drum parading across a theater stage as the announcer intoned, “Vote for peace, vote for Eisenhower!”

The Republican Party my father — who volunteered to fight in WWII straight out of high school — loved believed in a set of core principles exemplified by Eisenhower:

— Strong national defense,
— Advocacy for democracy around the world,
— Clean environment,
— Honest wages for an honest day’s work,
— Building infrastructure (roads, hospitals, schools, airports) to support business and a good middle-class quality of life,
— Government balancing spending with taxation (“fiscal responsibility”), and
— Encouraging intact families through tax deductions and other incentives.

They called this “conservatism.”

It’s main argument with the Democrats had to do with how things essential for working class people — healthcare, college, housing — should be achieved. Republicans thought the “free market” should take care of these things, while Democrats supported government playing a significant role in all three (conservatives called that “socialism”).

Today’s Republican Party has largely turned its back on all these principles.

— Instead of a strong national defense, they argue for boondoggles and profits for defense contractors and lied us into a series of unnecessary wars (Reagan/Grenada, Bush/Kuwait, Bush/Iraq) while Trump pulled us out of the Iran deal and tried to cripple NATO.
— Instead of advocating democracy, Trump has embraced dictators like Putin, Xi, Kim, and Orbán while openly insulting and denigrating our allies.  
— Instead of supporting Nixon’s EPA, both Bush and Trump tried to cripple that agency.
— Instead of building infrastructure, Reagan, Bush, and Trump redirected government funds to tax cuts for billionaires.
— The entirety of today’s $34 trillion national debt can be solely accounted for by the revenue lost from the Reagan, Bush, and Trump tax cuts.
— Republicans now oppose most supports for housing, hate on queer families, voted unanimously against the expanded child tax credit, and fight against healthcare and educational support for working class families.

Today’s GOP has contracted into something that would be unrecognizable to Eisenhower’s and even Nixon’s and Reagan’s Republicans. It’s become the party of racial hatred, dictatorship, and xenophobia, serving only the interests of giant monopolies, the fossil fuel industry, and a handful of America’s most politically active rightwing billionaires.

While Liz Cheney is no liberal, and not even close to being an Eisenhower Republican, her split with Trump and the cult that he’s turned her party into is as significant as Adam Kinzinger and other Republicans speaking on behalf of the Harris/Walz ticket at the DNC.  

Her objurgation of Trump is consequential. It tells us there’s room for “principled conservatives” in the Democratic Party while the GOP has contracted into what Eisenhower warned us about: “[A] community of dreadful fear and hate…”

As such, its unlikely that today’s MAGA Republican Party will survive another election cycle — unless they win big this fall, Trump hands Europe over to Putin, and ends democracy here in America (and around the world).

As that prospect grows increasingly unlikely, Cheney’s endorsement of Harris is another clear sign that the MAGA GOP is, sooner or later, heading for the trash heap of history.

But what will rise out of those ashes? What does history tell us?

As Rachel Maddow brilliantly documents in her Ultra podcast and new book Prequel, the Republican Party flirted with fascism in a big way in the late 1940s and throughout the 1950s. It was largely saved both by Eisenhower’s moderation and the flame-out of Senator Joe McCarthy.

This time there probably won’t be such a soft landing, in large part because the GOP is being held together, funded, and promoted by neofascist billionaires. Money, though, can only hold a party so long.

So, if the party crashes and burns this fall, hopefully there will be a rejection of the kind of corruption represented by Clarence Thomas and Rick Scott, the bullying of Jim Jordan and James Comer, and the naked embrace of foreign dictators by Marjorie Taylor Greene and Rand Paul.

Where will the next generation of Republican leadership come from?

Your guess is as good as mine, but the competing factions are already visible. There are the neofascists like Steve Bannon, Josh Hawley, JD Vance, and Nick Fuentes on one side, and, on the other side, those who could embrace a return to Eisenhower’s values, including Adam Kinzinger, Lisa Murkowski, Larry Hogan, and Vermont’s Republican Governor Phil Scott.

Time will tell, of course, how this all shakes out for the GOP. But hopefully, for the good of the nation, the environment, and world peace, the party will reject its most extreme billionaires and politicians and return to the classically conservative side of true American values.

Meanwhile, the rest of us are following both Biden’s and Cheney’s advice and jumping on the Harris/Walz train!