The Rise and Fall (And Rise) of Darth Cheney, Lady Vader
Voter suppression be damned
image via wikimedia commons
Liz Cheney, the byproduct of Vader-ish neoconservative hawk Dick Cheney and culture warrior Lynne Cheney, can only be properly construed under the category of conservative royalty. The eldest daughter of the former Vice President and Second Lady of the United States in due time won election to her father’s former at-large Congressional seat in Wyoming and promptly began her rise up the House Republican leadership ladder. Her progress, however, was unceremoniously interrupted last week by Kevin McCarthy and a snap vote on her #3 position in the House of Representatives.
Surprisingly, in the run-up to the vote, she was something of a Washington media darling. In standing up to the Trumpist wing of the party, she made bit of a splash among the coastal elites. She was, for a time, the most fawningly covered Republican on the swishy left-of-center cable channels. If these days a Republican could be considered “principled,” that was what she was, or at least that was how she was portrayed on cable news (Fox excepted).
At least until this weekend.
In an interview with Jonathan Swan of Axios, the carefully-constructed façade of principled warrior unraveled. Cheney found her principled heroism on trial in cross examination as she essentially defended Republican attempts to enact voter restriction laws across the country. The Honorable Liz Cheney, it seems, is fine with some voter suppression if it benefits her party. Not a good look to her former media enablers.
Ultimately, the artificially-constructed battle against Trumpism was never wholly a matter of Liz Cheney-versus-the Trumpist wing of the Republican Party. Of course, there was some of that going on on the surface. And Progressive-friendly media outfits as a result lavished her with praise, running with her saga. No doubt, what Congresswoman Cheney did was courageous (as well as good cable TV). But it was not the epic radical shift in the party’s fundament as viewers were led to believe. It was also about fundraising (she brought in a record $1.5 million in the first quarter of 2021), it was also about distinguishing herself from the potential 2024 pack and also it was about those ancestral battles between neoconservatism-versus-isolationism. “On policy, if you had to say who’s farther to the right, Cheney or Trump, it would probably be Cheney,” Nicholas Lehmann wrote in The New Yorker. “The difference shows up most obviously in foreign policy, where Cheney, like her father, is a committed hawk and a believer in the aggressive use of American power (and that doesn’t mean soft power) around the world.” Ahem.
So — here we are. Liz Cheney has been revealed for what she is for once and for all: Darth Cheney, Lady Vader. Further, she is in a stronger position vis-a-vis the race in 2024, at least fundraising-wise. She has distinguished herself as the true “conservative,” albeit within the context of a right-wing ethnonationalist party (at least for the time being). And — we cannot fail to note — she accomplished a lot of this through the mainstream media, no mean feat. Not since Mitt Romney’s second impeachment vote has a conservative garnered so much adoring free press from the enemy camp. But then, as Palpatine said to Vader in the seduction to the pathway of evil, “The Dark Side of the force is a pathway to many abilities some consider to be... unnatural.”