The first point to make in considering Rep. Liz Cheney’s expulsion from the House Republican leadership is to stipulate that her core claim is true — Donald Trump lost the 2020 election, and his claim to the contrary is false.
But, as the Washington Examiner reported two weeks ago, that isn’t actually the issue of contention in the GOP’s internecine bloodletting. Most Republicans who want Cheney out don’t dispute her argument. On the contrary, they agree with it. But they reject and resent her tactic of outspoken denunciations, which they see hijacking the party’s message and annoying its voters. It’s surely reasonable enough that they should want a chief messenger who delivers the message they wish to send.
(It’s plain weird to suggest, as some do, that Republicans should accept Cheney’s contradictory message because they argue for viewpoint diversity on college campuses. A political party is more like an army, and no army would agree to have a general march off the battlefield instead of executing the agreed battle plan).
As the Wall Street Journal’s Gerald Seib, no Trumpist, pointed out recently, congressional Republicans who want Cheney to shut up about Trump’s “BIG LIE” do so “not to expand Mr. Trump’s role in the party but to control it.”
Most congressional Republicans don’t want Trump back. They want him to fade away. Right or wrong, they think the party will have a better chance of winning in the future if it can move beyond Trump without alienating his supporters.
Some pundits believe, or pretend to, that this is a simple moral question and that the party leaders are merely spineless equivocators. They say that because Trump is retailing a falsehood, he must be denounced unstintingly. Republicans who don’t do so are “cowards,” and Cheney, who does, is courageous.
But it isn’t axiomatically better to keep drawing attention to the fellow barking at the traffic rather than to ignore him. And it’s noteworthy that those calling loudest for Republican denunciation of Trump don’t seem genuinely to want to help the party. Many hope it will “burn to the ground” because, they say, it is corrupted beyond redemption. This is concern-trolling, disingenuous advice from an enemy. Politicians frequently do this, steering opponents away from a strategy that might work. They put on a mask of concern to offer advice that, if followed, would inflict harm.
Recipients should always ask, “Cui bono?” — Who stands to gain? And it’s not difficult to answer that question in this case, for those who ostensibly want to guide the GOP to a better path offer precisely the same advice about denouncing Trump as do Democrats who want Republicans to fail.
Who is helped if the GOP alienates Trump voters? It’s obviously not Republicans. It’s Democrats and the Left. And it is also those formerly important conservatives left behind when the GOP became a populist, nationalist vehicle for blue-collar workers who had been contemptuously marginalized by a caste that regards itself as naturally selected to govern.
The biggest electoral danger to the Democratic Party and its radical agenda is a party realignment that is forging a bond between Republicans and the working class, especially black and Hispanic voters. If the Democratic Party loses a sizable minority of this support, power will be prized from its cold, dead, socialist hands.
That’s why left-liberals reflexively and promiscuously accuse Republicans and conservatives of racism. It’s intended to open a rift between what is now the blue-collar party and a vital racial-minority portion of its natural supporters. The irony is that the working class is more racially mixed than any other because racial minorities, especially blacks and Hispanics, are disproportionately in that class.
So, it’s no puzzle why those who want the Republican Party to fail, whether it’s those who have never been conservative or those who’ve more recently repudiated that belief system, argue that the GOP should denounce Trump from the rooftops rather than steer a party past him in a way that might take his supporters with it.
Republicans are under no moral obligation to commit suicide. Trump is a huge impediment for the GOP. But if it can get to a post-Trump era without losing its Trumpy supporters, its prospects are good. The GOP leadership knows this. And the Republicans’ enemies fear it. Trumpism without Trump has both merit and electoral appeal.
