Liz Cheney, people who aren't born yet, and the conflation problem
On trying to conserve conservatism by handing the keys to its enemies
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I’ll start off by sharing in full a piece I wrote last November for The Freemen News-letter titled “The Conflation Problem”:
Since Republicans achieved their razor-thin House majority, holders of, and aspirants to, the Speaker position have been tainted, to one degree or another, with election denialism.
The current speaker could make the case for embracing the most consistent conservative set of principles of any of them, were it not for his wholesale enthusiasm for Donald Trump. But the fact that he has so vocally espoused those principles, and mixed them thoroughly with that enthusiasm, has had mainstream media outlets and Democratic politicians licking their chops from the moment he passed the 217-vote threshold.
That enthusiasm has led a lamentable number of right-of-center figures to succumb to the temptation to see "the times" as calling for the core's situational tweaking. We've seen such developments as "national conservatism," which is basically gussied up protectionism, and, more recently, a clouded understanding of the stakes involved in Ukraine.
This provides a ready-made heyday for the left to conflate these positions—and, more importantly, the election denialism that has poisoned the stances of all Republican Speaker aspirants in the past several months, to one degree or another—with solidly conservative positions that Never Trump conservatives get behind: unborn Americans' right to life, the understanding of what marriage is common to all cultures throughout all human history until five minutes ago, the understanding that cheap, dense and readily available energy sources have made for the quantum boost in human advancement over the last two centuries, and the principle that government ought to have to puke all over itself to take the first red cent of any citizen's money.
The next step is for the left to oh-so-cordially invite conservatives to consider the question: "Don't you think this presents you with an opportunity to reassess this whole conservative enterprise you've been so solidly behind most of your adult life?”
I’d wager that it doesn’t. There are still so many voices—The Freemen News-letter, among them—as well as National Review and The Dispatch (and my Substack Precipice) that did not swallow the Kool-Aid and are still capable of extracting Trumpist sludge from immutable verities.
But impressionable ordinary Americans, particularly the younger ones coming out of an "educational" system that has left them woefully ungrounded in a comprehension of the West's unique blessings for humankind, are vulnerable to a low-taxes-and-traditional-marriage-equals-election-denialism formulation as they prepare for the coming election cycle.
The task among those who still prioritize clarity is to strive with all available effort to disentangle this conflation. It is going to increasingly require a supreme steadiness of nerves.
I’d like to draw your attention to the mention of unborn Americans’ right to life. We shouldn’t be surprised that this issue has engendered a mirror-opposite type of conflation from the Trumpist Right: justification for calling those on record with strong pro-life cred who are endorsing - indeed, actively campaigning for - the Harris-Walz ticket squishy opportunists willing to abandon conservatism for the right price.
A piece yesterday by my Freemen Newsletter colleague Ben Connelly points up the dilemma Liz Cheney has created for herself regarding this topic:
Liz Cheney’s recent comments when asked about abortion while campaigning for Kamala Harris have turned many heads. The Guardian claimed that Cheney “suggested that Republican-led states had overreached in restricting abortion since the supreme court’s [sic] 2022 Dobbs decision ended it as a constitutional right.” Charlie Cooke at National Review pointed out that Cheney had co-sponsored a bill in 2021 banning abortion from the moment of conception, a fair sight more restrictive than any law on the books anywhere in America today.
Here is what she actually said:
Can I add to this just to — because I — I think it’s such an important point. And I think there are many of us around the country who have been pro-life but who have watched what’s going on in our states since the Dobbs decision and have watched state legislatures put in place laws that are resulting in women not getting the care they need.
And so, I think this — this is not an issue that we’re seeing break down across party lines —— but I think we’re seeing people come together to say what has happened to women, when women are facing situations where they can’t get the care they need — where in places like Texas, for example, the attorney general is talking about suing — is suing to get access to women’s medical records — that’s not sustainable for us as — as a country, and — and it has to change.
First, I’d like to state that I have a great deal of respect for Liz Cheney. After January 6th, she was one of the few Republicans with the guts to hammer Donald Trump on his part in one of the most disgraceful days in American public life. Many, many of the Republicans who voted to remove Cheney from leadership, who voted not the certify the election, agreed with everything she said about Donald Trump and January 6th and lacked the spine to be honest about it.
We hear a lot about manhood these days. One of those spineless Republicans wrote a book by that title. Well, if the Republican Party had more men in it, Donald Trump would have been convicted in the Senate after January 6th and barred from ever holding office again.
But her courage notwithstanding, Liz Cheney shouldn’t have made these comments. The media has overreacted, acting as though the comments represent some major change of opinion on Cheney’s part. A careful parsing would lend support to the theory that she remains staunchly pro-life but is upset by the way red states have gone about banning abortion even if she still supports banning abortion in principle. However, a skilled politician like Cheney has to know that statements which require careful parsing will inevitably be misconstrued.
I won’t comment on the policy here, just on the politics of it. If Cheney’s goal is to persuade anti-Trump Republicans to vote Harris or at least keep them from voting for Trump, she can’t afford to give them any reason to write her off. Talk-radio hosts are already saying she “sold out to the libs” for a pile of cash. If Cheney is to successfully persuade Trump-skeptical Republicans, she needs to keep her credibility as a rock-ribbed conservative. Anything which sounds as though she’s gone over to the other team will give voters a reason to write off anything else she says. The best case she can make is this, “I remain dedicated to conservative principles, but I am willing to overlook my policy disagreements with Vice-President Harris because Donald Trump instigated an attack on the American Constitution with his baseless lies about the 2020 election. Donald Trump is not now, nor has he ever been, committed to conservative principles. Therefore, I urge conservatives not to vote for him, because he will only betray you and the country you love.”
Or something to that effect.
At National Review, Jack Butler frames her predicament thusly:
Consider Liz Cheney, daughter of Dick. Daughter preceded father in affirmatively endorsing Kamala Harris. One need not be a reader of left-wing periodicals to notice imperfections in Trump’s character and policies. But Liz Cheney’s endorsement of Harris has gone beyond weighing her as the lesser of two evils. It has gone beyond vaunting her character above his. It has settled on a view of abortion that aligns more closely with Harris’s than with what was only recently Cheney’s own. It’s a transformation that illustrates once again a truth of — and the central flaw in — Trump-era attempts by the Left to persuade conservatives to abandon Trump: “Saving democracy,” conveniently, means yielding to the Left.
His piece is of a broader scope, so he brings in Stuart Stevens to make his point:
Another figure of some political import between 2004 and 2024 was Stuart Stevens. A Republican political consultant, he played a role in several presidential campaigns and helped lead Mitt Romney’s 2012 effort. In his 2020 book It Was All a Lie, Stevens revealed, well . . . that it was all a lie — “it” being the entirety of the Republican Party’s pretense to respectability and decency. In reality, he says, it was a front for white grievance that, among other things, “played too much on the social-conservative side” and took its cues from a man — William F. Buckley Jr. — who began his professional life as a “stone-cold racist.”
Stevens was, alas, not alone in belatedly realizing — or perhaps just admitting to — his contempt for the voters and for the movement he had allegedly sought to empower. The Lincoln Project, with which he is affiliated, is replete with such types. Did they use their positions of influence well when they had them? Might their defective influence explain the origin of at least some of the discontent that led ultimately to their marginalization? And given Stevens’s record, might his new peers on the left find his confidence in a Harris victory a bit alarming?
I’ve come to notice that there is a certain kind of drive-by accusation that disingenuous polemicists use to drag a broad-scope conversation into the weeds, so that tussles over characterization of seventy-years-old behavior of one of America’s towering intellectuals distract everybody from arguments for actual principles, the thinkers who first put them forth, and how those principles have held up when tested in policy application. (“Here’s my proof he was a racist” / “Here’s my proof he wasn’t.” That could make for one long pissing match.)
Back in September, I wrote a post at my old-school blog Late in the Day about Cheney’s decision to endorse Harris. She had not yet started overtly campaigning for Harris yet, but she’d opened a door that would prove hard to shut:
I 've been rethinking my harsh view of at least some of the people who have decided thusly. Cheney and Kinzinger are serious people with solid conservative bona fides, and I have no disagreement with their assessment of Trump and Trumpism. Cheney has chosen the word "danger" wisely.
But as I said recently over at Precipice, I have to conclude differently:
I’m not sure that stressing which is worse, which requires establishing some kind of criteria for how to line the two candidates up side by side to determine that, is a productive use of our time as summer turns to fall in 2024. The Very Stable Genius is a solipsistic man-child driven solely by self-glorification, but Kamala Harris has no redeeming qualities, as a politician, statesperson, or an example of character.
I mean that. John Kelly was exactly right last October when he said that Trump has no idea what America stands for. That goes for Harris as well. From her abysmal economic policy stances (increase in corporate and capital gains taxes, price controls, minimum wage increase) to her zeal for having government impose play-like energy forms on the post-American people to her horrible choice of a running mate to her apparent inability to see that for a ceasefire to be agreed to in Gaza, Hamas would have to come to the table and negotiate, she is a nightmare.
The likelihood that Republicans could take the Senate could mitigate her ability to do damage. But consider the symbolism-level power a US president has. No one else serves as a national emblem the way a president does.
Presidents have cultural influence. Her people are big on talking about vibes, so consider what kinds of vibes she'd emit from the White House.
It’s probably apt for me to repeat a basic point here: I fully understand how dangerous a second Trump term would be. The guy is a poorly-brought-up seven-year-old in a geriatric body. John Kelly is absolutely correct in saying that the Very Stable Genius has no idea what America is, let alone ought to be.
But conservatives give aid and succor to the party that hates their worldview at the expense of that worldview ever being politically viable again.
A week and a half out from an election that will confirm one form of American ruin or the other, I remain convinced that the Narrow Sliver of Terrain is the only principled place to stand.
BONUS UNRELATED LINK: Last Halloween season, Freemen Newsletter editor Justin Stapley asked writers to contribute essays on scary movies. I looked at the spiritual implications of scenes from two classic Universal horror films: The “he went for a little walk” scene in The Mummy (1932) and the beam-of-moonlight-through-the-hosiptal-room-window transformation scene in Frankenstein Meets the Wolfman (1943).