Liz Cheney, who recently lost a primary to a Trump-backed challenger, has vowed not to remain in the Republican Party if the man Joe Biden defeated at the presidential election in 2020 is chosen as the party’s nominee for the White House again in 2024.
Cheney is that rare presence in the Republican tent for whose forthright expression of views in defense of the rule of law respect has been there aplenty. Of course, not the same can be said about her father Dick Cheney, who served the two Bushes, the second one as vice president and in that position was instrumental in giving the Republicans a hard nudge to the right.
In the party of Abraham Lincoln, Liz Cheney remains a voice of moderation. But she, along with retiring Congressman Adam Kinzinger, is an endangered species in a party which has clearly cast logic and democratic values to the wind. The party is now a cabal of Trump loyalists consistently believing the lie that the Democrats stole the presidency from their man.
Politicians like Mitch McConnell have undermined their reputation by their genuflecting loyalty to Trump. Others, like Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio, quite forgetting the insults Trump hurled at them in the run-up to the Republican convention in 2016, have turned into groveling followers of the former president. But Mitt Romney remains a senator who has kept his integrity intact through his refusal to toe Trump’s incendiary politics.
In essence, Republicans are doing lasting damage to themselves. Maybe they will win enough seats at the mid-term next month to pose a real threat to President Biden and the Democrats. But that they lack logical coherence, except when it comes to parroting the Big Lie about 2020 by Trump, is a sign of how the Republican Party has turned into a bastion of anti-politics.
Should one be surprised, though, at the many ways in which these Republicans have been damaging the democratic and constitutional fabric of American politics? They are on a dark campaign to ensure that voters inclined to cast ballots for Democrats are prevented from doing so in future. A partisan Supreme Court -- a shame for a country which regularly lectures the world on rule of law and the independence of the judiciary -- has overturned Roe vs Wade.
Abortion, in the view of these latter-day puritans, is a sin.
Such acts are but natural, given the modern history of the Republican Party. Take the manner of the rise to prominence of Richard Nixon. Elected to Congress in 1946, Nixon sought and won the nomination for a Senate seat from California in 1952. He ran a vicious campaign against his decent Democratic rival, Congresswoman Helen Gahagan Douglas, accusing her, in those early days of Red-baiting, of harbouring communist sympathies. Douglas lost the election.
Observers of American politics have always recalled the nasty witch hunt Republican Senator Joseph McCarthy conducted in the early to mid-1950s against individuals reputed in government. He accused them of being secret communists or communist sympathizers and so oversaw the ruin of distinguished careers. Not until a military officer confronted him at the hearings McCarthy presided over did his star begin to dim. The Senate then censured him. His career was at an end. He died lonely and miserable.
While McCarthyism raged, neither President Dwight Eisenhower nor Vice President Nixon condemned McCarthy. Speaking of Eisenhower, his administration took the early steps into American involvement in Vietnam. Eisenhower’s planned summit with Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev in 1960 went up in smoke when an American U-2 aircraft, piloted by Francis Gary Powers and taking off from a US base in Pakistan’s Peshawar, crossed into the Soviet Union.
It was shot down by Moscow.
The Republican administration of the 1950s cheerfully promoted the Cold War, refusing to acknowledge the triumph of China’s communists in Peking (today’s Beijing) and questioned the legitimacy of Mao Zedong’s government. At the 1954 Geneva Conference, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, an inveterate anti-communist, insulted Zhou En-lai by turning away when the latter moved toward him, a hand stretched out as a peace offering.
The Republican penchant for turning down things positive, at home and abroad -- with rare exceptions -- has lingered. The Senate, led by Mitch McConnell, committed the blatant act of refusing to consider Merrick Garland’s nomination for the Supreme Court. It was an insult to President Barack Obama. Garland is today attorney general in the Biden administration. The Republicans would not stop at engaging in political perversity. Bypassing Obama, they invited Israel’s then prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu to address a joint session of Congress.
None of this is a defense of Democratic administrations in the United States. The Democrats too have had their share of mistakes and policy blunders, but their missteps quite pale in comparison with how badly Republicans have conducted themselves in politics and foreign affairs. Ronald Reagan, in cahoots with Pakistan’s Ziaul Haq, pushed Afghanistan into a graver crisis than that engendered by Leonid Brezhnev’s invasion of December 1979 with his support for the Mujahideen.
Reagan’s role in the Iran-Contra scandal was a throwback to the Watergate scandal that led to the resignation of Richard Nixon, the very first time for a president in American history. It was Nixon’s Republican administration which bombed Cambodia in a queer attempt to destroy North Vietnamese/Vietcong supply lines in 1970. Among the consequences was the rise of the brutal Khmer Rouge and its murder of no fewer than two million Cambodians.
President Reagan sent American forces into Granada in a demonstration of crude power by Washington. Gerald Ford looked the other way when Indonesia’s Suharto invaded and occupied East Timor. Ford was the president who declared, without batting an eyelid, that there was no Soviet influence on Poland. He lost the presidential race to the Democrat Jimmy Carter. In his time, the Republican George HW Bush ordered the capture and flight to America of Panama’s Manuel Noriega.
In 2003, another Bush, the son of George HW, invaded Iraq on the basis of a lie -- that Saddam Hussein had an arsenal of weapons of mass destruction. He and his British cohort, Tony Blair, destroyed Iraq.
Tens of thousands of Iraqis died.
Certainly there have been good Republicans like Liz Cheney. Nelson Rockefeller struggled long and hard to be president but could not go beyond the vice presidency, to which he was appointed by Gerald Ford in 1974. Senator Everett Dirksen collaborated with the Democratic administration of President Lyndon Johnson in ensuring the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
America’s Republicans have lost their way. How vicious Republican politicians have become is in the image of illegal immigrants being packed off to the homes of Vice President Kamala Harris and other Democratic functionaries. That is the nature of their anger.
Classified documents have been recovered from Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home. He is in legal jeopardy over other issues. And yet he remains the voice, albeit a dangerous one, of Republicanism in America.
American democracy is not safe in the hands of today’s Republicans.
Syed Badrul Ahsan is a journalist and biographer.
