The Liz Cheney Circus and the Rot of the American Ruling Class
...we shouldn’t be looking to Liz Cheney to save us or even a return to the “normalcy” that brought us to the brink of disaster in the first place.
By Jim Miller
Last week we were treated to the passion of Liz Cheney as the Republican Party dumped her from her leadership post in the House of Representatives for failing to embrace Trumpian lies about the Presidential election. She proceeded to give a speech denouncing the Big Lie for which a chorus of voices in the corporate-media-that-is-not-Fox lionized Representative Cheney as a hero of American democracy.
Nothing could be further from the truth.
Just as a host of “liberal” commentators on MSNBC and elsewhere have developed a case of historical amnesia strong enough to resurrect the George W. Bush presidency as a kind of Golden Era of the past when Republicans weren’t committed to lies and extreme culture war, the glorification of Cheney speaks less to her righteousness to than the normalization of the utter indecency of the American Right. Indeed, when telling the simple truth elevates one to nobility, we know something has gone terribly wrong.
It’s not lying that is at the root the Republicans’ decay, it is the rightwing agenda itself which Ms. Cheney still fully embraces with no apologies.
In the wake of the Capitol riot, the rush of the punditry was on to frame that incident as a novel kind of extremism rather than the logical extension of the decades-long radicalization of the Republican party. This kind of ahistorical commentary along with the vapid nostalgia for the lost days of “bipartisanship” and compromise serve to distract from a more insightful analysis of the American power elite.
As Doug Henwood points out in his recent Jacobin piece, “Take Me to Your Leader: The Rot of the American Ruling Class”:
Bourgeois pundits often lament “divided government” and the inability to compromise, which they attribute to partisanship or bad temperaments. A more fundamental reason may be that no fraction of capital, neither the older centrist kind nor the upstart right-leaning kind, is able to achieve hegemony. The Right has considerable strength at elite levels, but in the popular realm, it’s only the Electoral College, voter suppression, and aggressive gerrymandering that keeps it electorally competitive.
Its position is greatly aided, however, by the deep weakness of more centrist forces, who lack serious intellectual or political energy. As the Right discredits itself with ludicrous attacks on the Capitol and farcical QAnon conspiracies, the center-left is feeble. The geriatric nature of the mainstream Democrat leadership is a sign of exhaustion. We’re a long way from when DLC-style politics, as terrible as they were, had at least the superficial appeal of novelty. Now we’ve got the No Malarkey Express parked in the Oval Office.
Of course, it’s important to note that the current political battle to re-establish a reformist center to American government is both crucial to defeating the Right with its penchant for authoritarianism and political nihilism.
The Biden administration’s efforts to finally address climate change, chip away at extreme economic inequality, and at least recognize other deep structural ills in American society are, like the New Deal was, part of an effort to restore some semblance of order and prevent the multiple crises we face from destabilizing our political system and economy for years to come in a way that would ultimately threaten the interests of the elite.
And, as I have noted in this space before, progressives should hope for Biden’s success in re-establishing a reformist hegemony that realigns the American political landscape by finally moving away from the anti-government radicalism that rose with the New Right, flowered under Reagan, and has evolved to the present monstrosity we see in Congress.
That said, we should not be naïve enough to believe either that there are enough “reasonable Republicans” to ever compromise with or that the Democratic Party as currently constituted has what it takes to advance a thoroughgoing democracy without an extraordinary amount of pushing from outside the political establishment.
The existential crisis of democracy we are observing in the United States is occurring as we veer toward irreversible and catastrophic climate change, deepening plutocracy, and the rise of revanchist white-supremacist extremists inside and outside the halls of power. What this illustrates is that the real American ruling class has gorged itself in a grotesque fashion as the fabric of our society has frayed to its current fragile state, and it has rotted to such an extent that anything is possible.
In circumstances such as these, we shouldn’t be looking to Liz Cheney to save us or even a return to the “normalcy” that brought us to the brink of disaster in the first place. Instead, we need to rethink the system that rewards our corrupt billionaire class while threatening the future prospects of everyone else.