I have bad news for the progressives currently beguiled by Liz Cheney’s deft skewering of her erstwhile Republican colleagues: She is not going to love you back.
Cheney’s new book, “Oath and Honor: A Memoir and a Warning,” has become an immediate bestseller based on its promise to bring even more receipts to the Trump indictment party. (And she does have receipts.) Her message to anyone who has ever knitted a “pussy hat” hits right in the feels: Donald Trump is a “grave threat” to American democracy, a man “willing to torch the constitution,” and thus “[h]e has to be defeated, and people can’t be bystanders.”
Ironically, her last book had an equally dire warning — about Democrats post-Barack Obama.
Ironically, her last book had an equally dire warning — about Democrats post-Barack Obama. “Our next president must be committed to restoring America’s power and strength,” she and her father, former Vice President Dick Cheney, wrote in “Exceptional: Why the World Needs a Powerful America.” “Our security and the survival of freedom depend on it.” It’s almost as if they were calling for our next president to make America great again.
Others have illustrated the straight line that connects the rabid anti-Obama xenophobia and racism of the tea party movement — a movement Cheney embraced — and the mob that forced its way into the Capitol on Jan. 6. That ideological genealogy doesn’t make Cheney responsible for Jan. 6. Nor does it mean we shouldn’t take her current warnings less seriously. But it should temper the applause she gets in 2023 for making the same observations that plenty of people made in 2015. Democrats should be wary of investing this much political capital in a politician who is all but telling them about her intention to eventually betray them.
Cheney’s political transformation isn’t, in fact, very transformative. It’s one thing to have the scales fall from one’s eyes completely — to stumble upon one lie you told yourself, or that you were told, and then have a whole edifice of untruths unravel.
Former Wall Street Journal columnist Max Boot became a “Never Trumper” along with a host of other neocons when Trump’s terrible ambitions became clear. But then he did something rare and almost singular in that company: He also re-examined all the other beliefs that had kept him in the party that nominated Trump. Boot wound up apologizing for his part in promoting the Iraq War and, even more astonishingly, admitted that the GOP’s entire political project since 1964 has been built on a not-very-thinly disguised foundation of racism. (Something, he allowed, “liberals have been saying for decades.”) Ousting Trump isn’t enough, Boot argued; the Republican Party must be “burned to the ground” and “suffer repeated and devastating defeats” in order to have any hope of building “a reasonable center-right party out of the ashes.”
Cheney shows no sign of such expansive reconsiderations. Her call to arms is narrow-cast in the extreme: defeat Trump. She hasn’t said too much about what might follow. She may even assume she is the sort of Republican who could replace him. And that, as a reminder, would mean replacing Trump with a Republican who has consistently confirmed her commitment to restricting bodily autonomy and admits that climate change is happening but says there are “real questions about why and what’s causing it.” There are not.
Cheney shows no sign of such expansive reconsiderations. Her call to arms is narrow-cast in the extreme.
She has very gently come around on marriage equality. This is a notable shift given how she voiced her opposition to gay marriage in 2013, after her then-warm relationship with her gay sister, Mary, became an issue in the Wyoming Senate Republican campaign. Liz’s eventual recognition that she was “wrong” to oppose gay marriage came months after she lost her re-election primary in 2021, and after the end of her career in this version of Republican Party.
I understand the impulse to embrace former evildoers; compassion for the convert is one of humanity’s most precious psychological tics. An old enemy admitting they were wrong is also fun! The more vaunted the foe, the more delight one takes in the admission of fault; the more twisted their past, the more one can exult upon bringing them into the light. And, indeed, I’ve indulged in this kind of crowing, giving hours of airtime on my old podcast to former Republican dirty trickster Rick Wilson. A great interview! Hilarious! Would I want him to run the country? Not really!
High-profile antagonists also provide potentially valuable intel. Opposition research is, as I said, part of the supposed value of Cheney’s book. But we know a lot about Jan. 6 already. We know even more about the awfulness of Trump Republicans. I think what liberals are truly hoping to find in Cheney’s tome is more abstract: the key to repeating the miracle of her supposed rebirth.
It’s an understandable, and even worthwhile, quest. But I’m just not sure there’s a magic potion to be extracted from this narrative, nothing to drip into your racist uncle’s coffee at Christmas dinner that will make him see the light. Liz Cheney is, with respect to policy, a “typical Republican.” But in respect to everything else, she’s a Cheney: assured of her place in the political and economic firmament for as long as America exists — and maybe even afterward. With her vast wealth and robust network of powerful friends, she certainly could weather a Trump second term better than most, even if that means fleeing to a country without an extradition treaty. Her position as a Cheney also means the risks she took in opposing Trump remain minimal compared to those for anyone who works for a living or whose political career had some other starting point besides working for her father’s successful (if not popularly elected) White House campaign. Liberals become enthralled with characters like Liz Cheney because we want to know how it was done and what we can do to make it happen again. But the sad truth is that nothing can change someone’s mind until they’re ready for it to be changed. Even Cheney, who voted for Trump in his first run, clearly never liked the guy, calling his statements about women “appalling” in 2016 and his foreign policy decisions “disastrous” two years later. Liberals become enthralled with characters like Liz Cheney because we want to know how it was done and what we can do to make it happen again. For a lot of people, the cracks in their belief systems come only when they’ve been under terrific pressure and through unbearable pain. So I guess my question is would Liz Cheney be the media darling she is today if things hadn’t gotten quite as bad as they did? If we were living through Hillary Clinton’s second term, would Mary Cheney still be waiting for her apology? What kind of legislation would Cheney be supporting if some alt-timeline, majority-liberal Supreme Court held sway and Roe was still the law of the land? I think she’d still be the Republican she was before she got to Congress. And I prefer that alternate universe. On some level, I want to prevent conversions like Cheney’s, not create more of them. I want things to never get so bad that someone like Cheney changes her mind. According to her book, Cheney was plenty aware of Trump’s election conspiracy perfidy and the escalating plans for a coup. She didn’t tell the press or go public with her concerns. She had been a mild supporter and became a subdued critic. What pushed Liz Cheney to outraged opposition were the specific and horrific events of Jan. 6. It just shouldn’t take that much.
Ana Marie Cox
Ana Marie Cox is a political journalist and author. Her work has appeared in Harper’s, Sports Illustrated, The Daily Beast and The Washington Post, among other places. 
