Liz Cheney launches
"There is a tide in the affairs of men.
Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune. . . .
On such a full sea are we now afloat."Brutus, in Shakespeare's Julius Caesar
It isn't high tide for Liz Cheney. Not yet.
Even Fox News sees it and says it. The tide is changing.
Liz Cheney lost yesterday. People looking for a post-Trump GOP must wait. Had Cheney won, the Trump spell would have broken. Republican officeholders and presidential aspirates would see that Republican voters were no longer believing the unbelievable and defending the indefensible. It would have meant that the conspiracy and outrage wing of the party--Donald Trump, Tucker Carlson, Alex Jones, Marjorie Taylor Green--would be a minority faction within the GOP.
It didn't happen. It is still Trump's party. No political equilibrium persists for long.
Reagan-style Republicanism lasted about 30 years, from 1980 to 2010. By 2010 the Tea Party movement had substantially changed the GOP, even as, on the surface, everything was the same. Sarah Palin's know-nothing hockey-mom populism had combined with Newt Gingrich's scorched-earth language of Democrats as disgusting traitors. The result was a new party--an ethno-nationalist party in the style of Pat Buchanan. Mitt Romney was history even before his defeat in 2012. Trump understood and gave voice to this new GOP synthesis of frustration over job losses to China, rapid immigration from Latin America and Asia, and apparent Democratic progressive wins on social issues. He sounded angry and he didn't care if what he said was exactly true. It was true in spirit. Close enough.
Economic elites--the professional class, the Wall Street Journal readers, big-money donors, the Chamber of Commerce and country club Republicans--are going along with the new, angry populist GOP. It is an uneasy fit. They understand the anti-Semitism embedded in comments about George Soros. The traditional GOP elites don't care about homosexuality, gender transition, abortion, or guns. They like immigration. Still, the GOP's business wing wants low taxes, and they get that from the GOP.
Trump put together this coalition of the GOP by force of personality and the smart decision to turn the judiciary over to the Federalist Society. Christian nationalist voters wanted anti-abortion judges. Chamber of Commerce Republicans wanted anti-regulation judges. They each got what they wanted.
The GOP coalition under Trump is fragile. Trump is a minority taste. The important thing in the Wyoming primary is not that Cheney lost. It is that she got 30% of the vote. The Trump GOP is already a loser in a national election in battleground states, and Republican voters are peeling off. Enough people recognize that Trump is a crook. Election defeats change political parties. They adjust.
Liz Cheney represents a new synthesis for the GOP. She remains a national security hawk. The Ukraine issue makes that a popular one within the GOP, putting her at odds with Trump. She changed her anti-homosexual position, and is now a civil-libertarian conservative. That position is in tune with the Kansas vote. She reconnects the GOP with law enforcement, the natural home for GOP voters.
Political coalitions do not happen because policies "make sense." They happen because political leaders create them by interpreting and anticipating events. Liz Cheney looks and sounds like a leader. She projects the presumed masculine virtues of strength, courage, and integrity. She is willing to take a beating and not whine about it. Trump-the-fighter has always had a patina of fraud about him. He was Mr. Bone Spurs, the ladies-man playboy doing bravado bullying. His complaints about the election have a whiny, sore-loser quality. Trump won't be defeated by his current GOP rivals, who look like they are awaiting table scraps from the master. Only Trump could beat Trump. He is beating himself. Liz Cheney is in position to say she was right all along.
If the law catches up to Trump in 2022 then her tide will be ready in 2024. If not, then in 2028