Oath. Honor. Accountability? Liz Cheney’s Concerning Disbelief
On the corner of hope and despair this week, we turn back to American politics.
I just finished watching another documentary on the January 6th insurrection. I figured with Sudan, Congo, and Gaza, why not give myself more existential dread. Plus, my shy cat (Bex) was on my lap, so it’s not like I could get up.
At the very least it gave me a reason to write about Liz Cheney’s Oath and Honor. Overall, the book offers some key insights into January 6th, its aftermath, and Cheney’s journey with the Committee to Investigate the Attacks. I believe this book was Cheney’s attempt to make the public see the continued radicalization in the Republican party, the looming danger of Trump (who has at least 91 criminal charges against him, including 32 for violating the Espionage Act), and explain why everyone should despise Kevin McCarthy and Mike Johnson.
To that end, Cheney was successful, and I appreciate her diligence.
But at every turn I was waiting for her to offer some revelation that Republican politics laid the groundwork for Trumpism, and it never came. I would have settled for the acknowledgement that the “radicalization” Cheney talks about has long roots on the right (KKK, anyone?). What I mostly saw was her repeated surprise that people who had lied to her five pages ago were lying to her again.
Cheney’s fight against Trump is worth celebrating. Frankly, she and Adam Kinzinger showed more guts than the entirety of Republicans in Congress put together and certainly more than those in the Senate have had in their whole legislative lives. But that tidy narrative is not the whole picture.
She really didn’t see this coming?
From the first sentence of the “Prologue,” I realized Cheney and I live in different realities. She opens her book by calling January 6th “the story of the moment when American democracy began to unravel.” Maybe she’s not a history buff, but a look at the news in the post-9/11 landscape will tell you that democracy (measured by the rule of law, access to the ballot, freedom of the press) started to fray long before January 6th. The Democracy Index has said for years that US democracy is in decline. I don’t remember Cheney calling out Trump’s attacks on journalists, Republican voter suppression tactics, or her father’s support of torture.
If I could describe Oath and Honor with a gif, it would be the “shocked Pikachu face” for the number of times Cheney says, “I thought he was telling the truth. He was not.” Like, ma’am, you work with a party of people who regularly go on Fox News and lie to the American people, why would you think they’d treat you any differently? Even after the entire “Stop the Steal” scam, she was still surprised her colleagues were liars, sociopaths, or hopelessly delusional? That’s not comforting.
Oath, Honor, and a Lack of Accountability
Cheney’s surprise seems to stems from two intertwined problems: refusal to believe reality and lack of accountability.
The refusal to believe reality comes not just in terms of her disbelief that her colleagues were lying to her but in that she never once considers the social and political conditions that gave rise to Trump and Trumpism. Her party’s platform made targeting women, minorities, disabled people, and the LGBTQIA+ community a national pastime. She’s got Senator Mitch “Obstructionist” McConnell on speed dial. She really never considered that these things might be related?
Add this to the number of times she talks about Republicans saying prayers while in their capacity as officers of the government, which only reiterates the right has politicized religion and popularized Christian nationalism. But Cheney showed no self-awareness here.
“We cannot become the party of QAnon,” I said. “We cannot become the party of Holocaust deniers. We cannot become the party of white supremacy. That can never be us. We are the party of Abraham Lincoln and of Ronald Regan. We believe above all else in fidelity to the Constitution.” Pg. 152
Like, sis, that horse has left the barn. Do you remember that time your father outed a CIA agent and got her contacts killed just because her husband published a report saying he and Bush lied about Iraq having weapons of mass destruction? I remember that.
We all have problematic faves
At the end of the day, we all have problematic faves. That’s how it should work with politicians: all skepticism, no superfans. I would no more expect Liz Cheney to call her father a war criminal than I would call mine one. Likewise, she’s allowed to support the parts of her party that this country needs (a more limited government, a sense of fiscal responsibility) without being held accountable for the stuff it does that we really don’t (the Freedom Caucus). But when she refuses to acknowledge the bad parts, then she continues her complicity in maintaining them.
Heck, Cheney herself voted with Trump between 93 and 100% of the time. This seems to be a mistaken case of “we thought we could control the monster we made, how were we to know it would try to kill us?” A solid reading of Frankenstein might have cleared up this whole mess. The humanities matter, people.
This book which promises a reckoning with the truth falls ultimately short because Cheney walks right up to the edge of admitting the problems of the modern Republican party that built Trump and stops.
I suppose at the end of the book I was waiting for her to declare an Independent candidacy for something or call on Republicans to abandon their party for an election cycle, or tell Republican strategists to stop reading dystopian fiction like it’s a user’s manual.
As a gal who does love gossip and America, Cheney delivered on both of those promises. For the general reader, I’d give it 3 out of 5 stars. For those who like political biography, 4 out of 5. For those who like memoir, just go read Billy Crystal’s Still Foolin’ ‘Em because that was way more fun.
