Like me, Leslie Cannold is deeply grateful for Liz Chaney right now — you know, the way she’s speaking truth to fruitcakery.
Liz Cheney is my hero. On positions of policy, I disagree with her almost 100% of the time, but I see her as one of the first moral heroes of this millennia. A highly principled woman willing and able to set aside every one of her personal interests to do what’s right for her country.
She contrasts this with Democrat sympathisers who claim to see through Cheney’s apparently principled stand — those whose arguments amount to the assertion that “Cheney’s stance has nothing to do with principle, but rather vengeance (against Trump) served cold”.
However being asked to choose between light and dark seems a bit stark to me. Having observed politics from nearer and further for quite a few decades now, I’d never assume anyone had 100% pure motives. Ted Cruz stood up for principle — the principle of not lying every time you open your mouth in politics. Why? Because he was opposing Donald Trump who couldn’t open his mouth without lying. But Ted came to Jesus and it turned out he wasn’t a person of principle any more.
My operating assumption is that Liz Cheney has got herself into a situation in which Trump is an enemy and, having made her bed, she’s lying in it. That’s not me saying that all politicians are ‘cynical’. Rather the opposite. It’s saying that politics is a profession in which one is endlessly trading off ends and means, endlessly trying to promote one’s own career and do something worthwhile. And in that world, a great deal of the time the ends justify the means. And the art of politics is ultimately understanding where the ends don’t justify the means.
In all the democratic cultures I know, people tend to chat about politics as if it’s pretty clear who’s a goodie and who’s a baddie. They criticise those politicians they don’t like as if all politicians should be candid and strictly principled in all they say and do. Then of course when those on their own side do the same, they immediately make excuses — of course they have to cut corners given how ruthless their opponents are etc etc.
By this means almost everyone’s political chit-chat participates in a kind of moral panto. It’s one of the many ways in which political culture gets engulfed in wishful thinking. Indeed, as I’ve said before, I think we need a whole new ‘alt-political discourse’ to rise above the moral panto of wishful thinking into which the current political discourse has descended.
I don’t want to get too high on my horse about Cannold here as short pieces must compress what is said, but it really did stick in my craw to be told that her analysis was that of “an ethicist”. If that’s what ethicists have to tell us — that we have to choose between naivete and everyone’s-in-it-for-themselves-cynicism — then so much the worse for ethicism. I prefer ethics which is all about that land bounded by the two extremes of panto. It’s all about how we try to feel good about our own conduct in a murky world — a world in which vice always comes disguised as virtue.
Still, Liz Cheney got into politics to trade off ends and means and then got herself into the situation she’s in, and she’s digging in and fighting. She’s fighting for us all. That’s good enough for hero status for me.