Follow the artists. The brilliant among them usually detect the trends in a society or culture before the rest of us, whether we are politicians, plumbers or college professors. Novelists from Margaret Atwood to Octavia Butler have been writing fictional accounts of the collapse of the United States for decades, and I am just now seeing what they see: My nation is teetering on the brink.
If it weren’t so horrifying, it would be amusing. One of the two major political parties has committed itself to sanctifying a grotesque lie, to elevating an obvious falsehood as its organizing principle. The House Republican Caucus is on the verge of ousting Rep. Liz Cheney, R-Wyo., from her leadership position because she will not endorse former President Donald J. Trump’s outrageous lie that the last presidential election was stolen from him.
Let me repeat that: The GOP has decided that its defining doctrine is to support and spread a lie — a fabrication that is both demonstrably false and quite dangerous. The party of Abraham Lincoln, Dwight Eisenhower and Ronald Reagan has put aside fealty to truth, honor and the U.S. Constitution itself and replaced it with absolute allegiance to a deranged narcissist. In service of their mad king, GOP leaders in the House and Senate have also decided to ignore the Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, which President Joseph Biden rightly called “the worst attack on our democracy since the Civil War.”
If Omar El Akkad had written this scenario in “American War” (he didn’t; in his novel, the U.S. falls apart over climate change) or if Lawrence Wright had written it in “The End of October” (he didn’t; his fictional U.S. is laid to waste by a deadly pandemic), I would have laughed it off as too silly to merit attention, too ridiculous for a serious novel. Yet, inexplicably, we have arrived at this post-satire period of our history.
Cheney is not under fire because she is a moderate Republican or Democrat-in-waiting. She practices the same repugnant reactionary politics that course through the veins of her father, Dick Cheney, and that characterize the right wing of the Republican Party. She mimics her father’s views on foreign policy and national security, including endorsing torture. She has voted for tax cuts, for Trump’s border wall and against Obamacare. Her sister, Mary, who is gay, chastised her publicly for her stance against gay marriage.
Cheney even defended Trump after he was heard on tape admitting to sexually assaulting women, claiming that Hillary Clinton’s handling of her emails was worse. She has voted for Trump’s policies more often than her would-be successor in House GOP leadership, Rep. Elise Stefanik, R-N.Y.
Stefanik voted against the Trump tax cuts, which once would have been a suicidal vote for a GOP member of Congress. But having become an enthusiastic cheerleader for Trump, her star is rising.
Cheney, by contrast, has refused to dive down the rabbit hole into an alternative universe where “war is peace, freedom is slavery and ignorance is strength,” as George Orwell wrote in his classic novel “1984.” She voted to impeach Trump after the Capitol insurrection. And she has reminded her fellow Republicans that, after numerous Trump-appointed judges tossed out his spurious claims of voter fraud, they should uphold the peaceful transfer of power. “The most conservative of conservative values is reverence for the rule of law,” she wrote recently.
It is unlikely that her appeals to the Constitution will matter to her fellow partisans since 147 of them voted in January not to certify Biden’s electoral victory. Most (though perhaps not all) of them know better, of course. If they believed that Biden’s election was illegitimate, they would have to explain how their own elections, counted on the same ballots, were not. But they are willing to sacrifice morality, logic and common sense in order to win the support of the voters who remain in thrall to Trump.
Some political strategists believe that the GOP’s metamorphosis into a cult of personality signals its doom. I’m not so sure. The GOP retains enough power, partly through voter suppression, that Trump could win the White House again. That would spell doom for the country.
Cynthia Tucker won the Pulitzer Prize for commentary in 2007. She can be reached at cynthia@cynthiatucker.com.
