Democrats Mourn Liz Cheney’s Primary Loss to Harriet Hageman

Robert Reich, a former secretary of labor under then-President Bill Clinton, wrote an op-ed for the Guardian in praise of Cheney. He wrote:

Six days after the 6 January 2021 attack on the Capitol – when no other Republican in the House or Senate was willing to rebuke Trump – Cheney charged on the House floor that “the president of the United States summoned this mob, assembled the mob, and lit the flame of this attack. Everything that followed was his doing.”

The next day, Cheney joined nine other House Republicans and 222 Democrats in voting to impeach Trump.

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The role Cheney has played raises a larger question about the meaning of representative democracy. Is it the responsibility of elected officials to represent the views of their constituents or their own principles?

The question isn’t limited to Republicans. As the midterms draw closer, some Democratic operatives and pundits argue that Biden and the Democrats must move to the “center” to win.

But where is the center? Halfway between democracy and fascism? And if Democrats must go there to win, what’s the point of winning?

George Conway, a columnist for the Washington Post, wrote, “Whatever happens, @Liz_Cheney has won the general election for dignity, a race in which virtually none of her GOP colleagues could even compete.”