Two things are worth pointing out about the imminent passing of the Liz Cheney media phenomenon. First, she is the type of elite that our Founders, namely, Jefferson, warned us about: The sort of person who, once ensconced in the capital city court culture, acquires most or all of the affectations and vices of the very governing elites he or she previously had sworn to oppose.
This has always been a temptation for newcomers to Washington, even those who start out as brash conservative or populist firebrands. Indeed, two of the most reviled anti-Establishmebr figures in American nation politics, Richard Nixon and Barry Goldwater, both yielded to these temptations. And why wouldn’t they?After years of assiduously seeking and holding onto power in the capital of the most powerful and influential nation on earth, men and women expect a return on such a long investment and, even more, r-e-s-p-e-c-t from their peers.
They have rubbed elbows with colleagues, mostly liberals, who are lionized after retirement or death, by the court (i.e., Mainstream) media. How can they help but envy that? They’re politicians, after all.
Many conservatives from former presidents to sitting Supreme Court justices have yearned for some measure of hagiographic treatment – an acknowledgement within elite quarters that they have “grown in office” and, in the course of which, acquired a measure of the intellectual depth and gravitas afforded their more (in the opinion of elite media) deserving liberal counterparts.
Recall that the late Chief Justice Warren Burger, a Nixon appointee and the graduate of night law school, embraced affirmation action dogma, apparently with the intention of brandishing his intellectual bona fide.
But again, they’re only human.
Yet, in many cases, this grudging respect or tempered adulation, however it is expressed, is invariably extracted at a price. And in Cheney’s case, she can virtually rest assured that the media will consume and digest her, disregarding every bit that can’t be extracted to their advantage.
She will be briefly hailed as a thoughtful and courageous GOP maverick, perhaps invited as a speaker at the 2024 Democratic Party Convention, and then tossed aside and forgotten until, some 30 years from now, when she’s afforded a limousine ride from her assisted living facility to the Kennedy Presidential Library to receive a “Profiles in Courage” Award presented by some distant Kennedy descendant.
Of course, that is what our elite class and their media enables do: They enlist and rehabilitate for temporary political expediency conservative political leaders whom they have previously reviled as reactionary, if not racist.
