I’ve been thinking a lot about Liz Cheney recently. I expect many people have been thinking a lot about Liz Cheney recently. I suspect former President Donald Trump dreams about Liz Cheney. Whether those are nightmares or revenge fantasies is anyone’s guess.
Cheney took a principled stand against Donald Trump’s fitness to fulfill his office when she voted, along with only nine other Republicans, to impeach him in January 2021. She took a principled stand when she agreed to co-chair the January 6th Committee and has stood firmly in support of the Committee’s work even when it cost her a leadership position in the House of Representatives. Now, she has lost her House seat due to her refusal to join most of her Republican colleagues in unwavering support of the Big Lie and Donald Trump. Still, instead of cowering and slinking away, she has publicly committed to continue to work to oppose Donald Trump and all the Republicans who have pledged allegiance to him and his election denial.
This is a big deal, there’s no denying. The only way that our relatively young and unprecedented system of government has continued to work for as long as it has is because, despite any disagreements on policy, members of both parties pledged loyalty to the overarching principles of democratic government, to the Constitution. I’m not a great fan of any number of aspects of our political system and will argue until the day I die that we have rarely if ever lived up to the stated principles upon which this country was founded, but even in my criticism, I can appreciate the importance of a greater ideal to draw us all together.
The way Liz Cheney has stood up for that higher ideal in opposition to the majority of her party continues to be a master class in integrity.
However, watching the media around Cheney’s recent choices has also been instructive concerning what we fundamentally misunderstand about integrity.
Perhaps it is a function of our primal tendency towards tribalism, our instinctual attraction to “us vs. them”. Being biologically prone to that sort of social sorting makes binary thinking attractive in general— good/bad, black/white, in/out. Nuance has no place in this system. People, in their stubborn complexity, have no real place in this system. And integrity, for all of its moral and ethical impetus, has no place in binary systems either.
Author Rebecca Solnit described the conundrum recently when she wrote:
Apparently, a lot of adults have trouble with the concept--and reality--that just as good people can do bad things, so bad people can do good things, and I give you Liz Cheney, who after what appears to be a lifetime of doing or at least supporting very bad things, including her war-crimes-profiteer father, is doing a good thing and paying for it…
I get the impression people want everyone to be slotted into a tidy pigeonhole so they don't have to keep thinking and sifting, want people to be all good or all bad, and I certainly see a lot of tidying up of the record--excusing sins, ignoring virtues-- to achieve that goal (and a whole other tome could be written about the condemnation of people in the past for having the values and views of their time rather than ours).
People love categories so much they stuff everything into them whether or not they fit, ignore the contradictions and complexities, and once they've slotted something into its proper category assume they know it. The main thing about categories is that they are leaky and contain contradictions. They are useful and necessary descriptions of reality up to a point--after all words are categories, though even drink or horse or fair can mean many things. Taken too far they obscure what's out there.
Integrity is dictated by what we do— repeatedly, consistently, habitually. It’s not who we are. Every day we make choices that test our integrity. Just because we chose integrity today doesn’t mean we’ll choose it tomorrow. We don’t earn our spot on the integrity team and then get to keep it forever. Integrity doesn’t offer tenure.
Liz Cheney has, in the last year and a half, exhibited integrity around Donald Trump’s leadership of the Republican party and his actions to upend our democracy, but she also voted with the policies of his administration, by her own estimates, 93 percent of the time he was in office. She didn’t stand in the way of him being elected despite his history of sexual assault and misogyny or vote to impeach him for lies and collusion the first time she had a chance. She didn’t stand in the way of his family separation policy (though she did applaud when he ended it, which to my mind is a little late for integrity). She didn’t support the last round of Covid relief funding because, according to her website, it rewarded illegal immigrants and released prisoners, as if they were not human victims of the pandemic just like everyone else. She appears fine with dehumanization in the service of smaller government and lower taxes. Dehumanization isn’t ever an aspect of integrity.
Many folks are rushing to insist, “Oh, look! Liz Cheney’s one of the good guys now!” I’m not countering that she’s one of the bad guys. As I said, binaries have no real place in an integrity practice. Cheney has stood up with tremendous integrity recently on specific issues of deep importance to the fate of our country. This is worthy of applause. But, like all of us, she has many choices to make in this life. Whether or not she chooses integrity consistently is anyone’s bet. I’d argue her batting average isn’t great so far, despite her knocking it out of the park of late.
Integrity is like democracy. It only stays alive because we participate. Cheney has modeled recently how to participate. Now all of us, including Liz Cheney, have to decide to keep participating.
What do you think about Liz Cheney’s recent stands for democracy and integrity?
Speaking of democracy, I’m working the polls tomorrow for Election Day here in New York State. It’s my first time as a Democratic Poll Site Manager, which means I’ll be at work from 5 AM to 10 PM. It’s one of the ways I participate, both in democracy and integrity, but it’s a long day. Send me good thoughts! (Caffeine and chocolate also accepted.)
Oh! And perhaps when you’re reading this I’ll be in a job interview for a half-time gig at the local university library. Don’t you love libraries? I do. So. Many. Books. As we Quakers say, hold me in the Light, please.
XO, Asha