Kamala Harris — not Liz Cheney — is calling Republicans back to their party’s roots

The big mistake most of the media made with their coverage last week Kamala Harris and Liz Cheney visit came to the birthplace of the Republican Party in Wisconsin in the form of a suggestion that Cheney, one of the most prominent names in contemporary Republican politics, would provide Harris, the Democratic presidential nominee, with a connection to historic roots. values ​​of the Grand Old Party.

In fact, it was the other way around.

Cheney, a former Republican congressional leader, has previously taken far-right positions on war and peace, corporate power, workers’ rights, immigration and a host of other issues that would have embarrassed the people who founded the union. Republican Party. She is also the daughter of former Republican Vice President Dick Cheney, who dragged the party into the camp of neoconservatives and made his name synonymous with tax cuts for the wealthy and subordination to corporations.

Harris — the daughter of immigrants — is working on proposals to strengthen the federal government’s ability to fight divestment, tax the wealthy, improve conditions for the working class, and advance economic, social and social causes. racial justice—who would be far more likely to inspire the people who launched the Republican Party in the Ripon school building at the University of Eastern Wisconsin.

While he may not be as left-wing as the Ripon Republicans of 1854, Harris has views that are reasonably consistent with the first candidate elected to the presidency. Republican Abraham Lincoln denounced the “horrible injustice of slavery” at a time when most Southerners and many Northerners accepted the original sin of the American experiment; supported comprehensive land reforms; sided with immigrant workers; and fought for the working class. “Labor precedes and is independent of capital,” Lincoln declared in his first annual address to the nation in 1861. “Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is superior to capital and deserves much more attention.”

That line is often quoted by labor unions, which are now among Harris’s staunchest supporters — and which have opposed the anti-union policies of the Cheneys and their corporate allies for decades. But politics makes strange alliances. That’s how Cheney, the former Republican congressional leader who split with his party’s chairman in 2021 after he tried to sway the 2020 presidential election, has become Harris’s top Republican backer.

Harris and Cheney came to Ripon with the goal of encouraging more Republicans to join the former Wyoming representative in supporting the Democratic nominee’s presidential bid. It’s a politically significant effort at a time when Harris is competing in the presidential race with former President Donald Trump, the authoritarian extremist who spent the best part of a decade turning government into a personality cult.

Despite the former president’s increasingly tight grip on the party machine, millions of party members reject Cheney’s opinion on Thursday. as Trump’s “perverted cruelty.” Former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley won 4.3 million votes in her primary challenge to Trump — garnering significant support in Wisconsin, Michigan, Arizona and other close-knit battleground states. Although Haley is now a Trump supporter, her supporters have organized a well-funded Haley Voters for Harris campaign that is actively trying to sway disaffected Republicans to Harris.

Cheney appeared with Harris at a packed rally where banners proclaimed, “County above party,” and where the former Wyoming representative told wavering Republicans, “This election is not about putting patriotism before partisanship. This is our duty.”

Trump’s response to this threat was to brand Harris as:a radical leftist.” Like most contemporary Republicans — along with many Democrats and members of the media — Trump imagines that the Republican Party has always been conservative. But this is a political mistake.