I agree with that. I feel like this attitude is too close to celebrating Liz Cheney as some kind of heroic martyr for the good of the nation, which I take severe issue with. She seems to be just as terrible as her father and just hasn't had a chance to do as much damage. Praising terrible people because they do the bare minimum that's expected of them doesn't seem like a great thing for the country, either. I think even seeing this as a principled stand on her part because she shares some "core principles" with the center left is probably a mistake. More than anything else, I'll bet it's her misjudging the political moment she's in and she'll probably pivot soon enough and then all the people who saw her as a hero will be like "What the hell Liz, what happened?" I mean Lindsay Graham did the same thing, and people act like that's some kind of mystery. No, he did what spineless politicians always do which is shift where the wind is blowing. And yes, a lot of them really don't care if it benefits the country if they can get something out of it. That's hyper-individualism for you.
And I definitely have issue with the idea with all of this that populism is bad. No, American populists opposed imperialist wars like the Spanish-American war and tried to work across racial divides. What is bad is demagoguery. Scapegoating current problems on people not responsible for them, like immigrants or single moms, is what the problem is. They're not the ones who have been pushing the idea of trickle-down economics, deindustrialization, and Wall Street bailouts. The response is not to push "moderate" neoliberal policies most people don't actually want anymore, but offer a real alternative to demagoguery.
