Atlantic staff writer Russell Berman highlights it in, “‘I’m Not Sure Progressives Want Democrats to Be That Big-Tent.’“
For more than two decades, the most popular nickname liberals had for Dick Cheney was “Darth Vader.” And even that was practically a term of endearment compared with the runner-up: “war criminal.” So when Kamala Harris touted Cheney’s endorsement of her campaign during Tuesday’s debate, not all progressives were nodding in approval.
“I cringed,” Joseph Geevarghese, the executive director of the left-wing group Our Revolution, told me. “At the end of the day, I’m not sure progressives want Democrats to be that big-tent.”
The 83-year-old former vice president and his daughter Liz Cheney, the former representative from Wyoming, are now the most prominent of more than 200 former GOP officials to back the Democratic nominee. (Another Bush-era bogeyman of Democrats, former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, joined them on Thursday.) In his statement last week saying he would vote for Harris, Dick Cheney described her opponent in even graver terms than he once used against Democrats. Donald Trump, the elder Cheney said, “can never be trusted with power again.”
On one level, this clearly helps Harris. During the debate, she was able to use the Cheney endorsements as part of a broader effort to rebut Republican attacks that she’s too far left for moderate voters. (Her pledges to support fracking and boost small businesses came in the same vein.) But backing from the GOP could make another one of her campaign objectives harder to pull off.
Despite being the incumbent vice president, Harris has tried to establish herself as the change candidate, repeatedly urging voters during the debate to “turn the page” on the Trump era. Yet she has embraced many of the same establishment figures—including Democrats such as the Clintons, and Republicans such as the Cheneys—that Trump has long used as foils to make himself look like the agent of change.
For Harris, the trade-off was apparent in a New York Times/Siena poll taken after last month’s Democratic National Convention. In the survey, more than 60 percent of likely voters said they wanted a candidate that represented a major change; most said that Trump represented that change, but just 25 percent said the same of Harris. “He positions himself as not part of the establishment that has controlled politics for most of my life,” said Stevie O’Hanlon, a 28-year-old spokesperson for the Sunrise Movement, a progressive group focused on climate change. “The more that Harris associates herself with people in that political establishment, the easier Trump’s job is.”
Trump backers have tried to use the Cheney endorsement to appeal to disaffected Democrats. “Dick Cheney has just made the choice very clear: A vote for Kamala Harris is a vote for Dick Cheney, the architect of everything that has gone wrong in the Middle East for the last few decades,” Tulsi Gabbard, the former Democratic representative from Hawaii who is now supporting Trump, said last week during an event with Tucker Carlson. Another dark lord of Republican politics, Roger Stone, asked on X: “I guess Kamala is pursuing the warmonger vote?”
On the left, however, the Cheneys’ endorsement of Harris won the approval of no less an anti-war progressive than Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, who applauded the father-daughter duo on Meet the Press for “their courage in defending democracy.” But for Geevarghese, whose organization grew out of Sanders’s 2016 presidential campaign, Harris’s name-dropping of the Cheneys represented a rare discordant note in an otherwise encouraging debate.
On Thursday morning, in an effort to sound an alarm among Democrats who were mostly jubilant about Harris’s performance, Our Revolution released the results of a survey it had conducted with more than 10,000 of its members after the debate. The survey found that although a large majority of respondents believed that Harris had won the night, sizable minorities said they did not fully trust her or believe she would sufficiently take on corporate power as president.
This is all beyond silly. While I’m likely somewhat more aligned than they are with Harris on policy matters, the Cheneys have endorsed Harris for the same reason I have: policy disputes are secondary when the alternative is a sociopath who doesn’t believe in democracy and the rule of law, much less longstanding norms of presidential behavior. They’re not saying, “Finally, the Democrats have nominated someone like us!” but rather “We’d rather help elect the most progressive Democrat ever nominated than side with the man who tried to overthrow the last election by violence.”
Whatever one thinks of Dick Cheney’s actions in support of the Global War on Terrorism—and, while I’m more sympathetic to them than Harris, much less Geevarghese, some of them were egregious —he’s an American patriot. Unlike the man who topped the ticket on which he was twice elected Vice President, Cheney felt he had to take a public stand to make it clear he finds Trump unworthy to serve as Commander-in-Chief.
Similarly, despite her heroic stance in the wake of January 6, Liz Cheney hasn’t suddenly become a Democrat—or even a moderate. She’s simply unable to defend what our erstwhile party has come to represent.
To be fair, Geevarghese’s view is a decided minority within the Democratic Party.
Among the progressives I spoke with, Geevarghese was an outlier in questioning her Cheney shoutout. Most were fine with Harris promoting the endorsement, even if they were taken aback by a Democrat linking arms with a man they’ve long reviled for his role in orchestrating the Iraq War and defending the use of torture against suspected terrorists. “I mean, it’s weird,” Markos Moulitsas, the Daily Kos founder, who was one of Cheney’s loudest critics in the early 2000s, told me. “I didn’t put on my bingo card of life that I would be on the same side as Dick Cheney.”
Svante Myrick, the president of the progressive group People for the American Way and a former mayor of Ithaca, New York, seemed okay with it too, even though he considers Cheney and former President George W. Bush “war criminals and war profiteers and genuinely the worst people to lead our country not named Donald Trump.” But for Myrick, Harris’s acceptance of Cheney’s endorsement would be a problem only if she had given up something in return. “Kamala Harris hasn’t changed any of her views to appeal to Dick Cheney,” Myrick told me. “The support seems to have come about honestly. They disagree on taxes and foreign affairs and the military-industrial complex and almost everything except the fact that we should have elections in this country and the winner should hold office.”
Which is an important point of agreement! Indeed, it’s a non-negotiable baseline for representative democracy to function.
