Liz Cheney just delivered one of the most important speeches in American history

It was a speech for the ages. Standing amid the stark Wyoming prairie, Congresswoman Liz Cheney conceded her primary race to Trump-backed challenger Harriet Hageman. History will likely not remember Hageman. Her small victory will end up as just a footnote in the story of American patriot Liz Cheney – a woman who last night gave what will come to be considered one of the most important speeches in American history.

“Our duty as citizens of this republic is not only to defend the freedom that’s been handed down to us,” Cheney said. “We also have an obligation to learn from the actions of those who came before, to the stories of grit and perseverance of the brave men and women who built and saved this Union. In the lives of these great Americans, we find inspiration and purpose.”

Referencing the Battle of the Wilderness, one of the bloodiest battles of the Civil War, Cheney invoked the courage of Lincoln, Grant, and all those who “saved our Union” and “saved freedom” from its dissolution. “And if we listen closely,” she said, “they are speaking to us down the generations. We must not idly squander what so many have fought and died for.”

They are indeed speaking to us, and last night they used Cheney as their mouthpiece. Her words echoed – sometimes literally – the words of those Americans who came before her, the founders and refounders of this great experiment in self-governance. In doing so, she reminded us that we, the opponents of authoritarianism and proponents of democracy on both sides of the aisle, are the true inheritors of the Revolution, of Washington, of Lincoln, and of Dr King.

In his farewell address to the nation, George Washington warned about the very real inclination of governments to develop towards despotism. “It is important, likewise, that the habits of thinking in a free country should inspire caution in those entrusted with its administration to confine themselves within their respective constitutional spheres, avoiding in the exercise of the powers of one department to encroach upon another,” he wrote.

This was a theme Cheney touched on last night, leaving no doubt that she views Donald Trump as the very despot President Washington feared. “At the heart of the attack on January 6 is a willingness to embrace dangerous conspiracies that attack the very core of our nation,” Cheney said, pointing out that “lawful elections reviewed by the courts when necessary, and certified by the states and Electoral College, determine who serves as president.”

This is what happened in 2020, yet Trump tried to use the power of the presidency to undermine democracy and steal an election with little regard to the constitutional limits on the exercise of those vast powers. “If we do not condemn the conspiracies and lies, if we do not hold those responsible to account, we will be excusing this conduct, and it will become a feature of all elections,” Cheney said. “America will never be the same.”

In delivering those home truths and telling Americans what they may not like to hear, Cheney follows in the tradition of another president – Jimmy Carter. Carter’s infamous “Malaise Speech” in 1979 went down like a lead balloon. Fearing that the “erosion of our confidence in the future is threatening to destroy the social and the political fabric of America,” Carter warned that “our people are losing that faith, not only in government itself but in the ability as citizens to serve as the ultimate rulers and shapers of our democracy.”

President Carter got a lot of flak for that speech 43 years ago. Looking back from 2022, however, it seems eerily prescient. “Our nation is barreling, once again, towards crisis, lawlessness, and violence,” Cheney said this week, laying the blame directly at the feet of those who fall in line behind the authoritarian Trump instead of fighting for democracy. “No American should support election-deniers for any position of genuine responsibility, where their refusal to follow the rule of law will corrupt our future.”

Victory, she reminds us, is not guaranteed. “Our American freedom is a providential departure from history… it is said that the long arc of history bends towards justice and freedom,” she added, invoking the words of Martin Luther King, Jr’s famous 1968 speech at the National Cathedral. “That’s true, but only if we make it bend.”

Dr King understood that it took committed citizens peacefully confronting the moral bankruptcy of authoritarian Jim Crow laws to change the status quo. He was clear that only by believing in and fighting for a better future could one be possible. The success of the American experiment is not guaranteed – it is, after all, an experiment.

This is something Cheney also understands, and it is something Abraham Lincoln understood as he delivered what may be the most famous speech in American history. “Fourscore and seven years ago, our fathers brought forth, on this continent, a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal,” Lincoln said in his legendary Gettysburg Address. “Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived, and so dedicated, can long endure.”

It did endure the Civil War. We came out of that bloody conflict a far more perfect union, though still imperfect in so many horrific ways. The beauty of America – of Americans – though is that, as Cheney and Dr King said, we make history bend towards justice. “Today, our highest duty is to bend the arc of history to preserve our nation and its blessings to ensure that freedom will not perish, to protect the very foundations of this constitutional republic,” Cheney said, combining the words of the Great Emancipator and the father of the Civil Rights Movement to great patriotic effect.

I only hope that we heed her call. If we do – and we are successful – then Cheney’s words will ring through history like the Liberty Bell, just as those of the great Americans who came before her do. She will be remembered not as a Congressional loser, but as a patriotic hero. At a time of great historical and moral consequence, Liz Cheney spoke to the moment and inspired a nation to resolve itself that we shall have, as President Lincoln hoped in 1863, “a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”