FOLLOW THE MONEY.

The Swamp takes care of its own.

While Liz Cheney lost among Wyoming voters, one contest where she emerged victorious was the money race against her Trump-endorsed opponent.

According to the most recent filings, Cheney raised over $15 million for her campaign versus $4.4 million for Harriet Hageman. The bigger bankroll didn’t help her much on Tuesday, however, with Hageman decisively winning by nearly 40 percentage points.

But Cheney responded to her widely-expected defeat with a quick pivot. She launched a new political group for herself aimed at a possible run for president and, flush with cash, the new group's website was up and accepting donations by Wednesday morning.

Barbara Comstock, a Cheney ally and GOP donor, told Yahoo Finance that the money from supporters like her would “definitely” keep flowing, adding she is “thrilled [Cheney] is going to continue to stay active” as a leader of the effort by anti-Trump Republicans to take on the former president.

Who is her intended audience?

Come up with a Trumpian bundle without the drama, or some sort of pragmatic culturally conservative populism, and that might be doing people a solid.  That's not where she's going.

During her recent campaign, Cheney’s donors spanned the national and ideological spectrum, from luminaries of the GOP establishment like former president George W. Bush and Senator Mitt Romney to Democratic-affiliated donors like Jeffrey Katzenberg and LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman. From the business world, figures like Melinda Gates and Citi CEO Jane Fraser have also sent money.

What remains to be seen is how many liberal donors, who disagree with Cheney on nearly every issue except for being against Trump, will be on board for the next phase. Dmitri Mehlhorn, an adviser to several major Democratic donors including Hoffman, told the New York Times, “If [Cheney] has really good plans, then the amount of money available to her is definitely in the double-digit millions.”

Establishment GOP figures like Comstock, who served in Congress from 2015 to 2019, are also waiting to hear more about next steps. She gave the Cheney campaign $3,000 this year as part of an array of giving to Republican candidates all around the country.

Perhaps, if the tech oligarchs put their class interests ahead of their Weimar aesthetics, she's got a chance. To the likes of Common Dreams regular Richard Eskow, she's the lesser evil, but still evil.

Cheney is one face of the creeping totalitarianism that has been eroding American democracy for decades (and it wasn’t in great shape to start). Her bitter feud with Donald Trump is best understood as part of an internal battle currently raging within this country’s anti-democratic forces.

To Mr Eskow, "democracy" means being able to cheat better.

As an added affront to the MSNBC crowd, which seems newly infatuated with the intelligence services, Cheney worked closely with her father as he overruled and at times intimidated career intelligence analysts. She attacked the FBI’s agents at a time when entrepreneurs were selling votive candles featuring its former director, Robert Mueller.

Democracy? Until recently, Cheney helped lead a political party that has systematically undermined American democracy through voter suppression, gerrymandering, caging, and other illegal schemes. She actively participated in this Republican war on democracy by, for example, defending GOP laws aimed at voter suppression and voting against the John Lewis Voting Rights Act.

For "voter suppression" read "positive identification of voters, signature verification, and tighter custody of absentee and mail ballots." But I digress.  Let's credit Mr Eskow with recognizing a common tic among Our Progressive Betters.  (Yes, he'd likely bridle at my use of "progressive."  Tango Sierra.)

[Rebecca] Solnit, often a fine writer, chooses to adopt the all-too-common Democratic posture of lofty condescension toward those who disagree. Failure to share her opinion is presented as a kind of learning disability (without the sympathy and solidarity such a condition should inspire). After offering a list of historical bad people who did good things—I assume her opponents know such people exist—Solnit concludes that Cheney critics lack “the ability to cope with complexity.”

Let's also credit him for stumbling upon the pernicious side of "bipartisanship."

The problem, from the point of view of Cheney et al., isn’t that the actions of Trump and his followers are unconstitutional. The problem is that they’re conspicuous. They’re obvious. And they’re moving too fast. A midnight lock picker doesn’t want another thief to show up with a blowtorch.

Trump’s brand of fascism is hasty, unruly, and impulsive, a cult of personality that is built around an unstable and vain figure. Cheney represents another branch of American totalitarianism, one built on institutions, elites, and stability. Hers is the slow totalitarianism of internal spying, voter suppression, dark money elections, and dynastic politics.

Cheney’s branch of American totalitarianism helped the military-national security establishment grow in power, forging ever-deepening ties with corporations, educational institutions, religious establishments, and political institutions at all levels—a hybrid form of government, lest we forget, that political scientists call ‘fascism.’

She and her peers kept this complex humming for many years. Then, Trump and his minions triggered the hasty and unruly violence of ‘the wrong people,’ who came breaking glass and shouting ugly names. This intrusion of the hoi polloi is led by people who don’t care about establishment figures like the Cheneys. They humiliate generals and intelligence officers, while acting outside the predictable range of bipartisan behaviors in Washington.

But with the threat has come an opportunity. As Republicans move ever closer to Trump’s lowbrow totalitarianism, Democrats and liberal voters are increasingly embracing the intelligence and military establishment. They idealize the FBI and CIA, hang onto the televised words of generals, and elevate war criminals like George W. Bush and the Cheneys at the slightest prompting. (In Bush’s case, apparently all it took was a piece of candy.)

Cheney and her colleagues are smart. If they have an endgame, and they almost certainly do, it is to build on this growing liberal support for elites—the same elites that have been eroding American democracy for decades. My suspicion is that Cheney’s new organization, “the Great Task,” will raise a great deal of money from Democrats in the name of opposing Trump and will use it to reinforce elite perceptions and institutions.

Maybe, and if they did so, that might not be all bad, provided the next move is to apply the same grim strategy to squad-adjacent Democrats that the soon-to-be-former member of Congress unsuccessfully sought to apply to Trump-adjacent Democrats.  She's not quite there.

There's “a part of the party that realizes even if they like Trump, like what he did, they also realize if 20% of us leave, you don't have a winning coalition,” she said in Wednesday's interview. But she acknowledges that Trump’s allies may not care and if he ultimately prevails in a GOP primary: "It’s “get your ticket on the Titanic folks, look forward to seeing you sink.”

In isolation, that ensures another round of Democrat agendas written in the faculty lounge.

My Chicago Boyz colleague "Sgt. Mom" is on to the scam.

It’s nice that the voters in Wyoming can emphatically kick to the curb a notorious carpet-bagger pol (whose speaking resemblance to Miss Piggy ought to be noted.) and whose personal portfolio has increased to an incredible degree during her tenure. Alas, cut short due to the obstinacy and stupidity of the voters – but never mind, she will no doubt flit off to some other profitable perch among the minor nobility. They do tend to take care of their own, after all.

In the meantime, we can make fun of them. It can be vicious, enjoyable fun – passing around disrespectful memes, satires, jokes and cartoons about our ruling class, pointing out their many hypocrisies, their double standards and public pratfalls. Laughter and derision are potent weapons, as Saul Alinsky pointed out in his Rule #5; “Ridicule is man’s most potent weapon. There is no defense. It is almost impossible to counterattack ridicule. Also it infuriates the opposition, who then react to your advantage.”

All true, and yet it's on us to hold the swamp dwellers accountable, turf them out, and don't hesitate to punish the major parties for giving us bad choices.