By Chris Satullo

Let’s start by recalling some famous words from a wise man who ruined his own life with drink and recklessness:

“The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.”

That was F. Scott Fitzgerald in The Crack-up.

Fitzgerald embodied his own point; he was a genius of an artist who was a mess of a human being. Both poles were present at the same time, neither negating the other.

It’s not exactly a shocker to note that the Republican caucus in the U.S. Congress these days is not chock-a-block with first-rate intelligences. But the group’s collective inability to hold two ideas in their head at the same time is, to invoke one of Aaron Sorkin’s favorite phrases, really quite something.

Dudes – and, oh yes, you, too, Elise, Lauren, Marsha and Marj – it really is possible for someone to get 74 million votes and still lose fair and square…when the other guy gets 81 million.

It can be possible for vote fraud to happen from time to time across this large and ethically challenged land of ours, yet for it to be impossible to pull such shenanigans at anywhere near the scale needed to steal a presidential election, which is contested simultaneously in thousands of autonomous jurisdictions.

And, speaking of recent nonsense, it is possible for someone to disagree with you about whether Donald Trump’s nihilistic lies and malignant narcissism should be endlessly indulged – and still be a sincere Republican.

Yes, I rise in defense of Liz Cheney, recently tossed from her leadership role in the GOP caucus for having the audacity to state – and keep on stating – a simple truth: Joe Biden beat Donald Trump in the prescribed way, by getting more real, actual people to vote for him. And won by a lot.

That Cheney persists in this truth-telling should not be remarkable, but in Red World it sadly is. That she has done it in the face of abuse and risk to both her career and personal safety makes it brave. That she’s doing it in timely, urgent defense of the Constitution and democracy should earn her praise, not the censure dealt out by the Clown Caucus.

Whose members once again flunked the Fitzgerald Test.

But noting that is almost like training an AK-47 on a barrel full of mackerel. Let’s instead turn our gaze to the folks who pride themselves on their superior discernment and sophistication – the left-leaning pundit class. This group is having a hard time simply saying, “Thanks, Liz.” They are failing to meet F. Scott’s standard as well. From Maureen Dowd of the New York Times to Adam Serwer of the Atlantic to Chauncey DeVega of Salon, they’re struggling to hold the fact of Cheney’s admirable stand in their brains along with some other facts:

• She’s a conservative who holds many views and has taken many stands with which they (and I) disagree.

• She’s the loving, loyal daughter of Dick Cheney, the former vice president who is probably a war criminal and who certainly was a prime mover behind both the Iraq debacle and the trend towards an unaccountable White House that enabled Trump’s lawlessness. What’s more, she’s defended some of her dad’s most questionable deeds.

All that is true. Dick Cheney was a catastrophe who probably should have been hauled to The Hague for trial. It’s annoying, at the very least, to hear any defense of him.

Yet it’s also true that Liz Cheney has performed, at considerable risk, an indispensable service to the Republic – calling the Big Lie what it is and urging Republican voters to abandon it.

It’s a sign of first-rate citizen to be able to keep two opposing thoughts in mind at the same time, and not let past sins overwhelm and thwart due gratitude for current virtue.

The woke left shows a distressingly growing tendency to treat any and all missteps, mistakes, blind spots or lapses from ethical purity in one’s past as disqualifying, as things that cast one into a pile marked beneath contempt and beyond redemption.

This puritanical stance seems as ignorant of human nature as it is ungenerous. None of us can measure up to a one-lapse-and-you’re-done standard. That takes us into French Revolution territory, where purists who were sending people to the guillotine one month ended up riding the cart to the blade the next.

Beyond that, though – and this is where the Liz Cheney example is really on point – it’s counterproductive. It’s self-defeating. It gets the incentives all wrong.

When you have a group of people headed down the wrong path – as we certainly do with the Trump-besotted GOP of today – when one of them bravely breaks ranks and does the right thing, speaking up for sanity, it behooves us to applaud.  Not to go: “Yeah, fine, but we still despise you because of x, y and z.”

That second response surely does not encourage the person to stay on the right path. Why stick out your neck if this is all the thanks you get? Just as important, what does an ungenerous response from liberals tell all the other Republicans who know Trump is nuts but are afraid to say it out loud?

It tells them: Don’t bother. Your own tribe will pelt you, and the other one will do nothing to bind up your wounds. Better to keep your head down and pray the fit of collective madness will pass. Somehow.

I don’t like the odds of our Republic surviving if that’s the syndrome we settle for.

—

Chris Satullo, a civic engagement consultant, is a former editorial page editor/columnist at The Philadelphia Inquirer, and a former vice president/news at WHYY public media in Philadelphia