Feeling admiration for Cheney places me firmly on one side of an incredibly destructive divide in our politics. On Cheney’s side are those who still believe it’s possible, important, and praiseworthy for public officials to place country and Constitution over party, and even over personal self-interest, when they collide. Until fairly recently, this view was widely affirmed by politicians of both parties as well as by plenty of ordinary Americans. Today it’s held by nearly all Democrats and a minority of Republicans.

On the other side are those who follow former President Trump in denigrating such noble aspirations as either foolish or fundamentally dishonest. Those aspirations are foolish if the politician actually believes living up to ideals is better than pursuing his own advantage or the advantage of his friends and partisan allies. The aspirations are dishonest if the politician realizes their illusory character but nonetheless praises and engages in such deeds anyway, as a way of gaining political advantage from dim-witted suckers like Liz Cheney and me.

Trump may have done more than anyone in our politics to popularize the latter view, but he’s hardly the first person in history to weaponize cynicism. The ancient political philosophers were well aware of such claims. Plato’s dialogues, in particular, contain vivid depictions of characters, usually sophists, who mock earnest appeals to justice (while doing argumentative and rhetorical battle against Socrates’ sometimes rather extreme, unconditional moralism). Machiavelli revived and transformed the sophistical view, encouraging politicians to exhibit flexibility in doing good and evil as necessity demands.