Noted Trump hater and spotlight chaser Liz Cheney (R-Kabul) has been removed from House Republican leadership by a voice vote this morning, and there’s not much question as to who is going to replace her. Elise Stefanik—a 36-year-old New York four-termer with endorsements from President Trump, Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, and Minority Whip Steve Scalise—is all but inevitable.

The only thing that could make her a worse choice is if her father was Dick Cheney.

Stefanik officially kicked off her bid for House Republican Conference chair just minutes after the successful vote to remove Cheney the Younger, tweeting out a letter to her fellow GOP members asking for their votes:

READ: Why I’m running for House Republican Conference Chair

A letter to my colleagues on my vision to unify our GOP Conference, win the Majority, and fight on behalf of the American people to save our country??? pic.twitter.com/JGE5IqhNJo

— Elise Stefanik (@EliseStefanik) May 12, 2021

The tone she strikes is strange for 2021, and she seems able only to hit a single note. Stefanik boasts of her “laser focus on defeating the radical Socialist Democrat agenda of President Biden and Speaker Pelosi.” She laments (apparently never having heard of FDR) “the most significant Far-Left Socialist dismantling of America by any President or Congress in our Nation’s history.” She makes one flip and warns again of “the radical Democrats’ Socialist agenda” before pivoting to a warning of “the media and Socialist Democrats” and promising to “go on offense against the Socialist Democrats.”

I’d say she seems like a broken record, but I think that’s just how the song is supposed to sound. This stuff has proven effective, with some residual Red-Scaredness hanging on in the 2021 GOP all the way from the donor class right down to the base. But it will only be effective for so long—Boomers, whatever they might think, are not immortal. The voters for whom the Socialism Sucks™ shtick still has any purchase are quickly dying off.

Trump himself never shied away from this messaging, notably looping in tiny-faced Boomer-at-heart Charlie Kirk as his unofficial ambassador to the yoots. But it was always obviously a posture for him—a way to get the old folks on board with dollars and votes, a way to mend fences with the party’s marketeers. While railing against the socialist Democrats, the former president was always perfectly happy to exert political power in economic matters, and even to send relief checks to citizens in the face of state-imposed economic shutdowns.

Stefanik, meanwhile, seems to be a more sincere adherent of the “socialism is when government does things” school. Even still, she may be pushed to a more populist position simply due to the influence of the former president from behind the scenes. As has become increasingly clear in the months since January, it is still—and will be for a while—Donald Trump’s GOP. Many formerly laissez faire Republican leaders were forced to the right on economics during the Trump years, and Stefanik could well be pulled by the same political gravity. It is highly doubtful that Trump—or even McCarthy or Scalise, to a lesser extent—would have offered an endorsement without some kind of backroom guarantee that Stefanik would play ball.

If Stefanik will toe the America First line on economic policy, that’s all well and good, even if she does stick to the tired old messaging for political reasons. But that still leaves the question of, well, everything else.

On foreign policy, for instance—which is, ostensibly, the great dividing line between Trump and the “warmonger whose family stupidly pushed us into the never-ending Middle East Distaster“—Stefanik is every bit as hawkish as the outgoing conference chair. This tune hasn’t changed either, with Wednesday’s announcement letter urging a push to “strengthen our military to counter adversaries like the Chinese Communist Party.” In this arena, moreover, Trump has shown himself much less able to move others toward his position, or even to get most of his goals over the finish line. Four months after Trump left office, the most dovish Republican left on the national political stage is—well, he’s not doing great. Even with the 45th lurking in the shadows, we can hardly expect improvement on the foreign policy front just because Liz Cheney has been removed from leadership.

On social issues too, Stefanik is miles to the left of Cheney, and probably of the average American—to say nothing of the average Republican. Now, this is an area in which Trump (who often bragged of being the “most pro-gay president” ever) has proven not so much unable as unwilling to exert rightward pressure on the party. There’s good reason the most serious Republican candidate for governor of California is was Bruce Jenner. Elise Stefanik—who voted for the Equality Act in 2019—will fit in just fine. On abortion, too, the New York congresswoman is lukewarm at best, and we cannot expect pro-life leadership from her any more than we can expect it from the party.

Of course, it’s not all bad. She’s great on immigration. She won’t take away your guns. She knows that schools need to be reopened. She’s committed to election security and was always strongly against both dubious Trump impeachments. She is, in all likelihood, just good enough that we’re going to lay down and take it.

But we shouldn’t. Over the last year, Americans watched their cities burn as the government told them it was illegal to go to work; huge portions of the middle and lower classes were delivered to the brink of financial collapse, and now a massive eviction crisis is looming; the LGBT+ agenda made more progress than it had in years, and has now set its sights firmly on the young; the foundations of our national economy, faltering for ages, are now approaching total dissolution; the social fabric of the nation is in tatters. Americans today face a hundred grave—and even existential—threats, next to none of which has anything at all to do with the decades-old specters that distract Elise Stefanik.

A conservative party would do something about them. Even with Liz gone, don’t hold your breath.