Trouble in America. A vacuous president in over his head, expanding his executive powers and marginalising Congress. Illegal abductions of foreign individuals. Illegal detentions of people, accompanied by torture. An American foreign policy designed by powerful business interests. A tax policy designed by the same, with the apparent objective of abolishing taxes altogether. A Supreme Court compliant with the president’s accumulation of power. An elaborate web of lies woven by the administration for the purpose of justifying murderous undertakings overseas. A plot to subvert a presidential election.
Readers will recognise this as a chilling account of Donald Trump’s two presidencies. But it is also a description of George W Bush’s catastrophic eight-year reign. That administration was mostly directed, not by the callow, rudderless Bush, but by his enigmatic vice-president, Dick Cheney, who died last week aged 84. The most powerful vice-president in American history, especially during Bush’s first, most consequential term, the secretly criminal Cheney served as a kind of proof concept for the openly defiant criminal, Trump.
Democratic victories in various elections across the country had somewhat eased the feeling that the country is headed toward apocalypse. But the sudden resurfacing of Cheney in the news is a dour reminder that the country is floundering amid its swelling contradictions. (Even as a corpse, it is hard to mourn this agent of torture and mass murder.) Here was the very architect of the disastrous, entirely unnecessary Iraq War, a man driven by lust for oil and money and power who was, in his final years, lionised by liberals for his “brave” opposition to Trump. Cheney’s announcement that he was voting for Kamala Harris won him an outpouring of gratitude and affection from the country’s liberal establishment. Now Trump knows what to do, after ruining the republic and upending the world, to win the hearts of his enemies and put in a bid for a spot on Mount Rushmore. Share their contempt for his successor.
It is an almost excruciating irony that in his later years Cheney – along with his daughter, Liz – was celebrated for his criticism of Trump. Trump has been, in fact, pursuing the same abolition of taxes and regulations that the conservatives had been dreaming of for generations, and which Cheney, working behind the hapless Bush, to a great extent made even more of a reality than Reagan had been able to. Trump and his gang simply picked up where Bush-Cheney left off.
The result of Bush-Cheney letting the market run wild, making large tax cuts and deregulating the banks, was twofold. One effect was to run up deficits that Bush’s government tried to tame by reducing social benefits – it was yet another intensification of the crisis of “affordability” that has now become the Democrats’ war cry. The other was to hasten a collapse of the American economy in 2007 and 2008 that led to a worldwide depression – and to eight years of Obama and Democratic rule. When some liberals quietly counsel letting Trump hoist himself by his own petard, they are thinking of the revolutionary effects of Cheney and the economic far right’s myopic greed. The worse the better, as the Leninists used to say. Though, it should be said when today’s conservatives blindly grab all they can, consequences be damned, they are not thinking of Cheney and Bush at all.
What is interesting about Cheney, in contrast to Trump, who sees the world defensively, from a Queens stoop, and to the East Coast-educated figures nudging the helplessly impulsive Trump every which way, is that Cheney was a man of the West, of the Frontier. He saw the world offensively, as it were, from the top of a mountain or from a horizonless plain. He was born in Nebraska and bred and mostly educated in Wyoming, where his family moved when he was 13. Strangely, considering the mythic place the West holds in the American imagination, no American president had ever, or has ever, been born and raised in the West. To the extent that Cheney was the driving force behind the irresolute Bush, you could say that he was the only American leader to have come from that place of American legend.
The blending of neoconservative foreign ambitions with Cheney’s is a uniquely American story. On the one hand, a man of the mountains and the valleys and the plains hankering for other people’s gold; on the other, urban Jewish intellectuals fancying themselves gunfighters for freedom and democracy. Unlike the neoconservatives he was surrounded by, Cheney approached the situation in Iraq in a prosaic Western fashion. That is to say, in the manner of American pioneers, he saw oil-soaked land under a big blue sky and took all he could get. With the taciturn Cheney, the American wilderness met the Arab desert; the heedless romantic pragmatism of big, empty American spaces ran up against the implacable absolutism of big, empty Middle Eastern spaces.
It is interesting that, unlike most American leaders, especially conservative ones, Cheney rarely, if ever, referred to God, or expressed religious sentiments. His was the wilderness ethos of the American West: vast, unhindered acquisition on one side; infinite deregulation beating an untrammelled path to eternity on the other. His boundless amorality overwhelmed Bush’s pedigreed indecisions and hesitations – just as Trump has overwhelmed liberal mandarins used to playing by the rules invented by their own class. Liberal elites stab you in the back with the sharp little v’s of virtue. “Dick Cheney was perfectly comfortable with stabbing you in the chest,” said someone who had worked in the Bush White House. Cheney was Trump avant la lettre.
“Am I the evil genius in the corner that nobody ever sees come out of his hole?” Cheney once darkly joked, flashing a jarringly puerile nihilism that has now become a political movement. Cheney may be dead – too late for all the people his policies caused to be tortured and killed. But the evil “genius” he laid the foundation for is out of his hole, in plain, unrelenting view.
[Further reading: The limits of Zohran Mamdani’s TikTok politics]
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