The Worst of Us: Dick Cheney and the Dystopian World He Built

We live in Dick Cheney's America. God help us.

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I have spent my adult life hating Dick Cheney.

Hatred is a poisonous thing. It can corrode us. Warp us and twist us into a mirror image of that which we hate. But, when harnessed and processed, it can drive us to become something entirely different. We can look into the face of the hated and decide, through sheer force of will and tenacity of spirit, to steer away from that which we revile and evolve into its antithesis. This takes a ton of work, however, and a near constant vigilance.

Cheney, who died at the age of 84 today, was one of the worst of us. A brilliant, talented man who used his gifts in the pursuit of wealth, power, and the degradation of humanity. Regardless of how corporate media and moderates want to rhapsodize about him as a “statesman,” or tell us that his feeble and self-serving “stand” against Trumpism was a “heroic turn,” there is nothing to celebrate. Here is a cautionary tale. A life lived making the world worse. A life that would have been better off un-lived.

I resent the attempt to redeem Cheney and I see it for what it is: a sign of how far gone institutional moderates are gone and how much the Overton Window has slid toward open fascism. Watching Kamala Harris attach herself to Cheney and his daughter in the days leading up to the 2024 Presidential Election gave the game away. The Democratic Party, or at least the establishment Democratic Party, has slotted itself squarely into the vacuum Cheney and George W. Bush’s Republican Party left behind as the GOP sprinted toward gleeful authoritarianism. I wonder if Cheney, in his final few months, recognized this fact. I have to imagine he did.

There is no Trump Regime without Cheney or without Bush. This fact has been deleted from popular history as it was necessary to imagine Donald Trump as a historic aberration. Bush, one of the most destructive presidents in history and, like Cheney, a war criminal, needed to be re-cast. He became a harmless buffoon who palled around with former “regular” presidents Barack Obama and Bill Clinton. His “friendship” with Michelle Obama was memed to death. Never mind that he stole the 2000 Election, that he carried out a world war that killed millions, that he tortured and disappeared innocent people, that he ushered in the nascent surveillance state that will now be used against us. By the time Joe Biden took office in 2021, the recasting was ready.

It took another three years for Cheney because his evil was even more overt. Cheney was there for everything that pushed the GOP further and further into an antidemocratic, cruel body. He was in the Nixon White House. He was at the 1974 lunch where Art Laffer sketched a harebrained economic theory that has served as the relic for the rise of Neoliberal redistribution. He served as Secretary of Defense during the First Gulf War and helped engineer the second, which used dreams of forever empire to fuel a scheme to enrich private interests and hand the baton from the nation state to the wealth class. He championed the unitarian executive, a concept that dressed up a nascent dictatorship in the thin veils of perverted and deceptive legal theory. We now live in the world that Cheney fought tirelessly to create.

But they got there. Despite being one of the most murderous and ruinous men of the 20th and early 21st century, somehow the moderates managed to wrap their arms around Cheney’s spoiling, noxious body. Harris thanked Cheney for his support and “for his service to this country.” That service was to prepare it, like a company in decline, for predatory vulture capitalism and the birth of the fascist state that Cheney had midwifed into being. If you want to understand what is wrong with this country you need not look further.

The betrayal of the American people by political leaders enthralled to the wealth class and the eventual capitalist turn to fascism is the root of our crisis. Cheney was a grimacing hatchet man who might have convinced himself he was aiding the country or, and this is likely, didn’t need to bother himself with such delusions. He was a loyal servant of the wealthy, a murderer, a war criminal, and this country was worse off because he drew a breath. He sold us out and murdered millions and made the world a worse place in exchange for fleeting and meaningless things. It is a tragedy and he inflicted it upon the rest of us.

Perhaps it is a bit of solace to see that Cheney got what he wanted and seemed to abhor it. There is poetic justice in that. Cheney and so many of the ghouls around him that carried out this project seemed repulsed by MAGA and what their party had become, but what he lacked and what those Never Trump Republicans lacked was the perspective to openly admit what they had done and their culpability. Perhaps it is only wishful thinking, but I hope, in their quiet moments, there were glimpses of that responsibility, a shocking and stunning realization that they got exactly what they wanted along and what they got was ruin and hollow.

I’m not going to bother myself with watching gushing testimonies from moderates and liberals rhapsodizing about how the GOP has “drifted away” from the Bush/Cheney model. Their denial is a confession. If they want to believe all this happened in a vacuum and ignore the suffering of millions and now billions of people whose lives have been made worse or were ended tragically because of Cheney and his ilk. Their allegiance is to the bottom line and, in that way, and so many others, they were aligned with Cheney and the rest of his conspirators all along.

Instead, I’m going to dishonor Cheney’s memory by doing what he never could: enjoying life and all the bounties it has to offer. I’m going to take a walk. Maybe smile at a neighbor or a passerby. I’m going to take a few moments to remember him as he was - the worst of us - and try like hell to focus my compass on moving as far away from him as I possibly can.