At its heart, American conservatism is a fantasy. It's a vision of a world too evil to be saved or cared about, and fearsome enough to justify any and every impulse toward cruelty and violence that a person might have. A world resolutely unworthy of knowing, except as a danger. A world in which you will always need a gun, and to shoot somebody with it, instead of just lusting for both.
Because the world isn't actually like that—because, in general, people are just people, and mostly want to live peaceably and get along with each other—most American conservatives must mainline Fox News (or Newsmax, or whatever) directly to their brains at all hours in order to remain within the fantasy that both sustains and degrades them. In this respect, Dick Cheney got luckier than most American right-wingers could ever dream. Fanatics with brown skin crashed commercial jet airliners into the World Trade Center and Pentagon, at a time when, as vice president under the harebrained and banally evil George W. Bush, Cheney for all practical purposes ran the most lethal death-dealing apparatus in the history of the world. He got to spend seven years deciding who the bad guys were and how to kill them. He got to scrawl the simplest possible moral calculus across the world in blood. He lived the dream.
This is the Mega Millions jackpot for the American conservative. This is the golden ticket to Willy Wonka's Chocolate Factory. No one has ever welcomed their firstborn child to the world with greater joy than that with which the American reactionary greets a Pearl Harbor, a 9/11, a dead cop, an assassinated YouTube bigot. Dick Cheney's celebration lasted more than 20 years; by the time it ended—to the extent it ever did—a crucial portion of American civil liberties had gone with it. More than half a million Iraqis were dead.
Against the sheer scale of that mountain of corpses, it seems almost ghoulish to mention that Cheney, more than any other person, brought us today's political reality. He did, though; the American conservative project, the old dream of making the world into a place awful enough to justify American conservatism, never had a better champion. He was a shamelessly self-dealing con man, for one thing: Chosen as a trusted associate of the elder George H. W. Bush to lead the search for the right running-mate for George W., Cheney picked himself, and then ran the Iraq War as a monumental graft machine for his Halliburton oil company and as many cronies as could be dealt in. The nature of Cheney's con—aided by its contrast against Donald Rumsfeld's burlesque vamping, John Ashcroft's spiral-eyed eschatological lunacy, and the president's plain brainlessness—was a thin performance of steely, flinty-eyed competence laid over arrogance, ignorance, and ineptitude. He wrecked everything he touched, and was wrong in all of his predictions and analyses, and as a result completely discredited America's respectable establishment.
Along the way, he played white America's (and mainstream media's) Islamophobia and bloodlust like arcade joysticks, to rearguard each next extension of authoritarianism and paint the administration's critics as traitors. His vileness and cynicism were corrosive, and have by now more or less fully eaten through every surface and institution exposed to them.
Cheney, that is to say, gave Donald Trump a template for looting the government and for what to run against and for who to scapegoat and how. In 2024, Cheney endorsed Kamala Harris's presidential candidacy and denounced Trump as a grave threat to democracy. You could almost laugh, or cry.
He died on Monday, aged 84. What do you do with a life like his, at its end? Shiver at the thought of it, mostly. Bury him in a salt cavern. Bury him face down.
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