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dick cheney
On Cheney, Trump, and the Nature of Violence
As a nation, as a unified planet, we need to create a future that’s bigger than Trump, bigger than Cheney—bigger than what they could imagine in terms of global politics and power.
Nov 06, 2025
Let him rest in... peace?
I don’t know. The irony of those words is a little too much for me to grasp as I sit here contemplating the death of Dick Cheney at age 84. Cheney, mastermind and primary organizer on the “war on terror,” which, in a 20-year span of insanity, cost the United States some $8 trillion and killed (murdered) nearly a million people, according to Brown University’s Costs of War Project.
And as though that total weren’t high enough, the project notes that this number is very much an undercount, since it doesn’t include indirect deaths of the war caused by “disease, displacement, and loss of access to food or clean drinking water.”
Revisiting these numbers in the wake of Cheney’s death throws some horrific complexity into the present-day news, that is to say, the authoritarian activities of the Trump administration: Sending Immigration and Customs Enforcement to invade American cities, bombing small boats off the coast of Venezuela, cozying up to authoritarian leaders around the globe and, of course, staying in sync with the Israeli devastation f Gaza.
Trump is just the next step in the violent nation we’ve created: the unhinged step.
President Donald Trump is such an unconstrained blowhard and fascist wannabe, totally open about his desire to arrest, deport, pepperspray, and eliminate every American who dares protest or comedically belittle his policies, that Sen. Bernie Sanders (-Vt.) recently wrote:
This may be the most consequential moment in American history since the civil war. We have a megalomaniacal president who, consumed by his quest for more and more power, is undermining our constitution and the rule of law.
We’re on the verge of losing our country, losing our democracy! I hear it. I feel it. We’re at the edge of a political cliff. But then, in the wake of Dick Cheney’s death, the Bush administration slips back into my awareness and I suddenly find myself plummeting into concern and horror that transcends Trump. Trump has yet to do anything equal to the military hell these guys inflicted on the world, or even equal to their pompous rhetoric about the “axis of evil” they were intent on destroying.
And George W. Bush and Cheney were anti-Trumpers, for God’s sake, furious that Trump took their party away from them. Is this the sin of Trump—taking away not so much our wars but the political correctness in which we swathed them? Trump is an impulsive blatherer, speaking in ordinary-guy language, spewing out whatever he’s thinking in the moment. Yeah, he’s a scary jerk, utterly untrustworthy, but is what we had before him somehow better? Are the monstrous wars—the terror—we’ve waged throughout my lifetime what we want to return to?
I guess what I’m saying is that Trump is just the next step in the violent nation we’ve created: the unhinged step. He’s loosened himself from all sense of political dignity and is free to dance before the world to “YMCA” He’s committed to trashing our Constitution and making himself Boss-in-Chief, but he loves, and is as subservient to, money as any political leader who has preceded him.
All of which leads me back to the book I’m still in the process of writing. As a nation, as a unified planet, we need to create a future that’s bigger than Trump, bigger than Cheney—bigger than what they could imagine in terms of global politics and power. That is to say, we need to create a world that knows how to wage peace. Please understand, in no way do I see this as a simple process. We are creating peace in small fragments all across the planet, but collectively we continue to organize around domination, violence, and dehumanization.
Let me put forth one small piece of the book, which begins to address the nature of violence. I begin by quoting journalist and peace activist Colman McCarthy, who once asked: Why are we violent but not illiterate? This question stuck in my soul.
In the book I wrote: We’re taught to read, of course. The implied analogy here is that violence is the same thing as illiteracy, which is nothing in and of itself, a void, a lack of knowing. Is violence also nothing in and of itself, simply the absence of knowing how to behave with calm rationality and creative compassion? Certainly that doesn’t seem to be the case. To behave with violence, at least with a high level of violence, requires a great deal of knowing. Nations couldn’t go to war if they didn’t have the capacity to organize armies and equip them with up-to-date weaponry; to do this requires an extraordinary amount of “violent literacy,” you might say.
But there is a void of knowing—or perhaps more accurately, a void of control—that surrounds violence. Unlike illiteracy, however, violence has a positive sense of itself. In retrospect, violent behavior may be defended as self-protective and necessary, but in the actual act of it, I believe violence is an abdication of self-ownership, an abdication of everything that is godlike within us: an abdication of our vulnerability. And this abdication is collective...
So why are we violent but not illiterate? Once we’re taught to read, illiteracy is no longer possible or even, in a personal sense, imaginable. Reading isn’t simply a “protest” against illiteracy; reading and writing are steps from nothing to something, channeling spoken language into a world of entirely new possibilities. So what is the nonviolent equivalent of literacy? It’s not protests in the streets; it’s not a countermovement symbolized by peace signs and clenched fists. It’s not a futile demand for an end to violence. What the world needs, and what the New Story must present to us, is the means to evolve beyond violence, in the process reducing violence, in our minds, to the equivalent of illiteracy.
The trans-violent equivalent of literacy must be both intuitive and externally structured; it must be taught. And, indeed, many such systems already exist. The problem is, they don’t reduce simply and easily to a story: a plot device. How is John Wayne atop the stagecoach, as cameras focus in, going to listen to the Apaches’ grievances, absorb the white man’s collective guilt, apologize and begin a journey of atonement? It’s so much easier, when telling a story, to remove one small, inconvenient aspect of reality—consequences—and portray violence as the tool of goodness and the solution to problems.
And thus we have the current world, trying to control its chaos by spewing out ever more state-ordered, state-financed redemptive violence, in the form of war, punishment, news, and entertainment.
Let me leave with a thought: Let’s make America great for the first time.Keep ReadingShow Less
How Cheney's Destructive War on Terror Became Trump's Authoritarian War on Truth
In seeking to defend democracy at all costs, Dick Cheney helped build the machinery that would one day dismantle it. His war on terror became our war on truth, and the nation has yet to recover.
Nov 05, 2025
When Richard Cheney died, it marked more than the end of a political life. It marked the closing of an American chapter, one that began in the smoke of the Twin Towers and stretches to the chaos of today. Between those two moments lies the tragedy of Cheney’s legacy: a man who claimed to defend democracy while systematically undermining its moral foundations.
Cheney was not a showman or a populist firebrand. He was austere, secretive, and precise—a master of bureaucratic power. Yet few figures in modern history have reshaped the nation’s moral and legal architecture as thoroughly. In his determination to protect Americans, he normalized fear. In his effort to preserve liberty, he institutionalized its violation.
After September 11, Cheney became the chief engineer of America’s “War on Terror.” Torture was rebranded as “enhanced interrogation,” mass surveillance legalized under the Patriot Act, and the rule of law quietly rewritten in the name of necessity. Drone strikes, secret prisons, preemptive war — all were justified as temporary measures to secure the homeland. But what began as emergency measures became permanent instruments of power.
Donald Trump did not create this destructive architecture of control; he inherited it.
What began in black sites abroad found its echo in cages at the southern border and in the assault on democratic norms at home.
Cheney and Trump despised one another, one a cold technocrat, the other a performative populist, but their philosophies were aligned in principle. Both believed the ends justify the means. Both treated human dignity as negotiable. Cheney authorized torture to protect Americans from terror. Trump uses that logic to justify cruelty against immigrants, journalists, and political opponents. The moral exception Cheney carved for national security became Trump’s template for political dominance.
The irony is brutal. The man who professed to honor institutions helped birth a movement that scorns them. The leader who claimed to defend freedom helped create conditions for its dismantling. Cheney’s “war on terror” became Trump’s “war on truth.” What began in black sites abroad found its echo in cages at the southern border and in the assault on democratic norms at home.
Cheney was not a cynic; he was a believer. That is what makes his legacy tragic. He genuinely thought America could preserve its dignity while denying it to others. He mistook pragmatism for wisdom and necessity for virtue. In doing so, he opened a door that democracy has not yet closed.
Two decades on, the consequences are visible everywhere: in the surveillance economy, in militarized policing, in the normalization of fear, and in political leaders who wield cruelty as strategy. Cheney gave America the vocabulary of exception. Trump turned it into the language of rule.
The tragedy is not Cheney’s alone, it is ours. By allowing the moral compromises of the past to stand unchallenged, we learned to live with a democracy that operates on exceptions, a freedom bounded by checkpoints, and a conscience dulled by fear.
If America is to escape the shadow of Cheney’s legacy, and prevent its lessons from being exploited againit, must reclaim what both men forgot: the true strength of democracy lies not in its power to destroy its enemies, but in its refusal to become them.
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'No, Not This Time': Combat Veteran Graham Platner Doesn't Mourn for Dick Cheney
"The only legacy we have to remember," said the Maine candidate for US Senate about the former vice president, "is that he wasted thousands of young American lives, hundreds of thousands of Iraqi lives, and trillions of dollars for absolutely nothing."
Nov 05, 2025
Graham Platner, the US combat veteran and oyster farmer running for the Democratic nomination to defeat Republican US Senator Susan Collins of Maine in next year's election, is not interested in mourning the life and legacy of reviled war criminal Dick Cheney, though he does have "some thoughts" on the subject.
While Democratic leaders of the old guard such as Barack Obama and Kamala Harris issued statements Tuesday fawning over Cheney's service to country, contributing to the familiar hagiography that typically follows the demise of even the worst American leaders the nation has inflicted on the world, Platner stuck a distinctly different tone.
"Usually, when a former vice president passes, we all take some time to mourn," Platner says in a video posted to social media Tuesday. "As a veteran of the Iraq war, I’m going to say: No, not this time."
Platner, who served in the US Marines and in the US Army during multiple combat tours in both Iraq and Afghanistan, pushed back against the pattern of whitewashing the misdeeds of the dead, especially for elected leaders never held to account.
"Over the next couple days, I'm sure there are going to be thousands of think pieces about his legacy," said Platner, "but the only legacy we have to remember is that he wasted thousands of young American lives, hundreds of thousands of Iraqi lives, and trillions of dollars for absolutely nothing."
Some thoughts on Dick Cheney and his legacy. pic.twitter.com/vY7S3nu2nt
— Graham Platner for Senate (@grahamformaine) November 4, 2025
"If we take anything" from Cheney's death, continued Platner, "it should be that we need to build a politics that keeps the politicians, like Susan Collins, who support illegal foreign wars like the one in Iraq, accountable and get them out of office."
Platner has spoken at length about his time on the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan and how, after multiple tours, he became not only disillusioned with the wars but also incredibly angry over the foreign policy decisions that started them.
Cheney, who served as VP under former President George W. Bush, has long been seen as the chief architect and driving force behind the effort to manipulate the US public into backing the invasion of Iraq in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, despite Iraq having nothing to do with the plot.
Cheney infamously said after 9/11 it would be time to "take off the gloves," which resulted in a torture regime operated by the CIA and war crimes across the Middle East, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and beyond at the direction of the Bush administration.
Bob Brigham, a self-identified progressive from Montana, was among those who applauded Platner for his statement.
"Dick Cheney was a war criminal who cost my buddy his life in Iraq," said Brigham in a social media post. "Platner has a pitch-perfect remembrance of the a-hole. May Dick Cheney roast in hell!"
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From Executive Overreach to Undeclared Wars, We Are Living in the World Cheney Made
Dick Cheney midwifed the emergence of a new warfare marked by extrajudicial killing, torture, secrecy, and endless war that transformed American society and politics, perhaps forever.
Nov 04, 2025
Dick Cheney has died, according to reports Tuesday morning, at the age of 84.
A formidable White House and defense department aide (under Presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford) who left to head an equally formidable Texas-based oil company (with vast federal contracts) and then back in Washington as vice president to George W. Bush, Cheney is probably the most symbolic figure of the failure of the post-9/11 wars. In particular, the Iraq War. It was his amassed power and special cadre of operators known as neoconservatives inside the Old Executive Office building and E Ring at the Pentagon, who with strategic treachery dominated the politics and intelligence necessary to march Washington into the invasion of 2003 and to proliferate a Global War on Terror that lasted well beyond his tenure in office.
By all accounts it was his midwifed lies over WMDs that got us there, followed by the blunders (not anticipating the Iraqi insurgency); the loss of life (millions); the cost to our treasury; and the emergence of a new warfare marked by extrajudicial killing, torture, secrecy, and endless war that transformed American society and politics, perhaps forever.
For it was the exploitation of American grief, fear, and patriotism after 9/11 to pursue neoconservative wars in the Middle East that zapped the people's faith in government institutions. It pretty much destroyed the Republican Party and gave rise to populist movements on both sides of the aisle. It created a generation of veterans harboring more mistrust in elites and Washington than even the Vietnam War era. On the other end of the spectrum, it unleashed mercenary warfare, killer drones, civil wars, and police powers in the United States that have only served make the people less free and more fearful of their government. Thanks in part to Dick Cheney, the Executive, i.e. the president, has more power than ever—to bomb, detain, and "decapitate" any government leader he does not like.
There will be many obituaries written for Dick Cheney, all will be scarred with his role in the Iraq War. For a time he was a very, very powerful man and then he went away to retire and help raise his grandchildren. How many hundreds of thousands of American families were unable to do the same, plagued by death, disease, mental injuries, sterility, divorce, addiction, suicide—because of a war that he so relentlessly pushed but should never have been.
Cheney's Quest for More Executive Power and 'Machtpolitik'
Cheney first came to national prominence when he served as White House chief of staff (1975-77) to President Gerald Ford. In that position, he worked closely with Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld to counter and eventually derail Henry Kissinger's strategy of "detente" with the Soviet Union.
In that initiative, Cheney and Rumsfeld also worked closely with the Washington-based leaders of the emergent neoconservative movement, a number of them, including Richard Perle and Elliott Abrams, working in the office of Washington State Democratic Senator and Senate Armed Services Chairman Henry "Scoop" Jackson, to promote, among other things, Jewish emigration to Israel and in persuading Ford to convene an ultra-hawkish "Team B" outside the intelligence community to hype the alleged military threat posed by Moscow.
Their mutual interest in pursuing a massive US arms buildup and an aggressive foreign policy more generally would form the basis of an alliance between the aggressive nationalism and Machtpolitik of Cheney and Rumsfeld on the one hand, and the Israel-centered neoconservatives on the other that created the infamous Project for the New American Century in 1998 and ultimately became dominant in the post-9/11 "global war on terror" (GWOT) and the Iraq invasion for which he always remained unrepentant.
In the 1980s, Cheney, who chafed at the post-Watergate restrictions on presidential power, particularly regarding foreign policy, served as Wyoming’s single congressman in the House of Representatives where he became a staunch and powerful defender both of Ronald Reagan’s anti-Soviet policies and of the “Reagan Doctrine” of rolling back leftist regimes and movements in the Global South, notably in Central America and southern Africa. A staunch defender of the protagonists of what became the Iran-Contra scandal, a secret operation to sell weapons to Iran and use the proceeds to fund the Nicaraguan contras (for whom Congress had prohibited any US assistance), he later prevailed on President George H.W. Bush, for whom he served as defense secretary, to issue pardons to those, like Abrams, convicted as a result of the affair.
In the wake of the first Gulf War, Cheney commissioned his undersecretary of defense for policy, Paul Wolfowitz, to draft a long-term US strategy, called the Defense Planning Guidance (DPG), whose global ambitions, when leaked to the Washington Post, provoked a flurry of controversy about the future US role in the world.
Among other things, the draft called for Washington to maintain permanent military dominance of virtually all of Eurasia to be achieved by “deterring potential competitors from even aspiring to a larger regional or global role” and by preempting, using whatever means necessary, states believed to be developing weapons of mass destruction. It foretold a world in which US military intervention would become a “constant fixture” of the geopolitical landscape, and Washington would act as the ultimate guarantor of international peace and security.
One of the document’s principal drafters was I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, who would later become Vice President Cheney’s highly effective chief of staff and national security adviser during George W. Bush’s first term until he was indicted for perjury.
The draft DPG would essentially become the template for what became in 1997 the Project for New American Century, a letterhead organization launched by neoconservatives Bill Kristol and Robert Kagan that in some ways formalized the coalition of Machtpolitikers like Cheney, Rumsfeld, and John Bolton; pro-Israel neoconservatives like Perle, Abrams, Libby, Eliot Cohen, and Frank Gaffney; and Christian Zionists, such as Gary Bauer and William Bennett.
PNAC subsequently published a series of hawkish statements and open letters demanding substantial increases in the US defense budget and stronger US action against perceived adversaries, notably Iraq, Iran, and China. Led by Cheney as vice president and Rumsfeld as defense secretary, many PNAC associates, particularly neoconservatives, took key posts in the George W. Bush administration in 2001, while PNAC became the leading group outside the administration banging the drum for invading Iraq and prosecuting the “global war on terror.” A legacy that leads directly to the current moment where Cheney's hard won Executive powers rule over a landscape of unauthorized US military interventions and undeclared wars all over the globe.
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War Criminal Dick Cheney Dead at 84
"He should have died in The Hague," said one journalist.
Nov 04, 2025
Dick Cheney, a chief architect of the US invasion of Iraq and broader "war on terror" that has killed millions of people since its inception, has died at 84, his family announced in a statement Tuesday.
Cheney was best known for his central role in the administration of former President George W. Bush, under whom Cheney served as vice president.
An unapologetic advocate of preemptive war and torture in the wake of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on the United States, Cheney was widely regarded as a war criminal who should have faced international prosecution.
"He should have died in The Hague," journalist Mehdi Hasan wrote in response to the news of Cheney's death.
Cheney's family said he died "due to complications of pneumonia and cardiac and vascular disease."
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Trump's Lawlessness Comes From Seeds Planted by Bush-Cheney
The federal government’s willingness to violate federal and international law with impunity didn’t begin with Trump.
Apr 21, 2025
In 2003, the Macedonian police arrested Khaled el-Masri, a German citizen vacationing in their country. They handed the unfortunate man over to the CIA, who shipped him off to one of their “black sites.” For those too young to remember (or who have quite understandably chosen to forget), “black sites” was the name given to clandestine CIA detention centers around the world, where that agency held incommunicado and tortured men captured in what was then known as the Global War on Terror. The black site in this case was the notorious Salt Pit in Afghanistan. There el-Masri was, among other things, beaten, anally raped, and threatened with a gun held to his head. After four months he was dumped on a rural road in Albania.
It seems that the CIA had finally realized that they had arrested the wrong man. They wanted some other Khalid el-Masri, thought to be an al-Qaeda associate, and not, as Amy Davidson wrote in the New Yorker, that “car salesman from Bavaria.”
El-Masri was not the only person that representatives of the administration of President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney mistakenly sent off to another country to be tortured. In an infamous case of mistaken arrest, a Canadian citizen named Maher Arar was detained by the FBI at JFK Airport in New York while on his way home from a vacation in Tunisia. He was then held in solitary confinement for two weeks in the United States, while being denied contact with a lawyer before ultimately being shipped off to Syria. There, he would be tortured for almost a year until the Canadian government finally secured his release.
An “Administrative Error”
I was reminded of such instances of “extraordinary rendition” in the Bush-Cheney era when I read about the Trump administration’s March 2025 deportation of Kilmar Armando Abrego García to a grim prison in El Salvador. Because of threats against him and his family from Barrio 18, a vicious Salvadoran gang, Abrego García had fled that country as a young teenager. He entered the U.S. without papers in 2011 to join his older brother, already a U.S. citizen.
He was arrested in 2019, while seeking work as a day laborer outside a Home Depot store and handed over to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), which accused him of being a member of another Salvadoran gang, MS-13. This proved a false claim, as the immigration judge who heard his case agreed. While not granting Abrego García asylum, the judge assigned him a status — “withholding from removal” — which kept him safe in this country, because he faced the possibility of torture or other violence in his homeland. That status allowed him to work legally here. He married a U.S. citizen and they have three children who are also U.S. citizens.
Then, on March 12, 2025, on his way home from his job as a sheet-metal apprentice, he was suddenly stopped by ICE agents and arrested. They told him his status had been revoked (which wasn’t true) and promptly shipped him to various detention centers around the country. Ultimately, he was deported to El Salvador without benefit of legal assistance or a hearing before an immigration judge. As far as is known, he is now incarcerated at CECOT, the Center for the Confinement of Terrorists, a Salvadoran prison notorious for the ill treatment and torture of its inmates. While built for 40,000 prisoners, it now houses many more in perpetually illuminated cells, each crammed with more than 100 prisoners (leaving about 6.5 square feet of space for each man. It is considered “one of the most dangerous prisons in the Western Hemisphere” with “some of the most inhumane and squalid conditions known in any carceral system.” Furthermore, among the gangs reported to have a substantial presence at CECOT is Barrio 18, the very crew Abrego García fled El Salvador to escape so many years ago.
The Trump Justice Department has now admitted that they made an “administrative error” in deporting him but have so far refused to bring him home. Responding to a Supreme Court ruling demanding that the government facilitate his return, the Justice Department on April 12th finally acknowledged to the D.C. district court that he “is currently being held in the Terrorism Confinement Center in El Salvador.” Its statement continued: “He is alive and secure in that facility. He is detained pursuant to the sovereign, domestic authority of El Salvador.” On April 14, 2025, in contemptuous defiance of the supreme court, President Trump and his Salvadoran counterpart Nayib Bukele made it clear to reporters that Abrego García will not be returning to the United States.
Previously, the government’s spokesman, Michael G. Kozak, who identified himself in the filing as a “Senior Bureau Official” in the State Department’s Bureau of Western Hemisphere Affairs, had failed to comply with the rest of Judge Paula Xinis’s order: to identify what steps the administration is (or isn’t) taking to get him released. The judge has insisted that the department provide daily updates on its efforts to get him home, which it has failed to do. Its statement that Abrego García “is detained pursuant to the sovereign, domestic authority of El Salvador” suggests officials intend to argue that — despite paying the Salvadoran government a reported six million dollars for its prison services — the United States has no influence over Salvadoran actions. We can only hope that he really is still alive. The Trump administration’s truth-telling record is not exactly encouraging.The technical term for such detainee transfers is “extraordinary rendition.” “Rendition” involves sending a prisoner to another country to be interrogated, imprisoned, and even possibly tortured. Rendition becomes “extraordinary” when it occurs outside of normal legal strictures, as with the cases of el-Masri and Ahar decades ago,, and Abrego García today. Extraordinary rendition violates the United Nations Convention Against Torture, which explicitly prohibits sending someone to another country to be mistreated or tortured. It also violates U.S. anti-torture laws. As countless illegal Trump administration acts demonstrate, however, illegality is no longer a barrier of any sort to whatever its officials want to do.
Two other flights left for El Salvador on the day Abrego García was rendered. They contained almost 200 people accused of being members of a Venezuelan gang, Tren de Aragua, and were similarly deported under the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 without any hearings. Are they actually gang members? No one knows, although it seems likely that at least some of them aren’t. Jerce Reyes Barrios, for example, was a Venezuelan soccer coach who sought asylum in the U.S. and whose tattoo, celebrating the famous Spanish soccer team Royal Madrid, was claimed to be evidence enough of his gang membership and the excuse for his deportation.
Andry José Hernández Romero is another unlikely gang member. He’s a gay makeup artist who entered the United States last August to keep a pre-arranged asylum appointment. Instead, he was arrested and held in detention until the Tren de Aragua flights in March. The proof of his gang membership? His “Tres Reyes” or “Three Kings” tattoos that were common in his hometown in Venezuela.
In fact, all 200 or so deportees on those flights have been illegally rendered to El Salvador in blatant defiance of a judge’s court order to stop them or return those already in the air. None of those men received any sort of due process before being shipped off to a Salvadoran hellhole. In response, Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele tweeted, “Oopsie… Too late” with a laughing-face emoji.
Even U.S. citizens are at risk of incarceration at CECOT. After Secretary of State Marco Rubio met with President Bukele, the State Department’s website praised his “extraordinary gesture never before extended by any country,” an offer “to house in his jails dangerous American criminals, including U.S. citizens and legal residents.” Trump reiterated his interest in shipping “homegrown criminals” to El Salvador during his press conference with Bukele. As former federal prosecutor Joyce Vance has observed, “If it can happen to Abrego Garcia, it can happen to any of us.”
It Didn’t Start with Trump
It’s tempting to think of Donald Trump’s second term as a sui generis reign of lawlessness. But sadly, the federal government’s willingness to violate federal and international law with impunity didn’t begin with Trump. If anything, the present incumbent is harvesting a crop of autocratic powers from seeds planted by President George W. Bush and Vice-President Dick Cheney in those war on terror years following the attacks of September 11, 2001. In their wake, the hastily-passed Patriot Act granted the federal government vast new detention and surveillance powers. The Homeland Security Act of 2002 established a new cabinet-level department, one whose existence we now take for granted.
As I wrote more than a decade ago, after September 11th, torture went “mainstream” in the United States. The Bush administration cultivated an understandable American fear of terrorism to justify abrogating what, until then, had been a settled consensus in this country: that torture is both wrong and illegal. In the face of a new enemy, al-Qaeda, the administration argued that the requirements for decent treatment of wartime detainees outlined in the Geneva Conventions had been rendered “quaint.” Apparently, wartime rights granted even to Nazi prisoners of war during World War II were too risky to extend to that new foe.
In those days of “enhanced interrogation,” I was already arguing that accepting such lawless behavior could well become an American habit. We might gradually learn, I suggested, to put up with any government measures as long as they theoretically kept us safe. And that indeed was the Bush administration’s promise: Let us do whatever we need to, over there on the “dark side,” and in return we promise to always keep you safe. In essence, the message was: there will be no more terrorist attacks if you allow us to torture people.
The very fact that they were willing to torture prisoners was proof that those people must deserve it — even though, as we now know, many of them had nothing whatsoever to do with al-Qaeda or the September 11th attacks. (And even if they had been involved, no one, not even a terrorist, deserves to be tortured.)
If you’re too young to remember (or have been lucky enough to forget), you can click here, or here, or here for the grisly details of what the war on terror did to its victims.
The constant thrill of what some have called security theater has kept us primed for new enemies and so set the stage for the second set of Trump years that we now find ourselves in. We still encounter this theater of the absurd every time we stand in line at an airport, unpacking our computers, removing our shoes, sorting our liquids into quart-sized baggies — all to reinforce the idea that we are in terrible danger and that the government will indeed protect us.
Sadly, all too many of us became inured to the idea that prisoners could be sent to that infamous offshore prison of injustice at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, perhaps never to be released. (Indeed, as of January 2025, of the hundreds of people incarcerated there over the years, 15 war on terror prisoners still remain.) It should perhaps be no surprise, then, that the second time around, Donald Trump seized on Guantánamo as a possible place to house the immigrants he sought to deport from this country. After all, so many of us were already used to thinking of anybody sent there as the worst of the worst, as something other than human.
Dehumanizing the targets of institutionalized mistreatment and torture proved to be both the pretext for and a product of the process. Every torture regime develops a dehumanizing language for those it identifies as legitimate targets. For example, the torturers employed by the followers of Augusto Pinochet, who led Chile’s 1973 military coup, typically called their targets “humanoids” (to distinguish them from actual human beings).
For the same reason, the Israel Defense Forces now refer to just about anyone they kill in Gaza or on the West Bank as a “terrorist.” And the successful conflation of “Palestinian” with “terrorist” was all it took for some Americans to embrace Donald Trump’s suggestion that Gaza should be cleared of its people and turned into the “Riviera of the Middle East” for Israelis, Americans, and foreign tourists.
Trump’s representatives have used the same kind of language to describe people they are sending to that prison in El Salvador. His press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, referred to them as “heinous monsters,” which is in keeping with Trump’s own description of his political opponents as inhuman “vermin.” At a rally in New Hampshire in 2023, Trump told the crowd, “We pledge to you that we will root out the communists, Marxists, fascists, and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country.” Here he was talking not only about immigrants, but about U.S. citizens as well.
After years of security theater, all too many Americans seem ready to accept Trump’s pledge to root out the vermin.
It Can Happen to You
One difference between the Bush-Cheney years and the Trump ones is that the attacks of September 11, 2001, represented a genuine and horrific emergency. Trump’s version of such an emergency, on the other hand, is entirely Trumped-up. He posits nothing short of an immigration “invasion” — in effect, a permanent 9/11 — that “has caused widespread chaos and suffering in our country over the last 4 years.” Or so his executive order “Declaring a National Emergency at the Southern Border of the United States” insists. To justify illegally deporting alleged members of Tren de Aragua and, in the future (if he has his way), many others, he has invented a totally imaginary war so that he can invoke the 1798 Alien Enemies Act, which was last used during World War II to justify the otherwise unjustifiable internment of another group of dehumanized people in this country: Japanese-Americans.
Donald Trump has his very own “black site” now. Remember that El Salvador’s Nayib Bukele is perfectly willing to receive U.S. citizens, too, as prisoners in his country. Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor, joined by Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Jackson, made that point in a statement that accompanied that court’s recent order requiring the Trump administration to facilitate Kilmar Abrego García’s return to the United States. They wrote, “The Government’s argument, moreover, implies that it could deport and incarcerate any person, including U.S. citizens, without legal consequence, so long as it does so before a court can intervene.”
As the justices remind us, it can happen here. It can happen to you.
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Cowardly Billionaire Newspaper Owners Expose How Trump Has Already Won
Decisions last week by the Los Angeles Times and the Washington Post are a sign that an already-damaged democracy is entering a new stage of decay.
Oct 28, 2024
First the Los Angeles Times, then the Washington Post. Two of the country’s largest newspapers, including the one based in the nation’s capital, have now declared that they won’t endorse either major-party candidate for president. That’s irrefutable evidence that, in today’s United States of America, the self-interest of billionaires will always come before the needs of democracy. The financialization of journalism, which is so vital to a functioning democracy, has crushed the concept of a “free press.”
This is what oligarchy looks like.
This is why Democratic rhetoric about “saving democracy” has been so unpersuasive for undecided voters. Anti-Trump voters may know that democracy is important, but working people know something else: that what the billionaires want, they get. It’s hard to ask people to save something they feel they’ve already lost.
We’ve reached the point where a caudillo—a strongman figure—can openly threaten supposedly independent institutions and suppress opinions he doesn’t like.
Would a second Trump term do profound harm to democratic principles? Yes. Would this country’s vital institutions be cowed and manipulated with threats, hate speech, revenge, and the hideous lineaments of pseudo-Christian fascism? Yes. It’s a frightening prospect.
That may not be a big deal to this country’s elites, but they’d prefer the stability of a Kamala Harris presidency to the unpredictability of another Trump term. It’s better for their business interests. That’s why she’s raising so much more money than Trump.
But the billionaire owners of the Los Angeles Times and the Washington Post don’t dare act against Trump, who has been open about his pursuit of vengeance and equally clear that he’ll reward his friends with government contracts.
These are the signs that an already-damaged democracy is entering a new stage of decay. We’ve reached the point where a caudillo—a strongman figure—can openly threaten supposedly independent institutions and suppress opinions he doesn’t like.
These newspapers’ cowardly actions prove, in one way, that Trump has already won. He has stripped the veneer off our democracy and revealed the cowardice and greed beneath it. It is the latest in the series of political innovations Trump has brought to American politics: rule by fear.
Whoever wins the election, we know now that naked intimidation works. The owners of American media are financially dependent on government contracts, tax breaks, and the good graces of the executive branch. Their reporters depend on government officials as sources. That’s why Trump’s threats are working.
These newspapers’ cowardly actions prove, in one way, that Trump has already won. He has stripped the veneer off our democracy and revealed the cowardice and greed beneath it.
Democrats could take Trump’s cynical lesson to heart, as Lyndon Johnson might if he were still around. But it would be better to call out a system that allows billionaires to censor the news because a bully is pressuring the billionaires.
What they shouldn’t do is talk about “saving” a democracy so few voters believe in. It would be wiser to talk about “restoring” it—although it never functioned perfectly, especially for Black voters and the poor.
Polling bears that out. A July 2024 Pew Research survey found that an overwhelming 72 percent of Americans don’t believe the United States is a good example of democracy. Democrats were slightly more likely to believe in American democracy than Republicans, but they’re hardly starry-eyed. Less than one-fourth of Democrats think we have an exemplary democracy.
The best way to talk about democracy is as an unrealized ideal. That would mean renouncing the endorsement of anti-democratic figures like Dick Cheney, who ascended to the vice presidency in an undemocratic power grab by the Supreme Court; Gen. John Kelly, who defended pro-slavery Civil War insurgents and committed ethical lapses; James Clapper, who gave false testimony to Congress; and former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, who approved illegal torture programs under President George W. Bush.
I understand that they’re trying to reach Republican voters who are uncomfortable with Trump’s totalitarian tendencies, but how many voters like that are there? This approach may alienate more people than it gains.
Trump may regain the presidency, or he may not. But either way, he has changed politics forever, reshaping it in his own image.
In any case, this campaign is almost over—“all over but the shouting,” as the old saying goes. Trump may regain the presidency, or he may not. But either way, he has changed politics forever, reshaping it in his own image. There will be candidates who don’t hesitate to use what he’s taught them this year.
Americans who believe in the ideal of democracy will have to fight even harder for it—now, and for generations to come.
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After 23 Years, It’s Time to End the War on Terror for Good
Isn’t it time to free the country up to focus on truly pressing national concerns instead of letting the aberrations of the past continue to haunt the present moment?
Oct 03, 2024
September marked the 23rd anniversary of al Qaeda’s 2001 attacks on the United States, which left nearly 3,000 people dead. For the two decades since then, I’ve been writing, often for TomDispatch, about the ways the American response to 9/11, which quickly came to be known as the Global War on Terror, or GWOT, changed this country. As I’ve explored in several books, in the name of that war, we transformed our institutions, privileged secrecy over transparency and accountability, side-stepped and even violated longstanding laws and constitutional principles, and basically tossed aside many of the norms that had guided us as a nation for two centuries-plus, opening the way for a country now in Trumpian-style difficulty at home.
Even today, more than two decades later, the question remains: Will the war on terror ever end?
Certainly, one might be inclined to answer in the affirmative following the recent unexpected endorsement of presidential candidate Kamala Harris by two leading members of the George W. Bush administration which, in response to those attacks, launched the GWOT. First, Bush’s vice president, Dick Cheney, who, after September 11, sought to take the country down the path to what he called “the dark side” and was a chief instigator of the misguided and fraudulently justified invasion of Iraq in 2003, endorsed Vice President Harris. Then, so did Alberto Gonzales who, while serving as White House counsel to George W. Bush and then as his attorney general, was intricately involved in crafting that administration’s grim torture policy. (You remember, of course, those “enhanced interrogation techniques.”) He was similarly involved in creating the overreaching surveillance policy designed and implemented during the first years of the war on terror.
Consider those surprising endorsements by former Bush war hawks a possible coda for the war on terror as a major factor in American politics. In fact, for almost a decade and a half now, there have been signs suggesting that the denouement of that war might be at hand (though it never quite was). Those markers included the May 2011 lethal raid on the hideout of al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden; President Barack Obama’s December 2011 authorization for the “final” withdrawal of American troops from Iraq (though a cadre of 2,500 military personnel are stationed there presently and another 900 are in neighboring Syria). In August 2021, 10 years after the killing of bin Laden, the U.S. did finally exit, however disastrously, from its lost war in Afghanistan. And in 2022, a U.S. drone strike killed bin Laden’s successor, Ayman al-Zawahiri.
The counterterrorism measures have had an impact on the American threat environment. As reported in the Department of Homeland Security’s 2024 Homeland Threat Assessment, in 2022, “Only one attack in the United States was conducted by an individual inspired by a foreign terrorist organization” such as al Qaeda or ISIS.
Terrorism Prosecutions
Notably, prosecutions of alleged international terrorists have declined precipitously since the Bush administration years (and some of the convictions then have been reversed or altered). In a 2009 report, the Justice Department stated that, “since September 11, 2001, the Department has charged 512 individuals with terrorism or terrorism-related crimes and convicted or obtained guilty pleas in 319 terrorism-related and anti-terrorism cases.” Soon after that, however, the decline began. TRAC, a database that monitors such cases, reported that, in October 2014, “[t]here were no prosecutions recorded that involved international terrorism.” By 2022, TRAC was reporting that the number of domestic terrorism prosecutions far outnumbered international terrorism cases, due in large part to the charges leveled against those involved in the January 6th insurrection. And that trend has only continued. This year, as TRAC indicated, “Overall, the data show that convictions of this type are down 28.6 percent from levels reported in 2019.”
And when it comes to terrorism prosecutions, something unthinkable not so long ago has now happened. Several judges have recently given early release or simply overturned cases involving individuals convicted and sentenced in jihadi-inspired terrorism cases during the first decade of the war on terror. In July 2024, Eastern District of Virginia Judge Leonie Brinkema threw out 3 of 10 charges against and overturned a conviction carrying a life sentence for Ali Al-Timimi, a U.S.-born computational biology scholar sentenced in 2004 for soliciting treason by inspiring his followers to commit acts of violence abroad to defend Islam. Judge Brinkema reversed her decision following a 2019 U.S. Supreme Court decision that found the term “crime of violence” to be “unconstitutionally vague.” Al-Timimi’s fate on the other counts is now on appeal. Having been released to home confinement after the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic, he now no longer faces a life sentence, though, as The Associated Press reports, he could potentially see “decades of prison time beyond the 15 years he already served.”
Nor was this Brinkema’s first reversal in a terrorism case. In 2018, she ordered the release of two prisoners convicted in what was known as the Virginia “Paintball Jihad” case following two Supreme Court rulings that held the charges in those cases to be similarly unconstitutionally vague.
If only in acting to restore a balance between punishment and the law, even when it comes to post-9/11 terrorism cases, Judges MacMahon and Brinkema had set an example for others.
And Judge Brinkema was not alone in reviewing and reversing post-9/11 terrorism convictions. This year, in two controversial cases, judges reassessed rulings they had once made, releasing from prison those they had sentenced in the war on terror years. Judge Colleen MacMahon granted “compassionate release” to James Cromitie, after six months earlier ordering the release of his three codefendants, commonly referred to collectively as the “Newburgh Four.” At sentencing, MacMahon had indicated her disagreement with the initial outcome of the case which led to 25-year sentences for the defendants convicted on charges that involved plotting to bomb synagogues and shoot down American planes with stinger missiles, describing their crime as that of “allegedly planting ‘bombs’ that were packed with inert explosives supplied by the FBI.” She further chastised the FBI in her compassionate release ruling, claiming, “Nothing about the crimes of conviction was of defendants’ own making. The FBI invented the conspiracy, identified the targets, manufactured the ordnance, federalized what would otherwise have been a state crime…, and picked the day for the ‘mission.’”
Four years earlier, in late 2019, a federal judge in Lodi, California overturned the conviction of Hamid Hayat, convicted in 2006 for attending a terrorist training camp in Pakistan and plotting an attack on this country, on the grounds that his counsel had ineffectively assisted him. Following that vacated conviction, the National Security Division at the Department of Justice reviewed the case and decided against filing new charges concluding “that the passage of time and the interests of justice counsel against resurrecting this 15-year-old case.” Having served 14 years of a 24-year sentence, Hayat was released.
The “passage of time” in these cases had led to a rethinking of the uses of justice and law after 9/11. Sadly enough, it has not resulted in sunsetting two of the major initiatives of the war on terror—the authorization for the initial military response to the 9/11 attacks that led to this country’s disastrous military engagements in Afghanistan and elsewhere, and the creation of the Guantánamo Bay Detention Facility.
The 2001 AUMF
One glaring element of the war on terror that has defied any sense of ending is the 2001 Authorization for the Use of Military Force, or AUMF, passed by Congress in the days just after 9/11, which initially green-lit the invasion of Afghanistan. It’s still on the books.
Unlike prior authorizations for war, the 2001 authorization included no temporal limits, no geographical boundaries, and no named enemy. It was a classic blank check for launching attacks anywhere in the name of the war on terror and has indeed been used to justify attacks in dozens of countries throughout the Middle East and Africa, including against “unspecified organizations and individuals connected to international terrorism,” as a Council on Foreign Relations overview reports. As Georgetown professor Rosa Brooks has pointed out, the temporal open-endedness of that AUMF defied international law and norms in which “a state’s right to respond to an armed attack is clearly subject to some temporal limitations; it does not last indefinitely.” Or at least it shouldn’t.
Year after year, Congress has indeed considered sunsetting that 2001 AUMF, as well as the 2002 authorization for war in Iraq. After all, the landscape of international terrorism has changed vastly since the post-9/11 years. While the threat hasn’t disappeared, it has been transfigured. As the 2024 Annual Threat Assessment issued by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence points out, “While al Qaeda has reached an operational nadir in Afghanistan and Pakistan and ISIS has suffered cascading leadership losses in Iraq and Syria, regional affiliates will continue to expand.”
The war in Gaza has, of course, further changed the terrorism landscape. According to FBI Director Chris Wray, Hamas’ October 7th attack on Israel took the threat of foreign terrorism to “a whole ‘nother level.”
However, the 2001 authorization for the war on terror that remains in place is not an apt authorization for the new brand of terrorism or for the war in Gaza. It has so far made no difference that a 2022 National Security Strategy issued by the Biden White House pledged “to work with the Congress to replace outdated authorizations for the use of military force with a narrow and specific framework appropriate to ensure that we can continue to protect Americans from terrorist threats.” To date, no such narrowed framework has come into existence. And while Congress has repeatedly tried to sunset that piece of legislation, largely under the leadership of California Democratic Congresswoman Barbara Lee (the sole member of Congress who insightfully opposed it in 2001 on the grounds of its expansive overreach), such efforts have failed year after year after year. With Lee’s departure from office this coming January, the possibility of such a sunset will lose its most ardent proponent.
The Forever Prison
By far the most egregious relic of the war on terror is undoubtedly that forever war’s forever prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. True, the number of detainees still held there—30—is down dramatically from the “roughly 780 detainees” in 2002. And 16 of those detainees have now been cleared for release (a review board having determined that they no longer pose a threat to the United States), while three remain in indefinite detention, and 11 others are in the military commissions system either facing charges or convicted. And true, President Joe Biden’s administration has made some progress in those commissions, arranging plea deals to resolve the cases of those who have been charged, as in that of two detainees who had been tortured and who pleaded guilty to charges related to terrorist bombings in Bali, Indonesia.
But whatever progress has been made during this administration, there have been two major setbacks.
First, early in the fall of 2023, the Biden administration reportedly arranged for the transfer of 11 Yemeni detainees to Oman. As The New York Times‘s Carol Rosenberg reported, thanks to Hamas’ October 7th attack on Israel, “A military cargo plane was already on the runway at Guantánamo Bay ready to airlift the group of Yemeni prisoners to Oman when the trip was called off.” Had that transfer occurred, the prison population would have dwindled to 19. But worries about a newly unstable Middle East left members of Congress uneasy and, according to Rosenberg, they expressed their concerns to the State Department and so succeeded in halting the transfer.
Twenty-three years later, there is arguably no greater reminder of both the need to put the war on terror behind us and an all-American inability to do so than the continued existence of Guantánamo.
In July, however, a momentous forward step did take place. Brigadier General Susan Escallier, the Pentagon’s Convening Authority for Guantánamo, the person in charge of the military commissions there, finally authorized a plea deal that had been in the works for years. It involved three of five defendants in that prison’s signature case, the prosecution of those accused of conspiring in and abetting the 9/11 attacks, including their alleged mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. The grim years of torture of those five codefendants at CIA “black sites” around the globe had long made it impossible to bring the case to court.
However, a deal was finally reached. As Chief Prosecutor Rear Admiral Aaron Rugh explained, “In exchange for the removal of the death penalty as a possible punishment, these three accused have agreed to plead guilty to all of the charged offenses, including the murder of the 2,976 people listed in the charge sheet.” Other parts of the agreement remain secret, but it still seemed like a huge step forward had been taken in bringing justice to the perpetrators of the 9/11 attacks. After endless pretrial hearings, filings, and motions—and no trial—there seemed at least to be a glimmer of light at the end of the tunnel. In the words of Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), the plea deal “was the best path forward to finality and justice.”
Unfortunately, only two days after the announced deal, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin mysteriously revoked it, issuing a two-page memorandum that managed to provide no explanation whatsoever for his decision.
Twenty-three years later, there is arguably no greater reminder of both the need to put the war on terror behind us and an all-American inability to do so than the continued existence of Guantánamo. There, at an estimated expense of more than $13 million per prisoner per year, judges and lawyers, many of whom favor plea deals, continue to play their roles as if a trial in the 9/11 case will ever be possible; as if the passage of time without resolution is an acceptable solution; and as if the example of indefinite detention, the use of torture, and a system that can’t adjudicate justice doesn’t continue to undermine the American promise of justice for all.
Moving Forward?
If only, in acting to restore a balance between punishment and the law, even when it comes to post-9/11 terrorism cases, Judges MacMahon and Brinkema had set an example for others. Certainly, at this truly late date, President Biden and Secretary of Defense Austin should have accepted—and should now reconsider and accept—the plea deal for those 9/11 co-defendants as a way of helping this country finally move past the 9/11 era and those endless, disastrous wars on terror. Isn’t it time to free the country up to focus on truly pressing national concerns instead of letting the aberrations of the past continue to haunt the present moment? Along these lines, perhaps it’s also the moment for Congress to sunset the 9/11 authorization for open-ended all-American global warfare.
Isn’t it truly time to move on from the war on terror’s lingering and painful legacy?
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Far-Right Endorsements Unmask Democratic Charade
The fight against Trump's authoritarianism, while certainly necessary, is being used as cover to shore up support for a status quo that is itself profoundly anti-democratic in its functioning.
Sep 14, 2024
In recent months, a curious phenomenon has emerged in American politics—the endorsement of Democratic candidates by figures traditionally associated with the Republican far right. Most notably, former U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney and his daughter Liz Cheney made headlines by throwing their support behind Kamala Harris' presidential bid. This unexpected alliance has been framed by centrist media outlets as a heartening example of cross-party unity in the face of former President Donald Trump's purported threat to democracy. However, a more critical examination reveals that these endorsements are less a triumph of democratic values and more a damning indictment of the current political status quo.
The Illusion of a 'Popular Front'
Defenders of this unlikely alliance argue that it represents a necessary "popular front" against the authoritarian threat posed by Trump and his supporters. They contend that in times of crisis, we must set aside ideological differences and unite to preserve the foundations of our democracy. But this framing relies on a fundamentally flawed premise—that the system these centrists and right-wingers are rallying to protect is itself truly democratic.
The political establishment that the Cheneys and their Democratic allies seek to preserve is one that perpetuates endless wars and military interventions across the globe, from Iraq to Libya to the ongoing support for Israel's assault on Gaza. It allows for and exacerbates grotesque levels of economic inequality, with wealth increasingly concentrated in the hands of a tiny elite. This system routinely supports and arms authoritarian regimes when it aligns with U.S. corporate interests, from Saudi Arabia to Thailand. It oversees a mass incarceration system that disproportionately targets communities of color and fails to take meaningful action on existential threats like climate change due to the influence of fossil fuel lobbyists.
The Democratic Party's willingness to embrace far-right endorsements puts the lie to their posturing as champions of the working class and foes of elite power.
This is the system that the so-called "popular front" is mobilizing to defend. Not a beacon of democracy, but a corrupt oligarchy that masquerades as one. The fight against Trump's authoritarianism, while certainly necessary, is being used as cover to shore up support for a status quo that is itself profoundly anti-democratic in its functioning.
The embrace of figures like the Cheneys also reveals a deeply troubling moral relativism at the heart of the Democratic establishment. Dick Cheney, after all, was one of the primary architects of the Iraq War—a conflict built on lies that resulted in hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths and destabilized an entire region. He has been an unapologetic defender of torture and a champion of unchecked executive power.
That Democrats would welcome such a figure into their tent speaks volumes about their own moral compass and political priorities. It suggests that in their calculus, the taint of association with war criminals and corporate oligarchs is outweighed by the potential electoral benefits. This is not principled politics—it is cynical maneuvering that betrays any claim to real progressive values.
The Bankruptcy of Centrism and the Democratic Establishment
Central to understanding this phenomenon is recognizing the intellectual and moral bankruptcy of political centrism as it exists in the United States today. Centrists pride themselves on their supposed pragmatism and willingness to reach across the aisle. But in practice, this "pragmatism" almost always skews rightward, dragging the entire political spectrum in a more conservative direction.
We see this in the way that ideas once considered radical right-wing positions have become normalized as "centrist" compromises. We see it in the adoption of Republican framing on issues like crime, fracking, welfare, and national security. And we see it now in the lionization of figures like Dick Cheney as principled defenders of democracy, memory-holing their long records of supporting deeply anti-democratic policies.
This narrowing of the political spectrum has profound consequences for American democracy, effectively disenfranchising millions of citizens whose views and interests are not represented by either major party.
The Democratic Party's willingness to embrace far-right endorsements puts the lie to their posturing as champions of the working class and foes of elite power. Their rhetoric may occasionally nod to populist themes, but their actions reveal a party that is fundamentally comfortable with the current distribution of power and wealth in society. By welcoming figures like the Cheneys into their coalition, Democrats are sending a clear message—they are not opposed to elites per se, only to those particular elites who threaten their own place in the established order.
This elite consensus is evident in the policy priorities of Democratic administrations. Whether under former President Barack Obama or current President Joe Biden, we see a consistent pattern of bailing out banks and major corporations while offering only crumbs to struggling workers. We see promises of a new direction in foreign policy coupled with a continuation of the same interventionist approach.
The result is a democracy where the differences between the two parties, while real, are far narrower than their rhetoric would suggest. Both ultimately serve the interests of corporate power and the military-industrial complex, merely disagreeing on the details of implementation. This narrowing of the political spectrum has profound consequences for American democracy, effectively disenfranchising millions of citizens whose views and interests are not represented by either major party.
Moreover, this centrist consensus serves to stifle genuine debate and innovation in policymaking. By defining the range of "acceptable" ideas so narrowly, it excludes potentially transformative solutions to the pressing problems facing the country. Ideas like Medicare for All, a Green New Deal, or serious corporate regulation are dismissed as fringe or unrealistic, while failed policies of the past are recycled under new branding.
The Urgent Need for Alternatives
As we survey this bleak political landscape, the urgent need for genuine alternatives becomes increasingly apparent. While strategically it remains important to influence local and national elections, recent events in France serve as a stark reminder of the limitations of this approach.
French President Emmanuel Macron's appointment of Michel Barnier, a conservative politician, as prime minister following a fractured election result illustrates how centrist parties will ultimately betray the left in favor of the right. Despite the left-wing New Popular Front coalition winning the most seats in snap elections, Macron chose to align with the right, including placating the far-right National Rally. This decision reveals where the true class allegiances of centrist politicians lie—with the established order and corporate interests, rather than with progressive change.
Ultimately, the spectacle of Democrats embracing far-right endorsements should serve not as cause for despair, but as a clarion call for genuine, transformative change.
This pattern is not unique to France. In the United States, the Democratic Party's embrace of far-right endorsements follows a similar logic. By welcoming figures like the Cheneys into their fold, Democrats signal their willingness to preserve the status quo at the expense of meaningful reform. This move rightward is not an aberration but a reflection of the party's fundamental priorities.
The danger in this situation lies not just in the immediate policy implications, but in the long-term erosion of political possibilities. By supporting these endorsements, even tacitly through not challenging the Democrats to reject them, progressives risk ceding the ground of real transformative change to the right wing. The language of anti-elitism and systemic change, divorced from a genuinely progressive economic and social agenda, becomes the domain of right-wing populists.
The challenge, then, is twofold. On one hand, there is an urgent need to build political power outside of the two-party system. This means investing in grassroots organizing, mutual aid networks, and alternative economic structures that can provide a glimpse of a different way of organizing society. It means fostering a political culture that prioritizes the needs of working people over the demands of corporate donors.
On the other hand, there is a need for a more forceful and unapologetic progressive movement within electoral politics. This movement must be willing to challenge the Democratic establishment, to reject compromises that betray core values, and to articulate a vision of change that goes beyond incremental reforms. It must be willing to call out the hypocrisy of embracing far-right figures in the name of "unity" while marginalizing progressive voices.
Ultimately, the spectacle of Democrats embracing far-right endorsements should serve not as cause for despair, but as a clarion call for genuine, transformative change. It exposes the hollowness at the core of centrist politics and underscores the need for a political movement that truly represents the interests of the many rather than the elite few.
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The Trump-Harris Debate: Racist Lies Vs. Military Clichés
Much as “Who won?” seems to be the media focal point, my question is: Did anybody win? Did the whole country lose?
Sep 12, 2024
If nothing else, former U.S. President Donald Trump is forcing mainstream America out of its jail cell of clichés and political correctness—even though his apparent “vision” for America is primarily a dark comedy of lies.
Yeah, I watched the debate. Was the Trump character played by Rodney Dangerfield? Maybe Don Rickles? He could have been. The problem, however, is that there’s nothing funny about racism, which seemed to be the primary core of Trump’s blather.
Did Vice President Kamala Harris “win” the debate? Uh... this wasn’t a ping-pong game, much as “Who won?” seems to be the media focal point. My question is: Did anybody win? Did the whole country lose?
In her “victory,” what deeper truth did Harris advance?
One thing I must concede is that, in listening for 90 minutes to Trump’s arrogant irreverence toward the country’s centrist rituals and propriety, I must acknowledge at least this much: Our would-be dictator-in-chief is trying to push the country beyond the military-industrial status quo of the moment. His irreverence is so blatant he is driving neocon Republicans crazy, as exemplified by former veep Dick Cheney’s recent announcement that he plans to vote for Harris, declaring that Trump can “never be trusted with power again.”
Maybe, as the media notes, this was a big boost for Harris, but I find myself unable to separate Cheney from his legacy of hideous militarism: the Iraq war in particular, the hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians killed, the “weapons of mass destruction” lies, Gitmo and Abu Ghraib and the torture of prisoners. Suddenly, in the media, those are now simply historical abstractions, hardly worth mentioning in detail. The American past is sealed shut and mythologized as the good old days.
What matters is a unified America, right? As Time Magazine reported: “Harris was asked about the Cheneys’ endorsement while on the campaign trail, visiting a spice shop in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. She said she was ‘honored’ to have their endorsement, and that it represented the opportunity to ‘turn the page’ on partisan divisiveness.’”
She added that Americans are “exhausted about the division”—seeming to imply that the country was once solid and unified, fully in agreement on the nature of American values and such matters as who are enemies are. This seems to be one of the media talking points of the moment, which is ironic almost beyond belief. A nation born in a state of legalized slavery has never been a unified nation. What unity that does currently exist isn’t the result of Americans simply deciding to get along—or all agreeing on a specific, external enemy—but rather the result of decades and decades and decades of intense struggle, a la the civil rights movement, the women’s rights movement, the workers’ movements, etc., etc., and the ongoing creation of the country as it exists today.
Fascinatingly, in the wake of Cheney’s endorsement of Harris, Trump wrote on Truth Social: “He’s the King of Endless, Nonsensical Wars, wasting Lives and Trillions of Dollars, just like Comrade Kamala Harris. I am the Peace President, and only I will stop World War III!”
I note this not because I believe anything whatsoever that Trump says, but only to writhe in the irony that the main guy talking about peace (i.e., “peace”) on the national stage is a darkly comedic liar and narcissist whose primary talking point is racism.
During the debate, most of what Trump blathered was screw-loose nonsense, mixed, of course, with his special brand of racism, that is to say: the invasion of illegal aliens. This was the issue Trump rambled on about regardless of what he was asked to address, be it the economy, abortion, the January 6 riot, or whatever. To wit:
“Millions of people are pouring into the country—from prisons, jails, mental institutions, insane asylums. These are people she and Biden let into our country.”
“She’s a Marxist!... Twenty-one million people are pouring in. Many of these people are criminals.”
In Springfield, Ohio, Haitian immigrants are “eating dogs and cats—the pets of people that live there.”
Regarding Venezuela and other countries: “They’ve taken their criminals off the streets and given them to her (Harris). Crime is down all over the world—except here.”
Enough, enough! Trump’s audacious charisma apparently has given him some sort of media immunity. His lies—racist and otherwise—are simply too numerous to be questioned. But as I listen to him, screaming to myself, I also sense the nature of his appeal. He’s such a brat—so shameless in his attack on conventional wisdom, so blatant in his contempt for mainstream norms and certainties—that he has defied Cheney and the neocons and created his MAGA base: followers who have had it up to here with the rules of centrist dominance and political correctness.
The media consensus seems to be that Harris won the ping-pong game—I mean, the debate—because she spoke with clarity, factual accuracy, and sufficient contempt to continually put Trump in his place.
And yes, I get this, she won the ping-pong game. But in her “victory,” what deeper truth did Harris advance? What not-yet-existing country did she envision and present to the American people... and the world? I heard the clichés, especially the military clichés, but I didn’t see the vision.
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