The Cheneys Highlight the Democratic Party’s Neoconservative Betrayal

There’s a part of me that really wants to travel back in time to 2003 and talk to my twenty-one-year-old self. And, there’s another part of me that wants to leave well enough alone.

Back then, my life had one overriding purpose: trying to stop the illegal invasion of Iraq. This was the beginning of both my actual political education and my radicalization. It was more than obvious that the Bush Administration was manufacturing consent for a disastrous attack that would lead America further and further into the abyss. Our wild and belligerent reaction to the terror attacks of September 11th had already given us a glimpse of what was to come. My family and neighbors were rabidly calling for wanton genocide and unchecked war crimes. Life was a haze of jingoistic, violent bullshit. And stopping the Iraq War seemed the only means of pushing back.

As I still had a lot of learning to do, younger me was stupefied. George W. Bush was so obviously unfit, and his criminal cronies were piloting the American Empire for personal empowerment and enrichment. To make matters worse, the Democratic Party wasn’t just capitulating, it was actively helping. The Congressional Authorization for Use of Military Force passed the Senate without a single nay. In the House, Representative Barbara Lee was the lone dissenting vote. The Patriot Act received comparable support. When the vote on the Iraq War came around, the Democrats in the House took a stand, and in the Senate it was approved with the support of John Kerry, Hillary Clinton, and Joe Biden.

I felt betrayed. Disillusioned. Angry. And bereft.

And now, somehow, those feelings have not just reawakened, but have been amplified. Like a deep trauma that’s been unearthed to ring and sing again as the rehabilitation of Bush, Dick Cheney, and their sordid crew has moved into full swing.

There were warning signs we would get here. The rise of Donald Trump necessitated for some the need to view Bush through a different lens. We were bombarded for years of this sappy portrait of an old man learning to paint. Then, his friendship with celebrities like Ellen DeGeneres. Sharing candy with Michelle Obama at John McCain’s funeral and then, like a callback in a franchise movie, doing it again at his own father’s service. In 2021, as Biden was about to take the oath of office and Trump was conspicuously absent, we got these fawning segments with Bush hanging around with Bill Clinton and Barack Obama. A paragon of norms.

Cheney’s path back to respectability has taken longer, but here we are. The exile of his daughter Liz Cheney from the party greased the skids. We had to watch as she was welcomed into the fold and then one of the worst war criminals of the 21st century found his way. This weekend, Cheney endorsed Kamala Harris for president, leading insipid influencers to cheer and stamp their feet. When I pushed back, I was overwhelmed by liberals saying that maybe he had healed, changed his ways, and that “saving democracy” required this poisonous coalition.

Never mind, of course, that Cheney and Bush literally stole the 2000 Election.

It’s hard not to see how we have shifted rightward. Trump’s Era has given so much cover to Neoconservatives and “traditional” Republicans to hop off their sinking ship and demand the ship that saved them follow their lead. David Frum, who crafted the communication strategy leading to Iraq, is a liberal commentator now. Bill Kristol, one of the vanguards of the Right’s faux-intelligentsia, is now a vaunted Never-Trumper. All the strategists and consultants who gave us decades of some of the most misogynistic and racist advertisements imaginable, who ushered Sarah Palin and the new Know-Nothings into the spotlight, are now heroes of the “Resistance” and probably sleep on mountains of liberal donations every night.

All of it is sickening. In a world that made sense, Bush and Cheney would be following American politics from a cell in the Hague. The people who helped them and who guided the GOP along its trajectory would be isolated from power and influence and treated like pariahs. Instead, the Overton Window has shifted. And now the Democratic Party spans the ideological spectrum from Bernie Sanders to the Neoconservative Right.

It would be one thing if they were just commentators and influencers, but Neoconservatism has seeped into the party as well. Watching the Democratic National Convention, you couldn’t help but notice that the rhetorical tropes of freedom and strength dominated the discourse. Support for Israel’s ongoing brutalities in Gaza was seen across the board. And Harris herself punctuated her acceptance by promising to maintain “the most lethal fighting force” on the face of the Earth, a phrase most often used by Pentagon officials. The idea that America is some special nation with a special destiny and a war machine to change the world was inescapable.

What I feel, in addition to the anger and disgust, is mourning. A mourning for a simpler time in my life where I believed, for a moment, that for every Bush and Cheney there had to be an equal opposition. The votes cured me of that, as did the War on Terror. My understanding furthered when Howard Dean was scuttled in the 2004 primary in favor of Kerry, who wasn’t interested in so much as communicating an opposition to Bush or the Neoconservative line.

It was a small death, in a way, but a necessary one. It helped me see politics as they actually are, a pageant that concealed battles over power and resources. The idealism I carried, the same that spurred me to try and keep the war from happening, limited my ability to work and struggle. It left me with false hopes, and it left me vulnerable.

Knowing this, I cannot get duped as easily anymore. When the Cheney announcement arrived, I wasn’t surprised or caught off-guard. This is the nature of how power moves. It seeks, like water, the easiest course, and the rehabilitation of this nightmarish group and nightmarish time was always going to come. And the support for it, the willful ignorance of what it means, both as to where we are as a country and where the Democratic Party is, isn’t surprising either.

But I will still mourn. And I will still be angered.