On Tuesday night, I sat on the floor of the overflow room at Walsh Hall to hear Liz Cheney speak. I had been confounded for weeks: What had The Council for Women of Boston College chosen to celebrate? The fliers were maddeningly vague—and one week before the election, too! Wouldn’t she be campaigning with Kamala Harris? I was fascinated.
Doubtless, Cheney’s turn against Donald Trump cost her, and yet she held fast in resistance. That is noble, so far as it goes. But as I sat and listened to what Cheney had to share with us, I found myself only more confounded in a way that reflected a larger confusion surrounding the 2024 election.
For it was clear, too, that she was confounded.
Cheney was confounded about January 6, 2021. She spoke of “the party I loved” changing around her, as if Donald Trump and Jan. 6 leaped up out of nowhere. His “cult of personality” had taken over her party, she said—but she offered no explanation, no exploration, not even a “how” or a “why,” as to the cause.
This sort of confusion repeated. Simultaneously, she noted that America gets what it votes for, yet “we are not a cruel nation.” So whence then arose Trump, whom she clearly believes to be cruel? She spoke of the Washington Post’s silenced Harris endorsement: “This is what happens in an autocracy.” Yet, moments later, “This is not an autocracy.” So then what is an autocracy, if multiple billionaires regularly directing their media empires is not?
These words seemed to say something, at first, but when combined, demonstrate a significant refusal to speak about how America actually got here.
The first questions sought clarity: Liz Cheney, brave in resisting her party and Trump. How did she do it? Because Trump is an “existential threat to democracy,” such that Republicans must join Democrats to oppose him, including her father, Dick Cheney.
Here, the heart of the confusion is reached. Liz Cheney spoke of her father throughout the hour—how he raised her, how he inspired her, his concerned call when Trump threatened her. But if it is democracy at risk, we show how non-serious we are by praising Dick Cheney.
Dick Cheney was an active and sustained attack on democracy through mass centralization of executive power through the AUMFs, the dissolution of due process by the norms of torture and the opening of Guantanamo Bay, and by mass domination through the PATRIOT Act. The 2000 election itself made a mockery of democracy, for which Dick Cheney and Former President George Bush performed an encore in appointing the Justices who would soon approve of Citizens United—the last punchline in the phrase “American democracy.”
Dick Cheney’s hands are forever red with the blood of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis who he murdered—children and innocent generations, whose region of the world he destroyed. His lips are charred by the lies he told to sustain that war effort. The cause of human decency, global peace, climate security, and democratic governance was pitilessly abused by Dick Cheney’s rule, with longer-lasting material effects than Trump’s clumsy, awful, and disorganized attempt at a symbolic coup (bad as Jan. 6 was).
This history is what has confounded Democrats for eight years, and it’s clear that Harris and Cheney are no closer to understanding it. They treat Trump and his wild, nationalist madness as an incomprehensible aberration, as if emergent ex nihilo and sui generis, rather than as someone grown from what lies deep in the American project.
Cheney praises the Republican party she “grew up in,” without the slightest hint of irony that the organization had long been seeding the conditions for someone like Trump to grow—nurtured through financial crisis, through media extremism, through normalizing brutal, cruel, and massive violence across the globe in the name of America’s hegemony.
There is no great leap between Bush’s divinely-chosen America and “America First,” nor is there between the policies of Dick Cheney and the new neoconservative war-fueling and immigrant fear-mongering slowly embraced by the Biden-Harris administration.
There is a reason the Cheneys voted for Trump in 2016 and 2020, when he had made no secret whatsoever of who and what he was. Trump’s own fascistic speech, rapacious abuses, and rampant corruption were no deal-breaker for them until he became a personal threat on Jan. 6.
The Democrats, in failing to understand Trump, court disaster by treating him as exceptional and partnering with the very forces that made him—and future “hims”—possible. But Liz Cheney asks a different “why.”
“Why accept someone who lies to you?” speaking of Trump’s obvious and endless deceptions.
But who lied first? Whose lies killed more than Trump could ever dream? Who joined with an infinite media empire of deceptions and fear-mongering that came into adulthood under Dick Cheney’s watchful partnership? Whose lies, whose wars, whose financial corruption, set all the conditions for Trump to sweep America off its feet? Liz Cheney was not the only one raised by Dick Cheney.
So in the last count, I remained only confounded for what BC hoped we would learn, just as I am confounded by America’s insistent refusal to acknowledge its history—for before us was not one most noteworthy for her bravery, but someone as absurd as all of us: having for years sowed the wind, and yet claiming shock when the whirlwind was reaped.
