The Darth Vader Vote

The Democrats have wrapped up the Darth Vader vote.

Former Vice President Dick Cheney recently announced in a statement that he will be voting for Kamala Harris, as will his daughter Liz, a principal leader of the “conservative” resistance wing of the Democrats’ 2024 campaign.

Cheney’s endorsement of Harris comes after a group of Republicans spoke at the DNC in support of the Harris/Walz ticket. These include former Illinois Representative Adam Kinzinger, Olivia Troye, formerly a national security advisor to Vice President Mike Pence, and Stephanie Grisham, a one-time aide to Melania Trump and a short-lived White House press secretary.

In more catnip for the predominantly regime-aligned media, 200 former Bush, McCain, and Romney staffers—in truth, mostly interns and low-level aides—endorsed the Democrats’ 2024 nominee. At last Tuesday’s debate, Harris brought along Troye and the infamous former White House Communications Director Anthony Scaramucci who, as Trump campaign spokesman Steven Cheung quipped, “barely lasted more time than an expired ham sandwich” in the 45th President’s White House.

Former President George W. Bush, Vice President Mike Pence, and Mitt Romney, of course, have declined to endorse Trump. In the 2016 election, Bush’s father even cast his vote for Hillary Clinton.

As part of his statement, Dick Cheney declared, “in our nation’s 248-year history, there has never been an individual who is a greater threat to our republic than Donald Trump,” who purportedly “tried to steal the last election using lies and violence to keep himself in power after the voters had rejected him. He can never be trusted with power again.”

For a man who is not accustomed to indulging in hyperbole, this statement is striking in its imbalance. Trump is more dangerous than Osama Bin Laden? Or John Wilkes Booth? What about the two men who tried to assassinate Trump himself?

No matter one’s opinion about January 6 or the Trump team’s legal efforts in the wake of the 2020 election, the “greatest threat to America” left office according to the strict letter of the 20th Amendment to the Constitution.

On the surface, Cheney’s embrace of Harris seems odd for a number of reasons, especially considering that the Left has historically not been shy in lobbing every term of opprobrium in the English language at him. They’ve routinely called him a war criminal, a fascist, a shill for big oil, a shadow president. Green Day’s 2004 smash-hit “American Idiot” clearly targeted Cheney in their rage against the Republican-led establishment that took us to war in Afghanistan and Iraq (“Now everybody, do the propaganda / And sing along to the age of paranoia”). Adam McKay was so overcome by Cheney’s ghastliness that he made Vice, a dreadful biopic featuring Christian Bale as the evil menace himself. (In a promotional interview for the movie, Bale credited “Satan for giving me inspiration on how to play this role.”)

As the Claremont Institute’s own Theo Wold has noted, the biggest names in the Democratic Party have taken Dick Cheney to task in public. In 2004, John Kerry said he lied America into war; in 2008, Barack Obama teasingly called Cheney the worst “president” in U.S. history; and in 2016, Hillary Clinton argued that he routinely violated norms.

Cheney’s endorsement of Harris and Walz, however, isn’t simply hypocrisy on the Democrats’ part or defection from long-held principles on his own. His support for the most liberal candidates in U.S. history signals what the Democratic Party has become—and what Bushism always was at its core.

Far from a complete break with his past politics, Cheney’s realignment with the Left is the apotheosis of Bushism, which was simply a species of the ruling class genus. Its childish belief in self-government as consent absent citizen virtue, its almost prelapsarian view of human nature, and its willingness to use the machinery of modern government for its own ends absent any plan to roll back the administrative state was always of a piece with the current leftist order.

Regular violations of both the natural and constitutional rights of citizens—also Cheney’s bailiwick—are right at home in the big tent of the modern Democratic Party as well. The former vice president will be forever linked with the worst aspects of the homeland security state: rendition prisons, the torture of enemy combatants, warrantless wiretaps of American citizens carried out by the NSA, and support for pointless, reckless wars that have continued to have catastrophic consequences for the U.S. to this very day. The person who pushed all these irresponsible policies is the person whose vote Kamala Harris is “proud” and “honored” to claim. We should take her at her word.

As Pavlos Papadopoulos has noted, the Cheneys represent the constituency of the D.C. ruling class in contrast to average Wyomingites—or the average American for that matter. (Liz, after all, lost her 2022 primary to Harriet Hageman by an astounding 37-point margin.) After growing up in Nebraska and then later Wyoming, Papadopoulos explains, Dick Cheney moved to Washington, D.C. to work for both the Nixon and Ford Administrations before securing Wyoming’s Congressional seat in 1978. “After a decade representing the state, he returned to the capital full-time as Secretary of Defense.” Never looking back, Cheney then had “stints at the Council on Foreign Relations, American Enterprise Institute, Halliburton, and finally as vice president,” where he was “focused on irrigating Middle Eastern deserts with the waters of liberal democracy.”

The top-bottom coalition of the modern Democratic Party is one of the elites, by the elites, and for the elites. As Cheney’s own record demonstrates, one’s performance in public office no longer matters—since no one is ever held to account anyway. What counts is the lengths one goes to uphold the ruling consensus against the wishes of the proles in the hinterlands. Republicans are only “great,” as Harris called John McCain in last week’s debate, insofar as they work to maintain the powerful apparatus that benefits the ruling class and its courtiers at the expense of the U.S.’s people, political principles, power, and prestige.

George W. Bush’s Pauline Kael moment, when he called Trump’s First Inaugural “some weird sh*t,” was just as revealing as Nancy Pelosi’s much-maligned “we have to pass the bill to see what’s in it” remark about Obamacare. The power players of our bipartisan ruling class have jointly presided over the decline of the United States while fondly imagining they were doing a bang-up job—and they still have no clue how Donald Trump won in 2016 and could win again in November.

As our political realignment progresses, it’s good to see members of the old guard like Dick Cheney reveal where their sympathies lie. For once, the American people are finally beginning to face real choices between genuine alternatives. The return of actual politics, where deliberation is aimed at securing the common good of American citizens, would be a major step forward—and a much-needed rebuke to Cheney and his ilk who have done so much damage to the country.

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