The Dick Cheney/Harris Endorsement: In Terms of the Interests of the U.S. Ruling Class (and how they got to be that way)
"Either this nation shall kill racism, or racism shall kill this nation." (S. Jonas, August, 2018)
"A Vote for 'ABBH' (Any Body but Harris) is a Vote for Trump and Republo-Fascism" (S. Jonas, March, 2024)
Sorry. Could not find a caricature of Dick Cheney.
"Former Vice President and influential Republican Dick Cheney released a statement announcing his endorsement of Democratic nominee Vice President Kamala Harris for President. Speaking out against the Republican nominee, former President Donald Trump, Cheney said that he can 'never be trusted with power again. . . . In our nation's 248-year history, there has never been an individual who is a greater threat to our republic than Donald Trump . . . He tried to steal the last election using lies and violence to keep himself in power after the voters had rejected him,' he continued, referencing the events of Jan. 6, 2021. [As his daughter Liz Cheney said:] 'If you think about the moment, we're in, and you think about how serious this moment is, my dad believes-- and he said publicly-- there has never been an individual in our country who is as grave a threat to our democracy as Donald Trump is,' [emphasis added] she had said on the panel moderated by journalist Mark Leibovich."
So, not just Liz Cheney, but Dick Cheney, the man both liberals and progressives have loved to hate, for decades. First, see the Kuwait War, when he was H.W. Bush's Sec. of Defense. Kuwait was diagonal drilling into Iraq oil fields, and interfering with Iraq's narrow exit to the sea (which exit was protected by international law). 3 days before the U.S. invasion, the U.S. Ambassador, April Glaspie, assured Saddam Hussein that the U.S. would not interfere in his dispute with the Kuwaitis' (see my book The New Americanism, Chap. 8). Ooops! Either she did not know what was coming or she lied.
Then there was "W.'s War on Iraq," because "Saddam had nuclear weapons." As it happens in mid-Feb., 2003, about two weeks before the invasion, the Chief UN nuclear armament inspector, Hans Blix, said that Saddam had allowed him to inspect every site he (Blix) had on this list, and that here were NO nuclear weapons in Iraq. He also invited the CIA to follow-up with him. Well, with Cheney breathing down W.'s neck, we all know what happened: "Shock and Awe." How could one forget? And of course, after the U.S. won the war (in a way), no nukes, or even a hint of them, ever turned up. But Cheney had his even bigger war. So, taking those two events as starters, he was/is a really evil guy, indeed.
But he is now coming out in support of the Harris/Walz and has said publicly that he will vote for them. How can that be? After all, they are Democrats, No. 1 on Dick's target list for decades. Well, it is not just some spur-of-the-moment random choice, not perhaps one just to show public support for his daughter, who has been leading the Charge-of-the-Republican-Light-Brigade (light, that is, in that there are not too many of them, especially among the they-know-better crowd) against Trump for the last 3-plus years. Rather, it has very much to say about what the wishes of the (likely) majority ruling class in this country are in terms of national governance. That is, the Cheney endorsement is about what form of the state apparatus that keeps the ruling class in power in terms of control of the means of production, is best, at least for the present time. And that is capitalist parliamentary democracy, NOT fascism.
As I said in an earlier column, as it happens, Homo Sapiens is the only species that kills its own members on a grand scale. And that came about because Homo sapiens was the first (and to date only) species that, in order for its survival, needs to convert substances and stuffs found in the environment into other substances and stuffs, as in:
"Elsewhere I have discussed in some detail what has happened in the history of Homo sapiens concerning the essential 'conversion-of-natural-elements-in-order-to-survive' process. Apparently from pretty close in time to the beginning of communities organized at any level, which then became societies, the ownership of the various means of production that converts elements found in the environment into those goods and services needed/used for individual and species survival has for the most part been in private hands.
"The 'means of production' in those days could include anything from the ownership of farm or grazing land, the ownership/manufacturing of weapons, the ownership of boats for fishing, in the beginning on inland lakes, or the ownership of the means by which raw meat/game, vegetables, and grains were made into food, and then distributed to the population at large. It is precisely that mode of ownership, and the means the owners have used over time to protect their ownership, that eventually leads to violence within and between societies, on a larger and larger scale."
Private ownership of the means of production, whether farming, hunting, fishing, and eventually non-industrial manufacturing and trade, eventually to led to the accumulation of income in excess of the costs of production, which excess was in the hands of the owners of whatever the means of production were at the time. Until very recently, the owners used that excess income to build better lives for themselves, to hire more servants/peasants, to expand their ownership of land, to build more ships and other means of transport, to fight wars with neighbors (or, in the case of The Crusades, others far away) to control property and trade, and so on and so forth. In the Western World, generally in the Common Era, that system of land ownership and non-industrial production was what is generally referred to as Feudalism. Of course, similar systems held sway in East Asia, Japan, and South and Central Asia.
As it has happened over the last five centuries or so, a new system for the use and distribution of excess income has come into play: that system is what we refer to as "capitalism." VERY briefly, capitalism is a system under which at least some of the excess income produced by exchange and production is used not first for the expansion of private wealth (although that of course one of the most desirable outcomes of the process being described here), but rather for re-investment in and expansion of the available means of production.
In feudal times, the protection of private property was generally undertaken by bodies of armed men, directly reporting to the "feudal lords," organized at various levels. Historically, the first form of capitalism was developed in the 17th Netherlands, which was a major trading nation. For whatever reasons (perhaps because it was a small county), instead of expanding personal goods and spaces, the traders took at least some of the profits that they made from their trading and plowed them back into further expanding their ever-growing fleets and trading routes. That system has come to be called mercantile capitalism. And then, as manufacturing and early industrialization began to develop in the 18th century, the private owners began to introduce what we now call industrial capitalism into their activities as well. And increasingly sophisticated state apparati began to be developed to perpetuate the private ownership and control of the several industries.
Now as to the state apparati that the owners of the means of production used to maintain their control. In its early days, capitalism operated under various forms of monarchy --- see the United Kingdom, France, Prussia, Russia, Japan (the latter of which, by the way, is the only non-European nation that was never colonized by a European one). And, among other things, it was the monarchies which endeavored to keep control of the workers who toiled in the factories, transportation systems, and etc., and whom the owners exploited so as to gain the excess income, both to expand their industries and ownership and also to purchase the "finer things in life."
The means of control were not always by the use of force (and certainly are not in modern times). As Chancellor Otto von Bismarck of Prussia is reported to have said, "the workers are revolting [in both meanings of the term], so we had better give them something." (Indeed, it was under Bismarck that the first very early form of what became national health insurance [in every industrialized country other than the U.S.] was introduced, in the 1880's.)
As capitalism developed into the 20th century, so did two rather different forms of national governance develop at the same time. One is one form or an other of "Constitutional Democracy," with a variety of governing bodies, elections, separations of powers to a greater or lesser extent, various degrees of personal freedom as well as various degrees of organization for the workers, and so on and so forth. The other is what is generally called "fascism," which is the name that one of the early progenitors of the system, Italy's Benito Mussolini, gave to it.
One of its basic characteristics is that there is no separation of governmental powers. The national government is generally headed by a single individual (Japan was one exception to that rule), in which all power --- administrative, legislative, and judicial --- is concentrated. Foreign war may or may not be an essential element of the system. Both forms existed in 20th century Europe: Italy and Germany, of course on the one hand, Miklos Horthy's Hungary, and Franco's Spain on the other.
And so, historically there have been three forms of government under which capitalist ownership and production has existed: monarchy (from the 17th century through the end of the first World War), parliamentary democracy, and fascism. In my view, what is going on in the United States right now is a major struggle not between capital and labor but rather between two opposing sectors of the capitalist ruling class: the supporters of some form of Constitutional Democracy, used to maintain control of the political economy, and the supporters of some form of authoritarian government (often called fascist) to accomplish the same outcome. This, to repeat, is what the current struggle between the two major U.S. political parties is all about.
Is the present form of parliamentary democracy that has worked very well for the owners of capital in the United States, since they became the major controllers of economic political and economic power following the conclusion of the First Civil War, to be maintained? Or, to accomplish the same ends, is some form of fascism (see Trump/Project2025) to be introduced. The Democrats would continue to do what they have been doing ever since the New Deal in order to protect the interests of the ruling class. This version of the Republican Party makes no secret about its wish to create, as the head of the Heritage Foundation, Kevin Roberts, has said, a Second American Revolution.
But, for the present dominant sector of the U.S. ruling class, that prospect is anathema. Dick Cheney is obviously linked to that sector. If he were not, he would be an open avatar for Trump and the policies of Project 2025. (Of course Trump has gone even further, calling for shooting certain categories of "illegal immigrants" in the streets.)
So, Dick Cheney has not "become one of us," or even a conventional Democrat. He (and Liz before him) is simply a prominent advocate for the direction the nation should take, in terms of its governmental structure, that the currently dominant sector of the U.S. ruling class finds to be the most useful for maintaining its position of power, and the profits that go with it.