If all that weren’t bad enough, Cheney was also a chief engineer of what historians call the “Imperial Presidency” — an institutional development in which the executive office routinely ignores or exceeds constitutional limits, particularly in matters of foreign policy and war powers. That precedent was later used by Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton to bypass Congress and overthrow Muammar Gaddafi’s regime in Libya, sending the nation into a death‑spiral where the slave trade again became legal. Obama’s administration also invoked the Imperial Presidency to carry out extrajudicial techno‑militarist killings of “enemies of state” via drones in Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia. And now, thanks to Cheney’s pioneering zeal, we have a sitting US president who uses his contempt for limits on his power to impose a sweeping global tariff regime and create a massive domestic agency that rounds up unwanted immigrants.

Cheney was indeed, as has been repeated endlessly in recent days, the most powerful vice president in all US history. It is a fact sure to appear in the opening line of every obituary, encyclopedia entry, and perhaps even chiseled into his epitaph. But a better way of understanding his fame is that Cheney was the Rasputin of the worst US presidential administration of the modern era. While Grigori Rasputin remains perhaps the most distressingly evil, dark magicians of all time — whispering insane advice that led Czar Nicholas II and the Romanov’s to ruin — Dick Cheney had the same effect on George W. Bush, but in a far more mundane, Americana‑like manner. In the lead‑up to the Iraq War, in his seemingly humble and even‑tempered Midwestern tone, Cheney frequently made speeches and appeared on television, pushing for “preemptive” action” to address the grave threat of Iraqi “weapons of mass destruction.”

Declassified memos and later congressional testimony show that Cheney and his aides pressured not just President Bush, but the intelligence agencies to overstate Iraq’s “WMDs.” Cheney was also the one who, after September 11th, authorized the NSA’s warrantless wire‑tapping program, which made the entire US population a target of the kind of at‑scale eavesdropping that Rasputin could have only dreamed of.  In the end, as with Rasputin’s spooky mystical sway over the Romanovs, Cheney’s clandestine maneuvering resulted in a disastrous presidential administration — one that historians will likely conclude broke the American empire, wasting wasting $4-6 trillion on an absurd quest to bring Anglo‑style democracy to the Islamic world.

Cheney’s financial ties to the American war machine were, however, more direct. Before joining the 2000 ticket, he served as CEO of Halliburton, the giant energy‑services firm. Critics frequently pointed to the overlap between his corporate past and the Bush administration’s contracting choices. Halliburton and its subsidiary KBR emerged as major recipients of lucrative, often no‑bid, contracts for reconstruction, logistics, and fuel services in Iraq — awards that watchdogs and congressional investigators repeatedly flagged for poor oversight and the appearance of favoritism.

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Put simply, Cheney helped normalize a revolving door between government and corporate power that turned war into a revenue stream for his affiliated investments and contractors. The grotesque entanglement of private interest profiteering and public violence is now a permanent feature of American statecraft. Cheney was one of its primary architects. If all this weren’t bad enough, Cheney’s administration was so dreadful that it ultimately produced the Obama‑Biden counter-revolution — which, rather than correcting the economic or military disasters of the Bush years, plagued the nation with the worst aspects of progressive moralism: fixating on tone and etiquette, and insisting the working class mind its manners while recognizing the alleged “plight” of elite minorities and privileged professionals.

“At least the Democrats didn’t start the Iraq War” was a line that justified this incessant fence-sitting moralizing. The result is that we now inhabit a country where the collective shine on the American state has dulled to the point that many Millennials and Gen Z question the value of democracy altogether, while allied nations warn their citizens that we may no longer be a safe place to visit. Meanwhile, both major parties are run by self‑dealing opportunists, raiding the public coffers for their donors, investors, and cronies alike. Biden and Trump might have taken this approach to governance to its extreme, but Cheney, as the kids say, “hit it first”.

Thus we’re left to ask — is the tragicomedy of late‑stage American politics all Dick Cheney’s fault? Hardly. But, at the start of the 21st century, Cheney contributed more than most to the doom loop Americans now occupy. Appropriate to George W. Bush’s Austin statehouse origins, the Iraq War initiated a Texas two‑step of national self‑destruction. The first step was the war itself. The second was melting the brains of the Gen‑X Left, who would create the first iteration of “resistance” liberalism — the so‑called “Anybody‑But‑Bush” milieu.

Strange as it is in retrospect, my first real job in journalism was at the media headquarters of the 2004 “Anybody‑But‑Bush” movement, writing radio news at the notoriously unlistenable Air America Radio, designed to be a “Fox News for Democrats”. Not only did the radio network launch the coastal‑centric and insufferably elitist careers of Rachel Maddow, Marc Maron, and Sam Seder, it did something far more impactful in the long term. Along with Jon Stewart’s The Daily Show, the station helped establish the Democratic Party propaganda framework that would become the blueprint for most of American legacy media in the 2010s and early 2020s. And it did so — as I witnessed personally — under the very specific auspices of the Bush‑Cheney regime’s grotesqueness. The first name on the marquee was widely presumed to be little more than a figurehead for Cheney and Karl Rove, the true masterminds behind the curtain.

While sitting at my computer on election night over two decades ago now, with the outcome still in doubt, I had to look away as the station’s executives began becoming physically aroused at the prospect of John Kerry prevailing in Ohio. Days earlier, I had placed bets with several co‑workers in the newsroom predicting that Kerry would lose to the Bush‑Cheney machine. Over and over, I’d tried to explain that there was simply no way a self‑serious, blue-blood like Kerry would ever be welcomed by Middle American voters.

None of my co‑workers considered this rationale worthy of consideration, even when it proved correct. In their minds, the only people who voted for Bush and Cheney were “racists” or “rubes”. Their white‑hot hatred for the Cheney‑run administration overshadowed any desire to treat cultural politics as something delicate and worthy of respect. It’s a mindset that’s still predominant throughout the Washington‑to‑NYC “Acela corridor” establishment media.

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A decade before Trump Derangement Syndrome became a tangible phenomenon, Bush and Cheney anticipated it by dissolving the rational critical-thinking capacity of the wealthy Gen X Democratic Party apparatchiks. Despite their inability to reconcile the reality of Bush’s everyman appeal — and the abject failure of their network to turn a profit — this group of pseudo‑journalists broadcasting from the 41st floor of Park Avenue South ultimately created the partisan model that took over mainstream media in the decades to come.

Air America Radio became the prototype for MSNBC — which eventually provided the audience strategy for the New York Times, The New Yorker, and what remained of the Condé Nast media empire. A world where “conservative” is nearly as dirty a label as “pedophile”, and anyone “on the Right” is presumed to be a white supremacist. And it all started with their burning hatred for Dick Cheney. He was a conniving and duplicitous but highly effective political puppeteer who, truth be told, they all would have loved to have on their side.

After Trump’s rise, that opportunity came about — and the Democratic establishment took it. So much of the Left‑liberal media, including my former co‑worker Rachel Maddow, who had spent countless hours portraying Cheney as the literal embodiment of evil, overnight turned coat and began calling him a “hero”. Why? Because, once it became a good career move, Cheney joined his daughter in standing against Trump.

A year ago, just before the 2024 election, Cheney declared: “In our nation’s 248‑year history, there has never been an individual who is a greater threat. He 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.” While I personally share the sentiment, it’s quite rich coming from Cheney — the man who personally designed the throne of the Imperial Presidency — to now say what America really needs is devotion to our history of republican checks‑and‑balances rule.

Now that we’ve seen its final turn, Cheney’s career arc — more than anyone’s — exposes the core absurdity of modern Democratic politics. Its deepest drive isn’t New Deal‑style liberalism, or even progressive social tolerance, but what Thomas Frank calls “anti‑populism.” An elitist impulse that exists solely to thwart the (small “d”) democratic desires of working people. Before heading to the great pasture in the sky, Cheney saw the light of anti‑populism, and that’s enough for establishment Democrats to declare him one of their own.

Baghdad was strafed by violence, and then lavished with colossal, almost surreal, amounts of foreign cash. The Americans spent $2 trillion on the war — a good chunk of it on efforts to rebuild the country they had helped to destroy. It was, like many things the US does, almost uncontrollable. Billions in shrink-wrapped $100 bills flowed into the country, and back out again into foreign bank accounts. It was the biggest transfer of cash in the history of the Federal Reserve. In the year after the 2003 invasion, almost 281 million notes, weighing 363 tonnes, were sent from New York to Baghdad.

Is Iraq now the functioning democracy of Washington’s dreams, or a sectarian dystopia? Twenty years on, was it worth it?

“Long live Bush! Long live Bush!” My fixer Ammar is reminiscing about the first days of the invasion as we drive through the city centre. “That’s what we were chanting. The Americans were coming; the Baathists were running. I was on the roof of my house, and we saw Apaches flying around. Then the American soldiers entered the city. They were covered in mud; their faces all painted black. Then the armoured vehicles came. Those soldiers were spotless.”

Ammar is one of the many Shia Iraqis who initially viewed the war as a liberation from Saddam Hussein’s sadism. Saddam was Sunni, but also a Baathist, an avowedly secular political philosophy influenced by Arab nationalism and Marxism. He lived in perennial fear of Iraq’s Shia majority, not least the Dawa Party, a Shia Islamist group that emerged in 1960. Devoted to turning Iraq into an Islamist state, it tried to assassinate Saddam in 1982, his would-be killers emerging from the cover of a date palm orchard in the city of Dujail. Saddam had two of its early leaders, Muhammad Baqir al-Sadr and Muhammad-Sadiq al-Sadr killed. (Saddam allegedly hammered an iron nail into the head of the former.)

We pass one of Saddam’s palaces. Every remaining pillar for 50 metres has his initials engraved into it, Ammar tells me. “He made himself everywhere,” he adds, before pointing to another fortified wall. “David, look! That’s the Green Zone.” If Baghdad is a city of chaos, it’s also a city of walls. Once they encased a tyrant; now they protect the hordes of diplomats, journalists and NGO workers, who comprise the tip of today’s Western spear into this country.

There’s a mural by the side of the road. “Stop killing; we deserve life; where are you UN?” it reads with the image of a bullet flying through it. Ammar remembers the violence. “We got so used to the bombs that, after a while, we could clean up everything after an attack — including the bodies — in one hour.

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“At first, I was disappointed with Iraqis for fighting the Americans. I thought they were forgetting our debt: if the Americans hadn’t taken out Saddam, we would have lived under his dictatorship for 1,000 years. I thought the Americans just needed time to make huge changes in the country.” But then Ammar started working for the US Army as a translator. “Everyone was always coming to me with their problems, asking me about electricity, water, jobs — simple things — and I realised they didn’t have a plan. Even when violence against them was from just a few people, they took it out on everyone. They shot at me with water cannons just for approaching their car. They were savage.”

George W. Bush went into Iraq declaring he would take out a tyrant and replace him with a liberal democracy. Five weeks after the invasion, the president declared the mission accomplished. “In the battle for Iraq, the United States and her allies have prevailed,” he announced from the USS Abraham Lincoln. American forces captured Saddam later that year. Everything seemed rosy. But in truth, the problems were just beginning.

The road into Sadr City is lined with the posters of martyrs. They are all so young: young men who should have spent their youth playing video games, not dying in the street. Sadr City is a Baghdad suburb that was built to house the poor. Originally called Al-Thawr (Revolution City), it was renamed Saddam City in 1982 and then unofficially renamed Sadr City, after the martyred Sadiq al-Sadr. Today, it is the base of his son Muqtada al-Sadr, a thorn in the side of the Americans from the moment they arrived.

I am here for Friday prayers. All around are children playing in the streets. A few kick a dirty football around, their replica shirts bearing the names of famous Muslim players: Mo Salah and Karim Benzema are the most popular.

Friday prayers have a special place in the Muslim world — especially for the Shia of Iraq, who have traditionally used them to voice dissent. It was largely because of their sermons during Friday prayers that Sadeq and Baqir Sadr were killed. Today, more than a thousand people are praying in the street. Flags and banners stretch almost to the horizon. The images of the Shia Imams Huseyn and Ali are everywhere. “Muqtada!” demand the crowd. Muqtada, however, is not here today, but back home in the holy Shia city of Najaf. His replacement is giving a speech centred on the environment. “Iraq has become a desert under the rule of the former regime,” he intones. “It is time to plant more trees.”

Sadr City is key to the story of post-invasion Iraq. Just two months after the Americans overthrew Saddam in July, they set up a governing council to rule the country until proper elections — the first in the nation’s history — could be held the following year. Among the council’s leaders were members of Dawa. The party had been responsible for terror attacks against US targets in the Eighties, but after Saddam became public enemy number one following his 1991 invasion of Kuwait, Washington brought it in from the cold. But Dawa had no time for the US vision of a rainbow nation. Instead, it used the parliament to achieve its own vision of a Shia-dominated Iraq.

One person, though, was left out. On orders from the US, Muqtada was barred from the governing council. Washington viewed him as a loose cannon. But it didn’t count on his ambition. If Muqtada couldn’t rule through the ballot, he would do so through the bullet.

He got to work quickly. Sadrist forces already controlled most of Baghdad’s mosques and, just weeks after the invasion, they set about seizing the schools and hospitals, as well as opening local Sharia law courts and “punishment” committees. Muqtada wanted to expel the Americans from the start, and made his views known publicly. Then, after Washington responded by shutting down his newspaper, he founded the Mahdi Army. Its goal: to drive US forces out of Iraq. Once that was achieved, he would take his rightful seat at the new table of Iraq’s government. As Iraq imploded into bedlam, hatred of Washington became increasingly popular; his message found a growing audience.

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In a hotel in central Baghdad, I meet Abu Fatima, also known as Al Jariyah (the wounded), a former soldier in the Mahdi Army, a large man with a large belly and wounds across his face. He joined up soon after Muqtada sent out the call, and fought US forces in the August 2004 Battle of Najaf. Abu Fatima was wanted by the Americans and spent four years on the run in Syria and Iran.

“The Americans said they were liberators,” he tells me, “but we were sure they were occupiers. We started as peaceful protestors in 2004, and when Muqtada said the occupiers had to leave, we joined him in Najaf. Then they closed the newspaper, and they issued an arrest warrant against him. Then they tried to raid the holy shrine — and the conflict began. I was 18 at the time. We had Kalashnikovs and RPGs, while they were using planes and tanks. But still we managed to push them back.”

The story is taken up by Mortava Al-Musavi, the spokesman of the military wing of the Sadr organisation. Dressed in a black suit (the Shia’s favoured colour), he recalls his own time fighting. “We never had any support from anyone. We made IEDs and used them against Abrams tanks. Many of us went out to fight believing we would not return. We used to sleep inside the graves with the dead. I remember a comment from a US general, who said: ‘We are fighting ghosts.’”

I ask him what he thinks of Iraq today. “Twenty years on, we have proved that we will not accept any occupiers trampling on us. We believe that only Iraqis can rule themselves. And this is what Muqtada is putting into practice. If only Iraq stops implementing a foreign agenda, it will become a stable country. I don’t want to be pessimistic; I hope things will get better.”

“A foreign agenda.” It is impossible to spend any time in post-invasion Iraq without hearing these words. And they generally mean one thing: Iran. When the Americans removed Saddam, they empowered not only Iraq’s Shia, but its neighbour, the world’s most powerful Shia state. As soon as Saddam fell, Iranian money and influence, and indeed weapons, started pouring into Iraq. Not only did Iran help set up several militias in the country, but many of members of Dawa who fled Iraq under Saddam went into exile in Iran. Nouri Al Maliki, Prime Minister of Iraq from 2006-2014, and who many blame for a range of viciously anti-Sunni policies, was a Dawa member who spent eight years in Tehran.

Muqtada, though, has always — publicly at least — rejected Tehran and campaigned against Iranian influence in Iraq (though he spent 2007-2011 in Iran on the run from a US arrest warrant). It may have cost him. In the 2021 Iraqi elections, the Sadrist Movement gained the most seats in parliament, but couldn’t form a government: among other things, the Iran-backed Fatah coalition wouldn’t countenance a Sadr-led government and negotiations stalled for over a year.

Over tea that evening, Fattah Al-Sheikh, a former MP close to the Sadrist movement, explains what lies behind this stasis. “Too many politicians are pro-Iran or they are scared of it. They are subject to the Velayat-e faqih [Iran’s ruling theological-political doctrine] while having to deal with western countries. One day they must implement the agenda of a country that attacks the Green Zone and sends rockets into Erbil; the next they are trying to meet the US ambassador. They are lost.”

He continues: “You cannot claim to be democratic on one hand and hold a weapon in the other. You cannot be a democratic country when you are part of the government that is smuggling cash to another country. We have armed militia groups who put rifles to people’s heads when they go to vote.”

Twenty years on, Al-Sheikh is keen to be, as he calls it, “fair”. Without US intervention, he concedes, Iraqis would never have been liberated from the former regime, but the job is unfinished. “They need to be serious about building a proper democratic process here. They are responsible for keeping it safe while holding all groups, including the Iran-backed Shia militias, to account. We can kick them out of Baghdad and back to Iran if the international community helps us to establish a national project to serve Iraq… If they do that, we can finally say the US has succeeded in its project in Iraq.”

Success is a long way off. Throughout the city, there are posters and murals commemorating the Iranian Quds force commander Qasem Soleimani. In one market, you can buy a pendant of pro-Iran Shia militia leader, Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, who was killed alongside Soleimani in a 2020 US drone strike.

Baghdad. The name still echoes in the imagination of both East and West. Shock and Awe. Old and New. The city is filled with scenes from ancient history and modern tragedy. Near the market, Ammar points out the site of a suicide bombing that killed hundreds. One day, we visit a coffee shop; near the entrance, a poster of the owner’s brother, martyred in another suicide bombing just outside, is pinned to a tree. Twenty years on from the 2003 invasion, the history of modern Iraq is still written into the cityscape of its capital.

As we drive out of central Baghdad, Ammar tells me: “This used to have so many bombs on it the Americans called it the Irish Road. Now it’s named after Muhandis.” I ask him about it all, after so many years. “We had so much hope in the beginning,” he replies. “Then the country turned to a path of blood, and then people started to want Saddam back to keep order. Even with all the misery he brought, you’d be taken quietly away. We didn’t see all this blood in the streets.”

As former Trump chief strategist Steven Bannon said, “I don’t care about Hunter’s feelings. This is war.” Hunter is treating it as such and has been preparing a legal counteroffensive in the form of his own threats of prosecution and defamation lawsuits against prominent conservatives. With these opening moves, the battle lines of the 118th Congress have been set, and Americans can expect to hear more and more about Hunter and his laptop (and all its tawdry contents) in the months ahead. Whatever else Joe Biden hopes to accomplish in the second half of his term, his administration will now be weighed down by the need to fight a daily rearguard battle against a Republican House determined to illustrate just how far his second son has fallen from grace.

Occasions like this may help to remind Americans of how their forebears came to found a government rooted, at least in theory, in a rejection of monarchical and aristocratic principles. Members of the founding generation apparently even rejoiced that the father of the nation, George Washington, could not father any children of his own. Many, including Washington himself, saw his infertility as a providential blessing on America’s republican experiment, lest the general’s heirs form the basis of a new kingly dynasty or, more likely, trade in the prestige of the Washington name for personal profit. Which is precisely the charge that today’s Republicans have levelled against the Bidens and the Clintons, and what Democrats have, in turn, accused the Trump children and in-laws of doing.

What Tolstoy wrote about unhappy families rings truer still for political families. Though patricians and political dynasties are — despite its professed ideals — as old as America itself, no one among them has yet written a manual for how to manage the merciless pressures of public life, which inevitably strain the bonds that are supposed to hold families together as well as keep them grounded. Furthermore, the often grossly uneven distribution of talent within such dynasties (which may produce an abundance of leadership traits in one child and a total absence of them in another) leads to expectations that are impossible to fulfil and throws the inadequacies of the “failson” into even starker relief. Indeed, the term “failson” may be a recent coinage, but the archetype it describes — “an incompetent, unsuccessful middle-class or upper-class man who is protected from… duress by his family’s wealth or influence” — is an all too familiar sight in the annals of American politics. Hunter Biden may be its ultimate Platonic form but presidential history furnishes plenty of examples of this dynamic.

Theodore Roosevelt had to deal with the alcoholic excesses of brother Elliott (father of Eleanor), whom he called “a maniac, morally [and] mentally” before his untimely death; the Kennedys had one fabled generation with Jack, Bobby, and Ted, only for Camelot to be inherited by a largely mediocre and often no less controversy-prone successor generation. Among George H.W. Bush’s sons, it was widely assumed that Jeb would take the mantle of leadership while eldest George W. was “the family clown” who threatened to disgrace the Bush name with beer-fuelled antics (to his credit, George W. overcame his alcoholism, became the 43rd president, and managed to disgrace the Bush name while sober). Donald Nixon, Billy Carter, and the Rodham brothers, all with their own questionable business ventures, can similarly stake a claim to being their family’s designated failsons.

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But perhaps the most poignant historical parallel to the current president’s dilemma vis-à-vis his deeply troubled son can be found in Joe Biden’s predecessor as both vice president and president, John Adams. Like Biden, Adams had one son who excelled in all the virtues of statesmanship, John Quincy, and another who utterly failed in the race of life, Charles. While the former went on to succeed his father as president and became a political titan in his own right, the latter, a rakish drunkard and philanderer, was disowned by President Adams (a dramatic rendition was performed to heartbreaking effect by Paul Giamatti in the 2008 HBO miniseries John Adams). Charles Adams died a broken man not long after.

In the case of the Bidens, the part of the natural leader belonged to Joe’s firstborn, the late Beau Biden, who was said to have had all the father’s virtues and none of the flaws, very much the John Quincy to Hunter’s Charles Adams. The contrast between the two could not be clearer: when Hunter flailed in business, sunk into addiction, and began to meet with foreign oligarchs (around the time Joe Biden became vice president), Beau built a profile in Delaware as Attorney General, served in the Iraq war, and was considering a 2016 run for governor just as he was felled by cancer in 2015. He died aged 46.

This was the crowning tragedy in the life of a political family defined by the concurrence of tragedy and triumph. Four decades previously, in 1972, Beau and Hunter survived a car crash that killed Joe’s first wife Neilia and their infant daughter; the accident took place just weeks before the beginning of Joe Biden’s first term as senator. When Beau died, the path opened for Joe to run for president for a third time and win, although the ex-vice president always felt that he was a placeholder for his dead son: the day before his own inauguration, Joe reportedly said: “We should be introducing him as president”.

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Beau had also been a caring and attentive brother to Hunter who made sure he stayed on the wagon and attended Alcoholics Anonymous. Beau’s death only accelerated Hunter’s decline. His involvement with Ukrainian and Chinese energy firms and various tax troubles, for which he is under investigation by a US attorney, as well as the more lurid accounts of his drug and alcohol addictions have been reported on extensively and need not be repeated here. Twitter’s rash decision to censor the New York Post report about “Hunter’s laptop” (which, like “Hillary’s emails”, is now a rallying cry for Republicans) in the middle of the 2020 election campaign turned what could have just been a personally embarrassing story into a far more politically compromising affair. The tragic lot of Hunter Biden, especially in the shadow of his brother’s death, was given expression by Hunter himself when he said to a friend after having just purchased a new .38 handgun, “I know you all think the wrong brother died.” Unlike the Adams’s family, it was the future president who perished and the failson who lived.

Republicans have yet to prove that Joe Biden had any complicity in the suspicious business activities of his son. It is more likely the case that, rather than being the “chairman of the board” and mastermind of a criminal outfit, as the Republican narrative holds, the President’s pitfall, if it can be called that, is in being too doting a father to his delinquent son. There is not enough of the stern Puritanism of John Adams or the cold Victorianism of Theodore Roosevelt in Joe Biden for him to be able to say to his flesh and blood what Adams said to his: “I renounce you.” The excerpt of a call released last year in which Joe Biden offered some tender words of support to his son (which was mocked on conservative media) was simply what any loving American parent (who didn’t subscribe to John Adams’s colonial-era social values) would say to a child, no matter how far lost or broken.

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Do the unwholesome actions and overpriced artworks of Hunter Biden warrant the attention and scrutiny of the press and — where evidence for potential criminal wrongdoing exists — of the relevant authorities? Absolutely. Should the House of Representatives (as all the evidence indicates is the plan) now spend the bulk of its political energies over the next two years on revisiting every sordid twist and turn of the Hunter Biden story before the American public? Absolutely not.

If Republicans were smart, they would know to focus their fire on the President’s policy record, not the human frailties that afflict his already scarred family. A discerning opposition would know how to separate the personal from the properly political, the petty issues from the truly meaningful ones, and this goes for Democrats obsessed with Trump’s tax returns just as much as for any Republican. While the instinct to remain vigilant against corruption is a sound one, taken too far, it can devolve into desperate conspiratorial scandalmongering.

Keeping the focus of politics on actual issues around the functioning of government, instead of on such personality-driven tabloid stories at least helps to make sure that the American people are well-served at an everyday institutional level by their elite, whatever their personal failings or vulnerabilities. For in spite of what Americans have been telling themselves since 1776, “the iron law of oligarchy” ensures that all societies must have an elite composed of elite families, whether it be the Adamses, the Clintons, the Trumps, or the Bidens. And if the country is to have a ruling class, at least make them rule well. Failsons and all.

First, a surreal copy of Baghdad’s Green Zone was built in central Washington to prevent any of them ever taking selfies in Nancy Pelosi’s office ever again. Then a consensus began to develop among America’s elites — a “Domestic War on Terror” must be launched against the Trumpists.

Michel Foucault would have been amused by the situation. In 1976 the Frenchman delivered a lecture, Society Must be Defended, about the relationship between war and the state. What stigmata, he asked, does warfare leave on the national body?

In the case of European colonial powers, Foucault identified a unique type of scar tissue. Colonial practices had a “boomerang effect” on Western states; Europeans experimented with “techniques” of control on the Imperial periphery, which went on to influence “apparatuses, institutions, and techniques of power” in the West itself. You must not forget, Foucault told his audience, that one result of colonialism “was that the West could practise something resembling colonisation, or an internal colonialism on itself.”

It was not quite an original thought. Foucault may have been inspired by Hannah Arendt, who, in her Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), draws a fairly straight line between Cecil Rhodes’ activities in South Africa and Adolf Hitler’s in Eastern Europe. Arendt was the first to use the phrase “imperial boomerang effect”, whereby authoritarian forms of social control, developed in colonies, are eventually turned on oppressed groups in the homeland. Totalitarianism was the consequence.

Imperialism, Foucault and Arendt thought, whirls back on itself. Given the right pressures, a Green Zone in Baghdad can become a Green Zone in Washington. The War on Terror comes home.

In the days after 9/11, Foucault wasn’t being consulted much by the architects of the new war. “Never again” was the phrase on their minds, not “imperial boomerang effect”. The Bush administration was laying the groundwork for policies like enhanced interrogation, extraordinary rendition, mass digital and telephone surveillance, arrest without warrant — and the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq.

Partly from disgust with these policies, Americans elected Barack Obama in 2008 to end them. Here was someone who had read Foucault — in a failed attempt to get a girlfriend — in college, sitting in the Oval Office. In a 2013 speech, Obama warned that force could not be deployed everywhere extremist ideologies took root. Perpetual war would “alter our country in troubling ways.”

As was so often the case, Obama eloquently outlined a problem, and never quite solved it. The War on Terror rippled out into new frontiers — Yemen, Syria, Libya, Niger. He deployed his special forces in at least seventy countries. Anwar al-Awlaki, a US citizen, was killed by a drone strike in 2011. This execution without a trial — even if it was ordered by the former president of the Harvard Law Review — was an extraordinary violation of the Constitution.

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Americans wanted a reduction in the number of terrorists who intended to do them harm. But blanket judgments based on pervasive fear took them somewhere else, and the scope of the anti-terror leviathan is enormous: nearly a million contracted security personnel; at least 33 facilities for these top-secret intelligence workers with the floorspace of three Pentagons; technology that can hack Angela Merkel’s phone and launch four Hellfire missiles at a Yemeni marriage procession from 60,000ft in the air. The US government appears to have given up on building infrastructure for its citizens — but it can spare $1.7 billion for the National Security Agency to build a data storage facility in Utah the size of seventeen football fields. When completed, it will store the virtual equivalent of 500 quintillion pages of text.

Panopticon doesn’t do that justice. The administrators of America’s security state have engineered a hideously overgrown octopus, entangled in everything digital, that can stretch and sniff in all directions, that can ooze into every crack and crevice of society. The NSA knows what porn Muslim radicals watched, and nobody but Edward Snowden and a few difficult journalists really seemed to care.

Perhaps these “apparatuses, institutions, and techniques of power” could be justified if they prevented further terrorist attacks on US soil.  As President Bush was so fond of saying throughout his first term: “We are fighting them over there so that we won’t have to fight them here at home.” And at least the hardest edges of it fell on the borderlands of the Empire.

But following 6 January the boomerang is arrowing back to the Imperial centre. The atmosphere at the FBI earlier this month, according to Seamus Hughes, the deputy director of George Washington University’s program on extremism, was like the aftermath of 9/11. Across American media War and Terror analogies flourished.

A former Chief Prosecutor at Guantanamo called one Republican congressman who supported the “Stop the Steal” rally more guilty than “95%” of his old detainees. “It’s time we start a domestic war on sedition by American terrorists,” he tweeted. Former FBI director James Comey declared that homegrown terrorists were a bigger threat to America than Islamic extremists. His former deputy, Andrew McCabe, compared those who stormed the Capitol to the Americans who trickled into Syria to join ISIS. Retired Army General Stanley McChrystal had his own analogy. The rampaging Trumpists were an insurgency — just like Al-Qaeda in Iraq. John Brennan, the ex-CIA chief, agreed: this was a homegrown insurgent movement.

Some ideas of how to extirpate it were less bloodthirsty than others. Katie Couric, former co-anchor of NBC’s Today, only wanted to “deprogram” the rioters. Instagram’s Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez merely wanted to “reign [sic] in our media environment” to combat “disinformation and misinformation”. On ABC’s light entertainment chat show, The View, Meghan McCain admitted that she wasn’t against sending the Trumpists to Gitmo. “They should be treated the same way we treat Al-Qaeda.” Her father — who loved war — would have been proud.

Suggested reading

Donald Trump's ruinous legacy

By Michael Tracey

There was action as well as talk. Trump was muted while he was still President. Parler was removed from the internet entirely. The largest gun forum in the world was taken offline. Corporations ranging from AirBnB to JP Morgan paused or blocked donations to Republicans who queried November’s election result. The Biden administration made passing a law against domestic terrorism a priority on January 7th. Career liberals, progressives and questionable men who gave the approval for “black sites” in Pakistan cheered all this on. The boomerang wasn’t heading towards them. “Techniques of control” — the kind of digital purging that was a feature of the war against ISIS — were flowing back home.

Had Americans forgotten where secrecy had taken Richard Nixon, or Ronald Reagan? Did they remember the blowback that administration had generated by underwriting a jihad against the USSR, or the generation of radicals (and the flow of migrants to Europe) that were the dividend of Bush’s War on Terror?

No, apparently not. The connection between actions and their consequences is still thinly perceived. “Sweep it all up” Donald Rumsfeld had mused the night the towers fell, “things related and not.”

The MAGA rioters, the QAnon cultists, the whole Trumpian miscellany, was, according to one (unsympathetic) terror academic, “waking up” the actual Deep State, not the one in their conspiratorial nightmares. All those billions and all that hardware may be trained on them. “Terrorism is terrorism” one official familiar with the Biden administration’s security plans told Politico. QAnon will get the Al-Qaeda treatment. The final irony is that those who are being swept up are themselves a legacy of the War on Terror.

Five people died in the Capitol riot. One of them was Ashli Babbit. She’d served fourteen years in the Air Force, and in the livestream she made as she walked towards the Capitol, referred to Trump supporters as “boots on the ground.” She stands for the rest — nearly one in five of those charged after the riot had a military history — far better than the “Q Shaman”. Among the arrested were an Army veteran with sniper training, and a former Lieutenant Colonel in the Air Force. A retired Navy SEAL boasted about storming the Capitol on Facebook. Fluttering above the crowd on January 6th were multiple United States Marine Corps flags.

Other banners — and they are too easily dismissed as kitsch — showed an incarnation of Trump as John Rambo, the character from Sylvester Stallone’s action movie franchise. Rambo is a veteran, broken in Vietnam, who travels to a town to pay his respects to a fallen comrade. He is hounded by the police and unable to find a job. Rambo starts to see the society he fought to defend as corrupt, decadent, and vile. “For me civilian life is nothing! In the field we had a code of honour… Back here there’s nothing!”

The veterans of small, pointless wars are vulnerable to feelings of betrayal. Trump knew how to speak to them. “We’ve destabilised the Middle East,” he said in South Carolina in 2016, “they lied.” Or as he put it in a later rally: “We’re all victims. Everybody here… They’re all victims.” It is not difficult to imagine how groups of unsettled veterans, estranged from their society, hardened with the knowledge that scandalous abuses are commonplace, could come to believe that their government stole an election from them.

Suggested reading

2020: the year the elites failed upwards

By Jacob Siegel

The historian Katherine Belew, author of Bring The War Home, a study of the growth in White Power movements after the Vietnam war, told an interviewer that the Capitol riot was a “ricochet of warfare.” There is a resonance too with the 20th century, when numerous European revolutions were stimulated by the return of unhappy soldiers to disintegrating polities.

What will happen if MAGAstan is treated like Afghanistan? Both the development of a networked armed anti-government underground, and the methods legislators, former spooks and talking heads want to use to destroy it, are boomeranging consequences of the War on Terror. Two decades and unlimited means did not end Islamic terror, which flourishes from French suburbs to Nigeria’s border with Cameroon.

Going after Trumpists with no-fly lists and secret prisons, dressed up in vague and open-ended rhetoric, will not be an effective treatment. It’s trepanning a skull to lift the “stone of madness” from the patient’s head. If there was an effective salve for political extremism, it would have been found a long time ago. Above everything, there is a wider sense that in America history is returning, and means to collect its debts.

Wolf’s fate has been recorded across the broadsheet media. It all started to unravel for her in the worst way possible – in a live on-air radio interview. In May she appeared with the author and BBC radio host Matthew Sweet, and during that polite exchange Sweet pointed out that there was a major error in the book of Wolf’s which they were discussing.

Outrages: Sex, Censorship and the Criminalisation of Love was based on a PhD thesis that Wolf had written in 2015 and largely centred on the poet John Addington Symonds. It was Wolf’s contention that the gay poet had the risk of execution hanging over his head in Victorian England. To prove this Wolf claimed that she had identified “dozens and dozens” of gay men of the era who had been executed — a punishment which was believed to have ceased for the crime of sodomy many years before.

In their discussion Sweet pointed out that Wolf had made a major if understandable error. The men in whose cases the words “death recorded” was listed were not in fact executed (as Wolf had assumed) but were trials in which the judge had actually abstained from pronouncing a death sentence.

What is more, Wolf appeared to think that charges of “sodomy” related to the modern understanding of the term whereas in the era about which she was writing the term referred also to child abuse. Meaning that one of the cases the author highlighted was not in fact (as she said) that of a 14-year-old executed in 1859 for the crime of sodomy, but a man convicted (and not executed) for performing an indecent act on a six-year-old.

Needless to say, this is the stuff of authorial nightmares. And doubtless there will be some accounting at Wolf’s publishers over how such elementary mistakes were able to slip by unquestioned.

By the same author

Woke GQ reeks of fear

By Douglas Murray

The problem, though, is that Wolf’s error is not a one-off, but part of a pattern of shoddy research in a career spanning nearly three decades. Her first book, The Beauty Myth (1991) was marred by a number of problems. One was the undeniable having-it-both-ways by which Wolf simultaneously lamented the imposition of certain societal norms of attractiveness while not exactly presenting her worst side, nor failing to benefit from that happy chance.

The more serious problem with the book, however, was the shoddy research for which she immediately became known. Wolf infamously claimed that 150,000 women were dying from anorexia-related eating disorders each year in America. As the writer Christina Hoff Sommers subsequently showed (in her 1995 book Who Stole Feminism?), the actual figure had been exaggerated several hundred times over by Wolf, and the actual figure was between 100 and 400.

The strand of slackness soon merged, as it so often does, with the paranoid style. In 2007 she was one of those American writers who honestly seemed to believe that George W Bush was, in his last days in office, not looking forward to retirement and a quieter life but was in fact preparing to govern forever.  In a book titled The End of America: Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot Wolf suggested that the then President and his team were enacting the playbook that dictators had used throughout the twentieth century.

By the same author

Will maths succumb to the woke wave?

By Douglas Murray

Among Wolf’s claims were that the Bush administration was in the process of coercing not only the media but also American academia to their dastardly plans. As anybody with even the slightest knowledge of either institution would know, if the Bush administration ever had sought to coerce the entirety of the US media and Academy then it was — against some competition — the least successful effort of that administration.

In her book, as well as a long piece in The Guardian summing up that book’s arguments, Wolf made nods to reality, but then hid them as fast as she could. For instance we read: “It is not that global Islamist terrorism is not a severe danger; of course it is. I am arguing rather that the language used to convey the nature of the threat….” Etc etc. But soon even that “of course-ery” became lost. Even though George Bush miraculously stood down and allowed Barack Obama to enter the Oval Office, Wolf’s warnings of an imminent fascist coup in America continued unabated.

By this stage Wolf had tumbled the whole way down the Gore Vidal trail along which so many bright American men and women go as they start to believe that they are living in a proto-fascist state; one that is especially intent on misleading and suppressing figures like themselves at the vanguard of the resistance. As Wolf publicly stumbled along this well-trodden path she even began to engage in that “I’m only asking questions” form of conspiracy theory that vague and lazy people have such a habit of falling into.

Suggested reading

Liberalism: the other God that failed

By John Gray

In 2012 Wolf threw herself feet first into the Occupy Wall Street Movement, apparently in the hope that here was the way to stop the imminent coup. But the fact that Occupy fell apart was simply more evidence of the fascist nature of the American state. In The Guardian (yet again) she maintained that the US government were conspiring with the American banks to impose a “totally integrated corporate-state repression of dissent”.

It got uglier. By 2014 she began suggesting that the carefully packaged beheading videos which the terrorist group ISIS was then releasing on a weekly basis were not what they seemed; indeed Wolf began declaring that these videos were in fact “staged” by the American government.

So far down this Alex Jones-ian path did Wolf go that she even went on shamefully to suggest that both the victims of these terrible acts and their families were in fact actors. In the inevitable criticism elicited by her inhumane comments Wolf fell back on the old conspiracist claim that she was “only asking questions”, because isn’t this what journalists are meant to do and so on.

Perhaps Wolf took the time off to do her PhD at Oxford in the middle of this decade because it had all got a bit too much for her; after all, one must suppose that warning about a fascism that never emerges would take a toll on anyone. And so Wolf went back to university and back to basics. The problem – as the pulping of her latest book shows – is that the basics of Wolf’s work are sloppy and error-ridden while the developed work is not so good, relying merely on paranoia and delusion.

Perhaps at some point the two styles will merge and we will be able to read of how the Bush and Obama administrations deliberately smuggled errors into the archives on John Addington Symonds in order to sabotage their valiant critic. I for one shall look forward to the next book.