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VIEWPOINT - When Richard Cheney died, America lost one of its most powerful and paradoxical figures. The most influential vice president in history, Cheney believed himself to be a guardian of democracy, a sentinel standing between civilization and chaos. Yet the methods he chose to defend that democracy corroded it from within. His life, and the era he helped define, remains a warning about what happens when fear eclipses principle.
After September 11, Cheney became the chief architect of the “War on Terror.” He justified torture, indefinite detention, and mass surveillance in the name of freedom. He signed off on drone strikes, secret prisons, and a doctrine of preemptive war that redefined self-defense into perpetual offense. To protect Americans, he said, the government needed to set aside certain ideals—temporarily, necessarily.
But democracy cannot survive moral exceptions.
What Cheney did in the shadows of the 2000s reshaped the light of American politics forever. The Patriot Act. Strip searches at airports. The suspension of habeas corpus. The erosion of privacy. The normalization of civilian casualties abroad. The unchecked expansion of executive power. Each of these measures, sold as temporary and pragmatic, became permanent features of American life.
Donald Trump is what happens when Cheney was allowed to get away with it.
Trump didn’t create the architecture of authoritarianism—he inherited it. The surveillance state, the militarization of borders, the conflation of dissent with disloyalty—all of it was waiting for someone less restrained, less disciplined, and less conflicted to seize it. Cheney believed he was protecting democracy; Trump used the tools Cheney built to dismantle it.
The irony is almost poetic. The man who believed in the sanctity of institutions helped birth a movement that scorns them. The leader who claimed to defend freedom helped create the conditions for its unraveling. Cheney’s “war on terror” became Trump’s “war on truth.” The same logic—sacrifice rights for safety, justify cruelty for the greater good—runs like a dark current beneath both.
And yet, Cheney was not a cynic. He was a believer. That’s what makes his legacy tragic rather than merely monstrous. He convinced himself that America could preserve its dignity while denying it to others. He mistook necessity for virtue and pragmatism for wisdom. In doing so, he opened a door that democracy has not been able to close.
If the twentieth century was defined by the struggle against totalitarianism abroad, the twenty-first is defined by the struggle against it at home. Cheney’s ghost lingers in every executive order that bypasses Congress, in every surveillance program justified by fear, in every drone strike cloaked in secrecy.
We live now in the country Cheney helped create—one where permanent surveillance feels normal, where the language of “security” justifies almost anything, and where fear has become a kind of civic religion. The tragedy is not only his, but ours. For in letting him get away with it, we learned to accept a democracy that runs on exceptions, a freedom fenced by checkpoints, and a conscience numbed by necessity.
Perhaps the only way to honor what Cheney thought he was protecting is to recover what he forgot: that the real strength of a democracy is not its capacity to destroy its enemies, but its refusal to become them.
(George Cassidy Payne is a journalist, poet, and essayist who writes on politics, culture, and social justice. He is a 988 Suicide Prevention Counselor, nonprofit creative strategist, and adjunct philosophy instructor. His work explores the intersection of ethics, community, and contemporary social issues.) The opinions expressed are those of the author and not necessarily of CityWatchLA.com.
