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The end of the pre-Trump 21st century

Dick Cheney’s death and Nancy Pelosi’s announced retirement bring down the curtain on a more normal political era.

This is not only the week in which the Democrats punctured the Trump hot-air balloon, winning elections from coast to coast by campaigning against the unaffordability and cruelty that are the hallmarks of Donald Trump’s America. It’s also the week that brought down the curtain on the initial, pre-Trump years of the 21st century, with the death of Dick Cheney and, today, Nancy Pelosi’s announcement that this would be her final term in Congress.

I don’t mean by this that Cheney and Pelosi completely disappeared once Trump became president in 2017. Right up until this Tuesday, in fact, Pelosi had been the chief fundraiser for Proposition 50, the California redistricting ballot measure that voters just enacted with 64 percent support. The Washington Post reported today that Pelosi had been telling donors, “I don’t want a win; I want a big win.” That was completely in keeping with her role as the chief fundraiser and strategist for House Democrats over the past quarter-century. She now goes out with a bang, notching a signal victory she shares with Gov. Gavin Newsom.

Cheney, who’d been George W. Bush’s vice president, had indeed largely disappeared in recent years, until he joined with his daughter Liz as the leading Republican opponent to Trump, even announcing his support for Kamala Harris in last year’s presidential election. How much of this not-quite-deathbed conversion was occasioned by Trump’s fury at his daughter for, initially, criticizing Trump’s foreign policy, which led to her ousting from the Republican House leadership and eventually to her virtual banishment from Republican ranks, we’ll never know. But Cheney had plenty of other reasons to feel estranged from the new MAGA-fied Republicans, knowing that his Manichaean worldview, of America at war with an axis of evil, had been rejected in favor of Trump’s nonideological view that every other nation, whether longtime friend or mortal foe, should be treated solely as a target for extortion (a view only somewhat mitigated by Trump’s racist preference for predominantly white regimes).

Opposed though he was to Trump’s view of the world, Cheney played a major role in lowering national norms to a level that made it easier for Trump to obliterate them entirely. Cheney’s foremost and most dubious achievement was to steer George W. Bush’s anger at Saddam Hussein (for having ordered an assassination attempt of W.’s father) into the disastrous Iraq War, based on false and fictitious accounts of Hussein’s involvement in 9/11 and of the threat Hussein posed to the United States and Western civilization generally. Cheney’s underlings spun a web of fantasies to justify that war and implemented an even more fantastical post-Hussein policy that placed third-tier Republican minor leaguers in charge of a nation that would never have thought of requesting them even as tourists. His “war on terror” employed surveillance at home and torture abroad in stark violation of constitutional safeguards, explicit military policy, and American values.

It was by opposing this dubious battle that Pelosi first came to national prominence. While the House Democratic leader, Missouri’s Dick Gephardt, supported a yes vote on the October 2002 bill authorizing our invasion of Iraq, Democratic whip Pelosi organized the opposition to it, which ended up with a clear majority of House Democrats voting no.

Her finest moment came in 2010: first, when she persuaded President Obama to keep pressing for the Affordable Care Act when its passage was very much in question, against the advice of his chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, who wanted to pare the measure back to incremental insignificance (something for which he should be held accountable as he gears up to seek the Democratic presidential nomination in 2028).

Second, when she corralled just enough Democratic votes to see that measure pass. She enjoyed another season of legislative successes in the first two years of Joe Biden’s presidency, steering the infrastructure bill and the industrial-policy bill (aka, the Inflation Reduction Act) through the House. No House Speaker in American history ever played so significant a role in such significant legislation: Henry Rainey and Jo Byrns, who were the successive Speakers during Franklin Roosevelt’s first term as president, were bystanders to the enactment of landmark New Deal legislation, and Speaker John McCormack played a very minor role during the 1960s enactment of civil rights, voting rights, Medicare, Medicaid, and other Great Society legislation. (All presided when the Democrats had huge House majorities, as Pelosi never did.)

Pelosi was not of the left by today’s standards. In fact, her only contested election was her first, when she defeated DSA member Harry Britt (who’d succeeded the murdered Harvey Milk as the San Francisco supervisor from the city’s LGBTQ community) in the special election following the death of Rep. Sala Burton. But it was the Burton machine, created by Sala’s late husband Phil (who was the single most effective left member of the House during the 1960s and ’70s, as well as the leader of congressional opposition to the Vietnam War), that had chosen Pelosi, at the ailing Sala’s suggestion, to be their candidate.

And while Pelosi was nobody’s socialist, she was, broadly speaking, the leader of the left wing of the congressionally possible during her years as leader of the House Democrats. She knew all her members’ districts, funders, and pressure points; she knew which votes they were needed for and which they could skip; she knew what points she needed to concede to win votes for issues on which she wouldn’t concede. Her skills encompassed every task incumbent on a legislative leader, which usually are not tasks requiring oratory, at which she was fairly dismal. She also made no effort to set or alter the party’s ideological perimeters; she’d invite neoliberal Robert Rubin to address her caucus until the 2008 crash made clear that his views could no longer guide her members to sound policies. But at the inside game—finding winnable candidates, funding their campaigns, and getting to 218 on bills that mattered—she had no peer.

Those were skills that mattered less when Trump made politics entirely binary. Sitting right behind Trump when he delivered his malevolent 2020 State of the Union address, she responded by tearing her paper copy to shreds as he finished speaking—the traditional positioning of the Speaker directly behind the president for those addresses being, at that point, the one way she could use her power to demonstrate her rejection of all he was and stood for. Nor did she ever seem eager to bring the new generation of left Democrats into her circle (AOC had sinned by ousting the Democrat who Pelosi had assumed would succeed her as Speaker in the 2018 primary). Even given that, Pelosi’s was a historic tenure that no other Speaker in our history can come close to matching.

For his part, Cheney probably assumed more power than any vice president in our history, due as much to the inexperience and mental lethargy of the man under whom he served as it was to his own vaulting ambition. In the sharpest possible contrast to Pelosi, however, he used those powers in ways that damaged and demeaned the nation they both helped to lead.

–HAROLD MEYERSON

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