Wednesday, November 5, 2025

Part I

Dick Cheney Dies at 84: The Life and Legacy of the Controversial 46th Vice President of the United States

Dick Cheney, the 46th Vice President of the United States, died yesterday at age 84. He had long suffered from heart ailments and frankly had to live much longer than would’ve been expected just a matter of a few decades ago. But in those 84 years of life, he made a lot of history, not only as the 46th Vice President of the United States, but as a member of the United States Congress, as a former White House Chief of Staff, and also as Secretary of Defense. So let’s just take a look at Dick Cheney, what he meant, and what we need to consider from a worldview perspective.

For one thing, Dick Cheney redefined the vice presidency, but he didn’t do that until he had already been experienced with four presidential administrations. He entered into national service under the administration of President Richard Nixon. He was, in one sense, a protege of Donald Rumsfeld who would later become a part of the administration once again in the Bush-Cheney years. Cheney had been a congressional staffer and then he was picked up and made a part of the Nixon administration in a junior role, but he clearly had political and administrative ability and in the Nixon administration, when that administration came to an end with the resignation of President Nixon, the new president, Gerald Ford, turned not only to Donald Rumsfeld, but also to Dick Cheney for roles inside the White House. Eventually, Dick Cheney would be one of the youngest persons to serve as White House Chief of Staff. That put him at the very center of the Ford administration. But what we also need to note is that at least in political terms, it put him at the center of the Republican Party at that time.

So, after he served in the Ford administration, he went and served roughly a decade in the United States House of Representatives, interestingly, representing Wyoming. He had been born in Nebraska, but as a boy moved to Wyoming. Wyoming has only one congressional seat, has two senators, but only one member of Congress. And of course, later Cheney’s seat would be succeeded by his own daughter. But that’s another story. We have to go backwards in time. After serving in the United States Congress and after having risen to a leadership role in the Republican caucus in the House of Representatives, Cheney went back into the administration, this case, the administration of President George H.W. Bush. That also requires a little bit of detail.

President Bush, that’s Bush 41, as he’s known to most historians, had named Senator John Tower of Texas to be his Secretary of Defense. It was expected to sail through the confirmation process, but accusations of drunkenness and alcoholism affected the Tower nomination. It was withdrawn and virtually at the last minute, president Bush, Bush 41 put Dick Cheney, the former White House Chief of Staff and one who’d been heavily involved in defense matters as a leader in Congress, as the new Secretary of Defense. And that was also a moment in history, remember when the administration of Bush 41 with Dick Cheney as Secretary of Defense, went to war against Saddam Hussein in Iraq and thus the first Gulf War. What we now know is that President George H.W. Bush did in that first Gulf War exactly what he said he would do. He put together an allied coalition, to expel Iraqi forces from Kuwait. But at that point, the war was over, the military effort was over. Americans basically came home. What we now know is that then Secretary of Defense, Dick Cheney wanted to press the war into Iraq in order to topple Saddam Hussein.

That didn’t happen under Bush 41. Interestingly, it did happen under Bush 43, president George W. Bush. Dick Cheney had gone into business as the chairman of the Halliburton Corporation after the Bush 41 administration. But when the son of President George H.W. Bush, then President George W. Bush, Bush 43 identified at that point as the presumptive Republican nominee, he named Dick Cheney to head the process of finding his vice presidential running mate. At the end of the day, however the process worked, the end result is that Dick Cheney became the running mate. George W. Bush appeared to have found who he wanted to run with as vice president, and of course, as you know, it became something as a soap opera in the 2000 election, all kinds of controversy, all kinds of delay in calling the race. But eventually in January of 2001, George W. Bush was inaugurated as the 43rd President of the United States, and Dick Cheney also took the oath of office as the 46th Vice President of the United States.

Now just fast-forward. Worldview terms, what’s going on here? Well, let’s just keep in mind that the modern Republican ascendancy came with the landslide election of then California Governor Ronald Reagan as President of the United States. Ronald Reagan won in a landslide. He was reelected, of course, in another landslide in 1984. Ronald Reagan put together a new form of the Republican Party, and it was remarkably changed from the Republican Party of the 1960s and the 1970s. If you go back to the post-war period, well, again, I’ll quote George Wallace, the former governor of Alabama, “There’s not a dime’s worth of difference between the Republicans and the Democrats.” He wasn’t entirely wrong. By the time you get to 1980, there’s a very clear distinction between the two parties, and it’s not just on the social issues such as abortion. It was that, but it was also on issues of foreign policy and national defense.

For years, republicans had been warning that the United States in the context of the Cold War, was falling behind the Soviet Union and frankly that the United States had a weakened defense posture. And so when you get to Ronald Reagan and you get to the Reagan years, you have a buildup. Just remember SDI, all the things that came, the B-II bomber, all the things that were heavily involved in the Reagan administration. Then fast-forward to the George H.W. Bush administration. George H.W. Bush had been a former director of the CIA. He was also a national defense Republican. Also that was true of George W. Bush, Bush 43 elected president in the year 2000, and again, serving 2001 to 2009. And not only was it about building the defense, but of course this was now in the aftermath of the Cold War. And the question is what are the current great threats against the United States and its national interests?

Well, it was defined differently depending upon where you were on the political spectrum. So here’s where things get very interesting. During the Cold War, one of the big developments in the 1970s, was the turn of a significant number of liberals, and I mean classical liberals, most of them very classically identified with the Democratic Party into a more conservative posture. And many of the leading intellectuals in that movement were actually also Jewish intellectuals. They had a very interesting read on the Cold War. They were called neoconservatives.

Part II

The Fall of Neoconservatism: Neoconservatism Turned Out to Be More Neo Than Conservative

Now, the difference between a conservative and a neoconservative is that many of the neoconservatives were actually coming from a formerly liberal background. As one of the leading neoconservatives was asked to define what it meant to be a neoconservative, he said that a neoconservative is “a liberal who has been mugged by reality.” Okay, well that’s an interesting statement, but by the time you get to the current time in the Republican Party, neoconservatism is not considered to be a continuing influence in the Republican Party and in the conservative movement.

So what happened? Well, as you look at the theory behind neoconservatism, it had a lot going for it. For one thing, it was clearly more right than wrong in understanding this Soviet threat. So here’s an interesting thing just in terms of political analysis. You can be really, really right at one moment and turn around and be really, really wrong in the next. The neoconservative vision, which saw the United States as falling behind the Soviet Union and wanted a very aggressive posture against the Soviet Union, it was actually easily incorporated into the conservative mainstream under the leadership of someone like Ronald Reagan. Ronald Reagan would put leading neoconservatives such as Gene Kirkpatrick in very frontline foreign policy roles. He made Gene Kirkpatrick the ambassador to the United Nations. Now, that was when it really mattered in terms of a lot of the debates that took place in that forum.

The neoconservatives wanted an assertive American foreign policy. Now, Dick Cheney was highly influenced by and was committed to that neoconservative vision. Now, why was it different than the inherited conservatism? It’s because the inherited conservatism was about a very strong America up against the Soviet Union, but it was a conservatism that had a very deep instinct against international entanglements, where there was not a direct threat to the United States of America. Neoconservatives define things in terms of American interests rather than what had been the traditional conservative concern with American territorial integrity, American liberty, American freedom, et cetera. The other thing about the neoconservatives is that their vision really required a pretty assertive foreign policy and a big government. Well, Dick Cheney as Vice President of the United States, having been a neoconservative U.S. Secretary of Defense under Bush 41 is now Vice President under Bush 43, and when you have the situation arise in terms of what became the Second Gulf War, Dick Cheney was determined to finish what didn’t get finished by his vision under the leadership of George Bush, the senior.

But now fast-forward to the contemporary Republican Party and you can see a radical distinction between the Bush years, and by that I mean both Bush administrations. That’s Bush 41 and Bush 43. The Republican Party now is arguably much more conservative. Put the matter bluntly, the Republican mainstream today isn’t just holding to a different policy. President Trump has repudiated neoconservatism as a worldview and his foreign policy is based upon a very different understanding of American interests. Now, let’s just note President Trump clearly is not reluctant to use American military power. He is very reluctant to engage in any long-term conflict anywhere that is not striking at a vital need in the integrity of the United States of America.

Now interestingly, the old neoconservatives haven’t gone away. They’ve just gone to the editorial boards of major American newspapers and magazines where you’ll also note many of them having historically switched from the Democratic to the Republican side, switched from the Republican back to the Democratic side. And one of those illustrative of the move was former Republican Vice President Dick Cheney, who along with his wife, endorsed Kamala Harris, the Democratic nominee in the presidential election of 2024. And I think among most conservatives there was very little surprise, but there was also very little patience.

Part III

The Cheney Test: If You Can Shift Your Morality on Marriage Based on the Lifestyle of a Family Member, You are Not Genuinely Conservative

There’s another angle here that I think is just really important. When it came to many issues of social policy, the neoconservatives were largely assertive on several conservative fronts. And so for instance, in rebuilding the family, in buttressing the family against outside threats, you also had very strong neoconservative influence on the recovery of morality in the society. You think of someone like Gertrude Himmelfarb, very prominent social thinker and generally extremely conservative. Now she was married to Irving Kristol. Their son is Bill Kristol. And you get to Bill Kristol, he’s someone who had been heavily involved in Republican administrations, a high-ranking official in the office of Dan Quayle when he was Vice President of the United States. But Bill Kristol is basically a one-man demolition effort against the Trump administration. And frankly, he shows up supporting democratic candidates that were the very opposite of what he said he stood for, as you look to just say a decade or so passed. But that tells you that neoconservatism turned out to be more neo than conservative.

Now, as a Christian theologian, I want to do a bit of theological diagnosis here. I think the big problem is that when you have a conservatism that is grounded in custom and tradition and prudence rather than a conservatism that is grounded in ontological truth, grounded in say a theistic revelation, grounded in Scripture, grounded in the Christian tradition or some very clear theological tradition, Orthodox Jews can be very much a part of this coalition. But if you’re not grounded in something deeper than custom and tradition, then your policies, your morality is going to change with custom and traditions.

The example of that is the fact that even when he was Vice President of the United States serving George W. Bush as President, even when President George W. Bush at least said he wanted to defend marriage as the union of a man and a woman, and actually gave credence and support to a hypothetical Constitutional amendment to bring that about, Vice President Cheney came as supportive of same-sex marriage on a state-by-state basis. He also said, why? And it is because one of the Vice President’s daughters was openly a lesbian and he said basically, we need a big tent that can include same-sex marriage.

And that shows you something else. Two issues here, I don’t want to leave unnoted. One is that the conservatism of Dick Cheney, which is explained partly by his Wyoming roots, was we can now see in retrospect, a libertarian conservatism. That’s the don’t tread on me conservatism that is distinct from a marriage can only be the union of a man and a woman conservatism that’s grounded in ontological truth. Libertarianism has something to add to the conservative movement. It can never drive the conservative movement because it has no ontological foundation, no foundation in objective reality. If you have a foundation in objective morality and objective reality, you can’t change your position on same-sex marriage. You can’t say that marriage can now be something it has never been and by divine revelation can never be. And so that’s when you find out who’s really a conservative. 

And I’ll simply say, I refer to this as the Cheney test and I have for decades now. The Cheney test is this, if you support same-sex marriage, I don’t care what you call yourself, conservative isn’t a legitimate part of your designation.

All right. In bringing this to a conclusion, I also want to say that many people with long experience in the Republican Party have to ask over and over again and they still ask, “What in the world happened? How do you get from George H.W. Bush and Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush to Donald J. Trump?” I want to give you the fast answer. You get there by the frustration of your political base that took what you said seriously until they found out you didn’t mean it. And I’m not even saying to some extent they didn’t mean it when they said it. I’m just going to say they didn’t mean it because they couldn’t move anywhere else, they weren’t ontologically committed to it. And so when the shifting sands of the culture began to shift and when all of a sudden all the right people were for same-sex marriage, you even had some so-called conservatives who used the libertarian argument to say, “Hey, everyone has the right to marry whomever they choose,” which is frankly one of the most irrational and irresponsible arguments imaginable. If marriage means anything, it doesn’t mean anything you choose.

Now, let me say, I think there were many Americans who thought George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush were conservative presidents and they certainly were as compared to let’s just say the candidates that they were running against. But if you can shift, and in this case, I’m not just talking about the Cheney family, I’m talking about the Bush family, if you can shift your position on same-sex marriage and that entire array of issues, then you never were authentically, objectively, in reality, a conservative. It may have been that you were more conservative than the other guy, but that is not a lasting conservatism.

And I want to translate that into something we can understand coming out of the second inaugural address of President Trump. When he came out and said, and he doesn’t really care what the world thinks, he said that in his administration, the definition of male and female, the definition of gender will be limited to male and female, and he specified male means the small reproductive cell and female means the large reproductive cell, let me just say, I really can’t imagine any previous Republican president having to say that, but I also have to say I’m not sure at least some of them would’ve said it. And when you look at some of the statements made post-presidentially by both Presidents Bush, I think it points to the heart of the problem.

So Donald J. Trump is a very complex figure, and at the end of the day, he was enough to get Dick Cheney to support a democratic nominee for the American presidency. You look at a picture like that and you say something fundamentally has changed. And at the very least we need to understand, yes, something has changed, but we’re now down to ontological issues. If you believe that a boy can be a girl and a girl can be a boy and that a man can marry a man and a woman can marry a woman, let’s just say you have no right to call yourself a conservative of any stripe. End of argument.

Part IV

Prince Andrew is Now Just Andrew: Andrew Stripped of Royal Title After Massive Moral Controversy

Okay, it’s time to talk about Prince Andrew who’s now no longer Prince Andrew. There’s a big parable here and it’s one we need to understand. Human beings are fascinated with royalty, the trappings of royalty. In a strange way, Americans are fascinated with royalty. Now, I want to put that in historic context. Even during World War II, when King George VI and Queen Elizabeth came to the United States, that was really a turning point. Up until that point, Americans in general had looked, let’s just say, with a great deal of suspicion at the British throne. Just think Revolutionary War, George III and all of that. 

But that all began to be reconsidered first of all, during the time of World War I, when Britain was such a close ally to the United States and then especially during World War II. The bonds that developed between the United States and Great Britain during World War II and thereafter really did create the sense of what Winston Churchill called the unity of the English-speaking peoples.

And by the way, this was a deliberate strategy undertaken by Prime Minister Winston Churchill, in order to build that kind of unity between the United States and Great Britain during the Second World War. But it was in the period after that, which also meant the period of newsreels and the period of the emergence of television and all the rest in which Americans developed a fascination with the British royal family. And at that point it really was Queen Elizabeth II. She was telegenic, she was photogenic, and she really did represent what a queen should be. That is to say she was morally and in other ways, she was circumspect, she was respectable. She was the very picture of granite-like respectability, and thus Americans were attracted to her. And of course it was a sweet romance story and all the rest, and by the time you get to the 1970s, Americans are going to the United Kingdom and are fascinated with the British royal family. And quite honestly, the British royal family has become a big engine for prosperity and for international celebrity for the United Kingdom.

But what are the problems in having a royal family is the family part because in almost every royal family, well, there are some interesting characters. And so all you have to do is look at the House of Windsor, say in the early decades of the 20th century and understand that King Edward VIII left in an abdication crisis because he wanted to marry a woman. The Church of England wouldn’t let him marry a divorcee. He then abandoned the throne. George III, who was the younger brother never expected to become King, did become King. Elizabeth, George VI’s daughter, becomes Queen Elizabeth II and Queen Elizabeth II and her father had a great deal to do with restoring moral credibility to the British Crown.

That’s one of the main achievements of George III. He was the picture of rectitude, of stability, and if you’re going to have a monarch, that’s the reason why you have one. As a picture of rectitude of righteousness and stability, the father of the nation and George VI really pulled that off. Queen Elizabeth II did, but in the case of Queen Elizabeth II, in retrospect, she left a lot of bombs about to go off, and most of them concerned her children and in one sense, her grandchildren. Of course, the biggest, most urgent controversy is over Prince Andrew. He’s now been stripped of the title Prince. That’s unprecedented in about a hundred years, and it shows you the depth and intensity of the controversy around him, the scandal that has engulfed the entire royal family, and frankly, the way the press works and the way culture works, it was bringing the entire House of Windsor into horrible disrepute.

I’m not going to go deeply into the details of the scandal, but let’s just say it involves Jeffrey Epstein. It also involves charges of pedophilia and sex abuse, and there are enough incriminating photographs and all the rest, and now we know released emails and all the rest to make very clear that Prince Andrew has been involved in deeply evil activity. And the point is, that’s incompatible with being a prince. It’s incompatible with being held up as a model of rectitude and judgment, and it was to the extent that it really does threaten the monarchy. Polling data indicates that for the first time in a long time, a majority of the British people are asking questions about the continuation of the monarchy. Now, it depends upon how you count it. That’s especially true among the young. 

The big concern of the British royal family is whether it will maintain public support going in the future. Now, I have no answer to that question other than to say it does bring us to a very clear worldview and moral perspective. If your purpose in life, in terms of leadership is to present public righteousness and stability and you undermine that, then guess what? You are now a former prince. And of course you’re still a celebrity because that’s also the way the culture works. In one sense, Edward VIII became more of a celebrity as a former king than he was even as a king. For some reason, human beings are drawn to scandal, but at the same time, it does tell you something in a moral universe. And remember, God created us as moral beings and created moral reality as the operating principle of human society. Eventually, when enough people see you as an evil person, you’re out. Now you know it’s going to be interesting to see how long this conversation stays front page news, but there’s every evidence it’s going to stay front page news for some time. And it’s because this kind of scandal is worth an untold number of millions or billions of dollars to the international media.

But as Christians, this offers us the opportunity, and indeed the responsibility, to think about the requirements of leadership. The requirements of leadership come down most importantly to moral credibility. And the lesson not only applied to former Prince Andrew, but to any leader in any context, but especially to Christians, and especially with a Christian understanding of leadership, it comes down to this, if you lose your credibility, you have lost everything. Just consider the models of the rise and fall of leaders in the Old Testament, and just consider the history of the rise and fall of leaders in the Christian church. The bottom line is this, even the secular world knows no integrity, no leadership. Christians have to understand that’s true and has to be true for reasons that are even more fundamental. The Christian worldview makes that clear. It’s not just a matter of behavior, it’s also a matter of the heart.

We will talk about the results of the elections of 2025 tomorrow when full results are in. Gubernatorial races in New Jersey and Virginia, and of course that big race for the mayor’s office in New York City, there’ll be plenty to talk about tomorrow. I’ll meet you then.