The empire strikes back. At late senator John McCain’s funeral earlier this month, the Clintons, Bushes and Obamas sat side by side in the front pew along with the former vice-presidents Dick Cheney and Al Gore and Cheney’s wife, Lynne. A clip of the former president George W Bush handing a sweet to ex-first lady Michelle Obama went viral.
Among the distinguished speakers at the Washington National Cathedral: Henry Kissinger, now a venerable 95. Among the most quoted lines: “America was always great”, from McCain’s 33-year-old daughter Meghan. It was an imperious rebuke from America’s political establishment to the absent Donald Trump. McCain, no doubt, would have been delighted – but so too were many on the liberal left.
Not so long ago, the idea of liberals hankering nostalgically for Bush, hanging on Kissinger’s words or cheering assertions of American exceptionalism would have been unthinkable. Likewise the idea of rooting for the rightwing attorney general Jeff Sessions, the former FBI director and registered Republican Robert Mueller, and other mandarins of the so-called “deep state”. Yet old certainties have been shaken, roles reversed and loyalties scrambled by Trump’s profoundly unorthodox presidency.
According to Dan Kovalik, a human rights and labour lawyer and adjunct law professor at the University of Pittsburgh, the liberal left was already in ideological confusion when Trump turbo-charged the process. “In short, liberals have decided that ‘the enemy of my enemy is my friend’, especially when ‘my enemy’ is Donald J Trump,” he wrote via email.
“And so, bizarrely, liberals have decided that the CIA and FBI – despite their well-known history of suppressing civil liberties and civil rights in this country and abroad – are now noble institutions which should be believed and respected. This is because the CIA and FBI have largely taken an oppositional stance towards Trump.”
Kovalik, author of The Plot to Scapegoat Russia and The Plot to Attack Iran, added: “Even George W Bush, who was hated by liberals especially because of the Iraq war (which the CIA helped lie us into, by the way), is now considered a sweet, old grandpa figure who liberals coo over, especially when he is bantering with Michelle Obama.
“Part of this is that people like Bush or McCain or even [the vice-president Mike] Pence, who at least appear to be standard, reasonable politicians, seem wonderful now when compared to Mad King Trump. And because Trump talks about ‘making America great again’, liberals have decided that, somehow, even under presidents like W or many more like him, we have always been great. Of course, this is nothing but a childish contrariness totally lacking in political sophistication and historical understanding.”
Bush misled the US into Iraq in search of non-existent weapons of mass destruction with a war that cost hundreds of thousands of lives and paved the way for the Islamic State. The use of torture at CIA “black sites” prompted calls for him to be prosecuted for war crimes. Bush also presided over the biggest financial crisis since the Great Depression and bungled the response to Hurricane Katrina, in which 1,800 people perished.
Around the time he left the White House in 2009, a CNN survey found that only 34% of the public had a favourable view of Bush, while 62% had an unfavourable one. Yet two polls published last October found that more Democrats now view Bush favourably than unfavourably. Obama regularly praises him. The ascent of Trump has ensured his redemption is complete.
Kissinger meanwhile, the former national security adviser and secretary of state, backed the covert bombing campaign in Laos and Cambodia in 1969-70. Hillary Clinton has lauded him, though her Democratic primary rival Bernie Sanders described him as “one of the most destructive secretaries of state in the modern history of this country”.
McCain’s funeral was widely hailed as a defiant stand for a vanished age of civility, honour and bipartisanship in American politics. A Washington Post headline declared: “McCain’s funeral was a melancholy last hurrah for what’s been lost in Trump era.” But Glenn Greenwald, a leftwing journalist, former lawyer and frequent critic of liberal politicians, tweeted to his near 1 million followers: “Only someone ensconced in the halls of DC power for decades, or drowning in jingoism, could declare that a ceremony featuring Henry Kissinger, George W Bush, Dick Cheney, Joe Lieberman & various other assorted warmongers is an inspiring & uplifting tribute to decency.”
Liberals’ default scepticism about the FBI, CIA and NSA [National Security Agency] has also taken a hit. John Brennan, the director of the CIA under Obama – who approved 542 drone strikes that killed 3,797 people in non-battlefield areas where US forces were not directly engaged including Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia – is now an unlikely hero of the resistance. When Brennan was recently interviewed on HBO’s Real Time with Bill Maher, the otherwise caustic, iconoclastic comedian hailed him as “a true American patriot”, adding: “I know how hard professionals here in the intelligence community work to try keeping this country strong and safe.”
Brennan is an ardent critic of Trump, who sought revenge by revoking his security clearance. In response, Sam Husseini, a senior analyst for the Institute for Public Accuracy, wrote on the Counterpunch website: “NPR tells me this is an attempt to ‘silence a critic’. But Brennan has an op-ed in today’s New York Times and is frequently on major media. He oversaw criminal policies during the Obama administration, including drone assassinations. If anything, this has elevated Brennan’s major media status. Those who have been truly silenced in the ‘Trump era’ are those who were critical of the seemingly perpetual US government war machine since the invasion of Iraq.”
The FBI, also under constant attack from the president over the Mueller investigation, is now often portrayed as a last line of defence for the republic, with former director J Edgar Hoover’s dark excesses long forgotten. Sessions, whose nomination for attorney general was opposed by the congressman John Lewis and others as a fundamental threat to civil rights, now earns sympathy and respect for standing up to Trump. His deputy, Rod Rosenstein, also a Republican, is similarly prized as plucky underdog and bulwark against chaos.
In an email, Husseini commented: “What we have seen is a massive Trumpwashing that has effectively rebranded much of the establishment, including Bush administration officials whose opinions should be less than worthless. Trump attacks Sessions and self-described liberals defend him even as he pushes increasingly brutal immigration policies.”
The Vietnam war led millions to question presidential and governmental authority as never before. Jackson Lears was a naval officer during the war but also actively campaigned against it. “The golden age of scepticism towards the intelligence agencies began to subside by the late 70s,” he said. “You could see the Washington consensus reassembling around the idea that the need for security is more important than the people’s right to know.
“People who consider themselves liberals and progressives seem to have forgotten their scepticism towards the national security state. I’m concerned that the reformation of liberal and progressives under the banner of Mueller and the deep state is a real failure of imagination and a real failure to find an alternative.”
Lears, now a history professor at Rutgers University in New Jersey and editor of the journal Raritan Quarterly, rejects the political establishment’s attempts to put Trump in a separate category from itself. “I yield to no one in my hatred and fear of Trump, but I don’t think he’s unique. Bush and Cheney committed as many crimes and overturned as many legal precedents as Trump has done.
“The rehabilitation of Bush is wilful historical amnesia. The Bushes, Clintons and Obamas sitting together was a revealing tableau of the Washington consensus. I don’t think just getting rid of Trump is the solution.”
He added: “Many of the CIA and FBI figures who are being lauded as paragons of integrity have condoned mass surveillance and contributed to the legitimisation of torture. These directors are enmeshed in the deeds and crimes of their agencies in recent years. To turn them into monuments of truth telling is disturbing.”
But Kurt Bardella, a columnist who last year switched allegiance from the Republican to Democratic party, suggested that Brennan and his peers have a legitimate role to play in the anti-Trump resistance. He said: “We have a president who will lie to anybody and has sided with Vladimir Putin against his own intelligence community as these adversaries are running campaigns against our country. The intelligence community is the last barrier to protect us against these global threats and the person in charge disregards them. The underlying good of this country supercedes any previous political alignments.”
It is this view that unites people of many political stripes around the special counsel investigation. Jeremy Varon, a history professor at the New School in New York and leading member of Witness Against Torture, a group seeking to close the Guantanamo Bay prison, believes Mueller’s work is vital to accountability and the rule of law.
“Trump has created an alliance of different groups of different ideologies who have a shared interest in protecting democratic norms,” he said. “That deeply flawed institutions are here the executors of accountability does not mitigate the desirability and value of accountability itself.”
Other observers agree that to hero worship or demonise Bush and the intelligence agencies is a gross and unnecessary over-simplification. Lawrence Lessig, an author and professor at Harvard Law School who in 2015 launched an abortive campaign for president, said in an email: “Of course, the left encourages the reasonable right, to defend against the crazy right. That’s not inconsistency. That’s practical politics. I’m sure none of them would select the people they’re now praising over their equivalent on the left. But the equivalent isn’t an option, so you must work with who you have.
“No doubt, there are lines no one should cross. And no doubt, praise is always conditional. But it is a weakness of our time that we insist (completely contrary to reality) that a person is either good or bad, or to be supported or opposed. I think it is a positive thing that we complexify moral judgment.”
Neil Sroka, the communications director for Democracy for America, a progressive political action committee, also called for pragmatism. “The fact is, the overwhelming majority of the left understands we need to walk and chew gum at the same time,” he said. “We have to back up the few institutions that give us a shot at holding the Trump administration accountable for its myriad crimes under united Republican government without becoming a cheering section for every anti-progressive action the FBI, intelligence community and military have taken in US history.
“Nuance like that isn’t easy in the Twitter era – see the small but noisy group writing James Comey fan fiction and wasting money on a Michael Cohen defence fund – but it’s the line we’ve got to walk right now, even if it’s hard.”
Sroka added: “The utterances and actions of those who don’t recognise the need for new nuance aren’t going to wear well in the years ahead but, as a whole, I think the heart of the resistance – the majority of folks showing up at rallies at airports, making calls to Senate offices about Kavanaugh, or being inspired to run for office in 2018 – gets it quite well.”