Once, when the world was a politer place, it was considered rude to speak ill of the dead. But some people’s lives are hard to burnish. The Columbia pictures movie mogul, Harry Cohn, was famously crude, bullying, and crass, yet a great many people turned out for his funeral. One attendee expressed surprise. Red Skelton provided this classic show business riposte: “It’s like Harry always said, give the people what they want and they’ll come out for it”

In this vein, I come to bury Roger Ailes, not to praise him. He has been lauded for being powerful, influential and memorable, but his life’s work made the United States a harsher, more divided, more dysfunctional, less decent and more credulous place.

He came from Warren, Ohio in the heart of the Rust Belt and studied radio-TV production at OU. Soon he was the producer of a daytime talk show hosted by Mike Douglas in Cleveland. It later moved to Philadelphia where a fateful meeting between Ailes and Richard Nixon took place in 1967 as the latter was gearing up for a second run for president. He complained to the young producer that TV was a gimmick that he hated.

Ailes, never a shrinking violet, told the former vice president that he didn’t know what he was talking about it. TV was a powerful tool and if Nixon didn’t learn to use it he was doomed to defeat. Soon, Ailes kissed Douglas good-bye and joined the Nixon team where he was instrumental in inventing “the new Nixon.”

As events and the White House tapes eventually showed, the new Nixon was a facade behind which the same old Nixon lurked — unscrupulous, bigoted, paranoid, vindictive ruthless, bitter, resentful and self-pitying. But before the scales dropped from the voter’s eyes, Ailes’s TV manipulations helped him win the White House twice, prolong a war for four more years that he claimed to have a secret plan to end, and trash the Constitution.

Ailes went on to do the same Svengali act for other candidates including George H.W. Bush in the famously disgraceful and race-bating campaign of 1988 that included smears of the opposing candidate’s wife and the infamous Willie Horton ad.

And then came his chef d’oeuvre, Fox News, which trafficked in the same fact-free, mudslinging brand of politicking. Fox claimed to be fair and balanced, but was false and biased from the start. It erased the line between news and editorial to become not a news outlet at all but a propaganda machine, financed by the piratical, literally un-American press lord, Rupert Murdock.

The formula was straight out of the Nixon playbook, though with a slightly less saturnine face. It was a faux populism engineered to appeal to the resentments and disaffection of those being left behind by history. And to get them to vote for policies against their interest like tax cuts for the wealthy, entitlement cuts for the stressed, and the repeal of protections for the public.

So the viewers were told they were the silent majority who do everything right but are victimized by forces of darkness — smarty-pants elites who look down their noses at them, Wall Street fat cats, radical college professors, pushy government bureaucrats, uppity minorities, Godless lefties, left wing journalists with their fake news, and stupid scientists.

All these liberty-stealing enemies of the people were in favor of one world government, globalization, intrusive regulation, confiscating your guns, atheism, abortions, gay rights, civil rights, affirmative action, wealth redistribution, outsourcing of jobs and on and on. In short, they are against you and everything good and right and holy in America.

Truth or evidence were beside the point. Profitably pandering to pre-existing prejudices was the method. Hauling the country to the right was the goal. And after twenty years of telling people that they could turn back the clock to the good old days, the working class was worse off than ever, the ruling class was laughing all the way to the deregulated bank, and the fruits of Fox were on display in Ailes’s last client.

That is, a tweeting president who calls reality “fake news,” offers the public “alternative facts,” demonizes minorities, mocks the Bill of Rights, and aims to betray his working class voters with tax cuts for the wealthy, the loss of health care for the needy, deregulation of health and environmental protections for everyone, and ill-gotten gains for his own business empire.

Thanks Roger, may you rest in peace. The rest of us are left with troubled sleep, and with your legacy of a poisonous disunity, distrust of democratic institutions, contempt for the truth, rampant political demagoguery, hijacked elections, and presdents ripe for impeachment.