Then US secretary of state Colin Powell in 2002 (Image: AP/J Scott Applewhite)

If, as several figures including US President Joe Biden have noted, Colin Powell embodied the American dream, it’s true in a far richer sense than the details of his biography.

The son of Jamaican immigrants who grew in Harlem, he rose to the highest ranks of the US military and became chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, then near to the top of US politics — all American dream stuff, assuredly.

But if Powell’s rise to prominence via the extraordinary killing power of the US military reflects the less PR-friendly and military fetishistic dimension of the American dream, his political fate perfectly illustrates how America, and particularly the Republicans, lost their way. That he ended up dying as a result of complications from a plague that Donald Trump helped flourish across the US is a bitter coda to the way he, and the American dream, both became detached from the grim truth of 21st century America.

Powell flirted with running for the Republican presidential nomination ahead of 1996 — when Bill Clinton steamrolled an elderly Bob Dole — and 2000. His aim was for the Republicans to once again become the “party of Lincoln”, he told Kerry O’Brien on Lateline in 1995.

Black, moderate, pro-choice, Powell harkened back to an earlier era of the GOP — though the party of Lincoln was always out of the question. He could perhaps, in an ideal world, have managed the party of Nixon — the Republicans before Reagan and the evangelical takeover, led then by a man whose profound personality flaws masked a highly progressive presidency.

But Powell lacked a passion for politics, he declared. And in any event, the GOP was already on the turn away from any moderation. Clinton unleashed something feral within Republicanism, a seething hatred that embraced any means to destroy him. The genial public service of the elder George Bush was no longer enough; Clinton and the Democrats became an unholy, existential threat to be fought any way possible.

The arrival of Fox News in the 1990s helped accelerate the radicalisation of Republicans; the blatant theft of the 2000 election by George W Bush a necessary act to prevent another Democratic president. Powell had endorsed Bush fils and signed up to be his secretary of state, perhaps expecting an easy continuation of the post-Cold War peace that had characterised Clinton’s years.

Instead he got 9/11, the Afghanistan War and the lie about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction. It was Powell’s credibility that sold the lie to the world. If the adult in the room at the White House, if the “reluctant warrior” believed, surely it must be true.

A “blot on my record” Powell would later generously admit — though he never resiled from his support for the invasion.

Bush kicked him out of the administration after winning in 2004, before the last years of Dubya turned into a litany of disasters culminating in the global financial crisis. Neither Powell nor Bush realised it, but the radical turn in the GOP hadn’t finished, and both would fall victim. Sarah Palin’s nomination as John McCain’s vice-presidential pick might have alerted them, but by then it was too late.

The once-potent isolationist strand of Republicanism re-emerged from long dormancy. Iraq became a national nightmare that America should never have entered; Bush and his extravagant, war-mongering ways was denounced. And Barack Obama unleashed a profound racism that morphed from Tea Party anti-government hostility into birtherism — the original political lie of Trump.

In Trump’s hands, the party of Lincoln became, quite literally, the party of the KKK. “Fine people on both sides,” Trump declared of white supremacists and those who objected to them, while making statements about military policy that hadn’t been heard from an elected Republican since the 1930s: that foreign military ventures only benefited arms companies, who encouraged conflict.

Trump made it inconceivable that Powell could ever have been a Republican president, just as he has made Bush Jr look unthreatening and amiable in retrospect. And names like Bush and Cheney — Republican royalty — became epithets.

And when it came Trump’s turn to try to steal an election, there was no Supreme Court challenge, no top team led by Republican grandees like James Baker, no careful parsing of Florida law. There were carpark press conferences, a farting Rudy Giuliani and the incitement of an insurrection aimed at overthrowing and even murdering members of Congress as they performed what used to be a minor piece of democratic theatre.

If Powell is a road not taken by the Republicans, it’s one long since lost from view in a party deep in a violent, racist authoritarian obsession.