Eulogy Flashback

From Osita Nwanevu:

The trouble with this is that people aren’t sent to Washington to have giving hearts for their colleagues, or to charm reporters, as McCain did. They are sent to craft and enact policies that have concrete consequences for ordinary people. It has never been clear whether Obama’s and McCain’s shared civic vision—that preserving civility matters more than achieving ideologically desired outcomes—allows for any point at which the American people should assess the character of political leaders on the basis of the policies they support. Whether, for instance, it was incumbent on Bush to acknowledge on Saturday that his and McCain’s advocacy for, in his words, “the true peace that comes only with freedom” led the United States into a war that brought neither peace nor real freedom to the Iraqi people. Or whether it was appropriate for McCain to select Henry Kissinger as one of his eulogists—a man who remains in Washington’s good graces despite a career that has likely killed millions. (Kissinger’s assistance with Richard Nixon’s sabotage of Lyndon B. Johnson’s peace talks with North Vietnam may have helped extend the torment and suffering of the war not just for McCain, then a prisoner of war, but for thousands of American soldiers and the people of Vietnam.) Much has been made of the fact that President Trump did not attend Saturday’s service. But any doubts that the keepers of American political norms stand ready to fully embrace more rule-bound, polite, and magnanimous representatives of Trump’s bigotry should have been quelled by élite indifference to the presence of John Kelly, one of the architects of the still unresolved family-separation crisis.

It is true, as Obama said in his eulogy, that political discourse can tend toward the “small and mean and petty” and “phony controversies and manufactured outrage.” But, for all the coruscating idiocies that the Trump years have brought us, they have also made clear that our most heated and significant fights are the product of a substantive divide between the values animating the left and the right in this country. The hope that Obama and McCain seemed to share was that we might ultimately come to find these values compatible—that we might commit to a politics uncurdled by wildly different and competing notions about what it means to be an American and which classes of people in our society are truly deserving of wealth, security, and power.

But the rise of Trump should raise doubts about whether that hope can or ought to be realized. It may instead be the case that there are political decisions about which one has a moral responsibility to be mean and unforgiving—that it shouldn’t, for instance, be considered churlish or unsporting to insist that the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi or Vietnamese civilians or the traumas inflicted on children needlessly separated from their families should forever stain the legacies of the leaders who caused them. On Tuesday, protesters loudly interrupted the hearings for the Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh, on the grounds that a conservative majority will have grave implications for women’s health and corporate power, among other issues, for decades to come. The restive and unruly voices on the rise in our politics may not live up to the shining example set by our fables about the Maverick. But, then again, not many people ever have. Not even John McCain.