The Lindsey Graham Pile On is Wrong

Not because he deserves better. Because we do.

U.S. Senator Lindsey Graham speaking with attendees at the 2015 Iowa Growth & Opportunity Party at the Varied Industries Building at the Iowa State Fairgrounds in Des Moines, Iowa. Please attribute to Gage Skidmore if used elsewhere. Wikimedia Commons.

I think it is wrong to jump on the pile that is reveling in the death of Lindsey Graham.

Someone lost a person last night. Not a vote, not a position, not a heel in a long-running kayfabe. But a person. Someone who made them feel a certain way and left them fuller than he found them. That is what death takes. It does not take the politics. The politics survive us all, which is rather the problem.

I say this as a writer who disagreed with nearly every choice the late senator made. But there is something ugly in a nation celebrating a death without any reverence for death itself, which is natural, which is coming for all of us, and which is both tragic and liberating in ways the mockery cannot hold.

My comments section will be angry about that paragraph. I needed it in ink anyway.

But there is a second reason the pile on is wrong, and it is the one I actually care about. The jokes are cruel, and yes, that is a small failing. The story underneath the jokes is false, and that is a large one.

The Barometer Problem

Watch what the mockery is actually doing. It is using Graham as a barometer of before Trump and after Trump. The good man, the fallen one, and the wingman who buried his friend and then golfed with the man who mocked him. It is a very satisfying story. It has a fall, a betrayal, and a corpse.

And it requires a before that never existed.

If you need Graham to be uniquely craven, it is because you need the rest of them not to be. If cowardice is a personal failing, then the ninety other Republicans who did the same thing with better manners were merely weak. Then the men who built the machine Trump drove were merely disappointed. Then the whole thing was an accident that befell a healthy body, and the body can recover.

That is the comfort on offer this morning, and people are eating it by the fistful. It is a scapegoat in the old Levitical sense, which is defined by loading the sins of the camp onto one goat, driving it into the wilderness, and then everyone gets to feel clean by supper.

I would rather be honest, which is less comfortable, and which the man himself would not have minded.

What He Wanted, 2003

Let us be specific, because specificity is the enemy of the redemption arc and also the enemy of the demonology.

He voted for the Iraq Resolution in 2002 and supported the invasion. He became one of its most vocal defenders in the Senate, pushed hard for the 2007 surge, and flew to Iraq in his reserve uniform to argue the case from the ground. He warned that leaving too early would let the country go to hell. He did the same in Afghanistan, deploying as a sitting member of Congress, and later said withdrawal was paving the way for another 9/11.

He called for preemptive strikes on Iran in 2010 under Obama. He opposed the nuclear deal in 2015. He endorsed war with North Korea in 2018. He blocked recognition of the Armenian genocide in 2019 because it inconvenienced Turkey, which is to say because it inconvenienced power.

He was, with McCain and Lieberman, one-third of the Three Amigos, a traveling roadshow whose entire program was more troops, more strikes, more presence, and more war. Their influence peaked with the surge, then went quiet because Bush left office and there was nobody left in the building who wanted what they were selling.

That is the man. That was always the man. There is no earlier Lindsey Graham we lost.

What He Got, 2017 to 2026

Now count what he obtained by cozying up to someone he had called a race-baiting xenophobic religious bigot and told to go to hell.

He got a Supreme Court while he chaired the Judiciary and ran the Barrett confirmation days before an election. Remember those were rules he had sworn on camera he would never use.

He got a president who bombed Iran. He backed the campaign in February and compared the regime to Nazi Germany, which is what he had been waiting sixteen years to say from a position of relevance rather than exile.

He got weapons to Ukraine over the objections of half his own coalition. Sanctions. A hearing for asset confiscation and ten trips to Kyiv, the last within weeks of his death. Netanyahu is calling him one of Israel’s greatest friends in Washington this morning, and he is not lying.

And Graham told us how it worked, on the record, without embarrassment. He said he wanted to be relevant. He said no president had ever called him this much. He said the president asked him for things, and he asked for things in return.

That is not cowardice.

Cowardice is abandoning a conviction under pressure. Graham never abandoned one. He carried every conviction he had into a new building and cashed it at a better window.

I am not saying this to praise him. I am saying it because it is true, and because the alternative story, the one where he crumbled, is a lie that flatters the people telling it.

September 13, 2001, Lindsey Graham and other Members of Congress visited the Pentagon to inspect the damage and thank the rescue workers. Office of Congressman Lindsey Graham. Public domain.

The Man Who Didn’t, and Then Did

Which brings me to the harder case, and the reason I am writing this instead of scrolling past.

Bill Kristol wanted regime change in Iraq before George W. Bush was president. He was urging Clinton to remove Saddam by force in 1998. He co-founded PNAC with Robert Kagan to make it happen, and ten of the twenty-five signatories to its founding statement walked into the Bush administration and did. In 2015, a dozen years and hundreds of thousands of deaths later, he wrote a column whose headline was: we were right to fight in Iraq.

Kristol is Never Trump. Kristol is the moral center of the right's resistance. Kristol did not do what Graham did.

Except that when Trump bombed Iran’s nuclear sites, Bill Kristol said Trump got this one right. He said you go to war with the president you have. He said if you truly believe Iran cannot have a bomb, here is the chance to finish the job. He posted that neoconservatism was back.

I do not write that as a gotcha. I write it because it clarifies something that the eulogies and the jokes are both obscuring.

The difference between Graham and Kristol was never the program. Both men wanted the same wars. Both men, when the vulgarian delivered, took delivery.

The difference is that Graham said thank you.

Kristol’s grievance against Trump was never that Trump would fail to advance the project.

Trump advanced the project.

The grievance is that Trump revealed the constituency. He demonstrated that the coalition that funded the Weekly Standard, which filled the town halls for the surge, which sent its sons to Ramadi, was never a coalition of Straussians. It could be summoned by a man on an escalator saying the ugliest available thing, and it would come running, and it would come running faster.

That is a real injury. I do not think it is a fake one. It is genuinely awful to learn that the people you thought were with you on the argument were with you on something else entirely, and that the something else did not need you.

But it is an injury to self-understanding, not to policy. And a movement organized around that injury will spend its life describing Trump’s manners and never once describing what he achieved, because describing what he achieved means describing what they wanted.

The Municipality

So here is what I would ask of the people dancing and the people eulogizing alike.

Stop using this man as a barometer. He was not the measure of a nation before and after. He was the same instrument reading the same weather in two different rooms, and the reason his readings changed is that the room changed, and the room changed because it was always capable of changing, and that capacity was in the walls the entire time.

South Carolina has been sending this man to Washington for two centuries. Calhoun figured out that you could dress raw interest in constitutional philosophy up as statesmanship. Tillman figured out you did not need the philosophy. Graham was not an aberration in that line. He was its most charming and least self-deceiving expression, a man who understood the arrangement perfectly and never once pretended it was something else.

Mocking him is easy, costs nothing, and changes nothing, because he is dead and the arrangement is not.

The best way to honor the truth that life is change and metamorphosis is to be honest about the darkness we keep insisting lives at the edge of town.

It does not live at the edge of town. It has the keys to City Hall. It has been signing the ordinances for years, in a good hand, with a Bronze Star on the wall and a very charming laugh, and it will be at the funeral, and it will be there next week too, and it will not need Lindsey Graham to do it.

Which is the part that should keep you up? Not the man but the vacancy, and how quickly it fills.