The Honorable But Overrated John McCain
A major consequence of Trump’s presidency, in my estimation, has been the retrospective adulation for past opponents of liberals. This of course makes sense; with a petulant, incompetent, and vile narcissist in the White House, most previous GOP offerings are bound to look rosy. And in many respects, people like John McCain and Mitt Romney deserve some credit. However, I am inclined to distrust the overly fawning praises occasionally put forth by those who, like I, so desperately want Trump gone from the White House.
In McCain’s case, there are four realms of policy in which he appears to have gained liberal favor; for Romney, all I feel that I need to say is that he voted to confirm Amy Coney Barrett. Those four spheres include LGBTQ rights, gun control, campaign finance reform, and healthcare. On the first, McCain commendably resisted the efforts of his Republican counterparts to allow religious groups to discriminate on the basis of gender identity and sexual orientation. Namely, his version of the contentious 2013 defense reauthorization bill lacked the provision which would grant faith-based organizations with federal contracts exemption from the rules protecting LGBTQ people from discrimination. This earned him commendation from various LGBTQ rights groups, and rightfully so. Though this annotation may only serve to strengthen one’s respect for McCain in view of his evolution, it is worth recalling his record of staunch opposition to the service of openly gay soldiers in the military, one which culminated in his appraisal of the ultimate granting of their right to do so: it was a “sad day”. Nevertheless, such is the dichotomous — or merely defensibly evolutionized — record of McCain on homosexuality and gender identity.
My judgments of McCain on gun control are admittedly a bit scant, as all I can state is that he was viewed as more liberal on the issue than the rest of his party. On campaign finance reform, however, there is much to unpack. In 1989, McCain faced criticism for his knowing and improper interference in a federal investigation of Charles Keating’s Savings and Loans Bank, which would collapse to the tune of $3.2 billion at the government’s expense. The only Republican of the “Keating Five”, McCain had intervened in defense of a man whose operation circulated stolen money, presumably doing so on account of the contributions Keating had made to McCain’s campaign. Still, McCain was one of two out of this faction who weren’t reprimanded given that their conduct was judged less nefarious than that of the other three. McCain would go on to champion campaign finance reform through initiatives like the bipartisan McCain-Feingold Act of 2002. Once again, one appears to have traced an evolution of political character in McCain, perhaps even a moral one; all the same, its impetus is all too easily forgotten by some and its yielding of substantive results remains debatable.
Perhaps the moment which enshrined Senator McCain as a lovable, nay, heroic figure for liberals was his refusal to vote to repeal the ACA in 2017. Though he had of course voted against its passage in 2010, McCain’s stinging rebuke of McConnell and the broader GOP’s plans to hastily discontinue Obama’s healthcare system without a replacement plan of their own deserves praise and was a telling display of principle. It was in moments such as these in which McCain, in the midst of a struggle with brain cancer at the time of his decisive “no” vote, no less, ascends to heroism in the eyes of many; along with his endurance of torture as a prisoner of war in Vietnam, I find this status hard to argue against. Though the Vietnam war was singularly criminal, I don’t find it fair or righteous to castigate its veterans who, like McCain, often saw their service as a sacrifice for American freedoms. Though not a disillusioned or exploited common soldier, Officer McCain’s decision to endanger his life in what he felt was a struggle for principles of freedom is, in my view, defensible; the same can be said for his refusal of an early release option from the POW camp which would have surely required of him a betrayal of American war information.
One of the uglier manifestations of McCain’s service in and, evidently, remaining loyalty to “Operation Rolling Thunder” came in 2015 with his conduct towards protesters of Henry Kissinger. When Kissinger, the former Secretary of State and National Security Advisor who oversaw an unmatched plethora of American war crimes ranging from Chile to Vietnam to Indonesia, arrived at a meeting of the Senate Armed Services Committee to shouts of “Prosecute Kissinger for war crimes”, McCain’s reaction would prove unsettling. Calling the events “one of the most disgraceful things he had seen” on Capitol Hill and the protesters — peaceful ones at that — “low-life scum”, McCain threatened to call Capitol Hill police to forcibly remove them. Now, when one chooses to disrupt a Senate meeting in such a fashion, it is not at all unexpected for arrests to follow. Even still, excoriating people who wished for the “rolling global crime wave” himself to be held accountable for his egregious offenses and who were exercising the right of demonstration purportedly guarded in Vietnam strikes me as detestable and reprehensible.
Again, however, in spite of his clear reverence for Kissinger, McCain’s record on Vietnam is complicated by his leadership in reestablishing and normalizing diplomatic relations with the country — still under Communist leadership — in 1995. This has earned him some popular adoration in parts of Vietnam itself.
In view of his long record of service, his general decency (particularly displayed in his concession speech to Obama in 2008), and his somewhat liberal evolution, McCain is an honorable figure. Casting aside his fondness for Kissinger, which is more of a consensus position in Washington than an anomaly, one understands all of the commendation. Still, without wishing to malign McCain, I have to attempt to burst the bipartisan bubble and mitigate at least partially the veneer cast by Trump over all of politics. Despite McCain’s respectable temperament, one should not indulge the tendency to over-praise. Such propriety should be expected of people and, though praiseworthy, can’t be the only component of one’s reputation. We mustn’t judge people by the Trump barometer.
As far as bipartisanship goes, one has to drop the illusions. While it is of course critical and instrumental to achieving much needed measures in Washington, its charm obfuscates its preservation of the consensus. While unity helps, it has at present gained a sort of blind, automatic precedence over division of any kind which won’t serve the country well in the long run. Make no mistake, Trump’s brand of division is repugnant and wholly unproductive; he pits people against each other through appeals to racial hatred, chauvinism, and most other brands of bigotry known to us. Nevertheless, once Trump has gone (though his incendiary vestiges will remain), we might do well to have another look at “the politics of division”. When bipartisanship receives unthinking support, any effort to work outside of the narrow consensus — that safeguard of corporate power and political moderation which bipartisanship so often sustains — gets vilified as unhealthy and divisive. This precludes efforts at structural reform and stifles the dialectic; it preserves a status quo which will hinder progressives, social democrats, or otherwise from gaining the sort of foothold which could allow for substantive progressive for the 98%.
As I write this, I am tempted by sheer sentimentality to brighten my assessment of McCain on account of a very recent development. He valiantly criticized Trump when so many of his peers shirked that responsibility, he was decent and caring, and for that alone, he is venerable. And today, as his great friend Joe Biden wrests the presidency from a megalomaniac, winning Arizona along the way, I can’t help but smile. Yet, I can’t withhold the statement I set out to make here: that John McCain remains overrated. I say it much less as a criticism of him than as a call to liberals and those on the left to refrain from the exaltation of certain people which — when done to excess — doesn’t accomplish much of anything.
