Who could have foreseen it? Who would have predicted we'd have something to thank Romney for? Well, this blog did, although the rest of the soaring optimism of that earlier post does not hold up so well. The Senate did not in the end come through. The system was not redeemed. Trump did not go the way of Nixon.
But then, we tend to over-idealize the past. We look back on Watergate as an instance in which the rule of law won out. Nixon resigned prior to conviction, but all the signs pointed to a coming reckoning.
Yet we forget: there was a crucial difference between then and now. At the time, there was a Democratic majority in both chambers of Congress. Indeed, there never has been a vote on impeachment in Congress that did not split fairly predictably along party lines.
Which is what gives to Romney's decision its distinct nobility. It is one for the ages.
We may never have liked Romney. He may bear a fair number of the sins of his party. He may have seemed to us at one point —circa 2012—like the ultimate enemy. But it turns out he was capable, when it counted, of an act of moral beauty.
And so we return to Yeats's words and confess, with the poet's tongue, that we had treated him unfairly in the past. Of Romney we sing:
This other man I had dreamed
A drunken, vainglorious lout.
He had done most bitter wrong
To some who are near my heart,
Yet I number him in the song;
He, too, has resigned his part
In the casual comedy;
He, too, has been changed in his turn,
Transformed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.
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