However much I detest 70% of John Bolton's politics—it's impossible not to start to like him now that Trump is sending federal agents to invade his home and intimidate him for publicly criticizing his former boss. Trump has made a martyr of him—and so, as with all martyrs, a glow of holiness now surrounds him, regardless of what his life was like before his immolation.
This other man I had dreamed
A drunken, vainglorious lout.
Yet I number him in the song; as Yeats wrote:
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.
This is the sort of take, I suppose, that Glenn Greenwald would despise. In one of the various sneering pieces he wrote a decade ago or so about the Charlie Hebdo affair—he accused liberals of making an elementary confusion between agreeing with someone and defending their right to say it.
It would have been fine, in his view—perhaps—for liberals to say (in the aftermath of the Hebdo killings)—they have a legal right to publish material, even when other people may find it offensive, demeaning, or blasphemous. But liberals went further than this—they said "I am Charlie Hebdo"—which to Greenwald was going too far.
The debate was mirrored earlier in the twentieth century in the argument between Arthur Schlesinger Jr., who proclaimed his right to defend people he saw as "scoundrels" from the depredations of HUAC; and Dalton Trumbo, who replied that the defend someone while calling them a "scoundrel" is no defense at all.
And I agree that Greenwald and Schlesinger are correct in a literal sense. It is logically and philosophically coherent to say something like: "I still despise John Bolton, but he should still have his legal rights respected, and not be railroaded through a bogus, retaliatory criminal investigation." There would be nothing self-contradictory in such a statement.
But it wouldn't be emotionally true—at least in my case. Whatever I thought of John Bolton before—I cannot despise him anymore. I cannot view him as a "scoundrel." Not after this. Just as I could not despise the innocent people gunned down at the Charlie Hebdo office. Why is that?
Partly—it's raw admiration for their moral courage. They were willing to say something—and stand by it—even though they faced violence or retaliation for doing so. That's something that anyone is bound to respect.
It's not like they had no warning, either. In Bolton's case, the first Trump administration already tried to prevent his White House memoir from being published—the ancient method of "prior restraint" that our constitutional tradition has long disfavored. So when this failed—and Bolton's book appeared in print—it was not hard to foresee that he would eventually face Trump's wrath and retaliation for it.
And in case that wasn't already clear enough—Trump removed any ambiguity at the start of this term—when he made a point of removing Bolton's protective detail, despite well-documented threats to his life. Trump could not have conveyed the message more nakedly if he had said outright: "It would be just fine with me if someone killed you";
or, perhaps: "Will no one rid me of this turbulent former national security advisor?"
So—that's part of the solution to the mystery. I have to respect Bolton because he has guts to speak his mind and adhere to his truth—even when faced with actual violence for it.
But it's not the entire answer. It's also the old "first they came" feeling—the sense that, if I don't speak up for Bolton—someone I otherwise disagree with about politics and foreign policy—then who will speak up for me?
Of course, this point on its own is compatible with the Greenwald-type position (i.e., "I hate you, but I would respect your legal rights.")
But having recognized it, it becomes hard to maintain that same feeling of "hate." Because—if it is true in some sense that Bolton is an outermost bulwark—the first line of defense to Trump's authoritarianism—
that is, if it's true that the neoconservative "Never Trump" Republicans will fall victim first to Trump's persecution, precisely because they were once closest to him, and there's a little thing in human psychology called the Narcissism of Minor Differences, which makes us hate those who depart from us in the details more than than we hate those who differ from us in the essentials—
if it's true that the first victims of any "Night of the Long Knives" early in the career of any despotism will always be members of the would-be despot's own previous inner circle—
then one has to realize that one owes something important to this early round of victims. They sacrificed themselves—in part—in order to save us. And so:
"From my heart I thank them," as William Ellery Channing once wrote of an Abolitionist press that had been ransacked by mob violence—"I am myself their debtor. I am not sure, that I should this moment write in safety, had they shrunk from the conflict, had they shut their lips, imposed silence on their presses, and hid themselves from their ferocious assailants."
Reading this, I couldn't help but think back to the Charlie Hebdo staff who lost their lives a decade ago.
"I thank the Abolitionists," Channing went on, "that in this evil day, they were true to the rights which the multitude were ready to betray." (Quoted in V.L. Parrington, Main Currents in American Thought, Vol. II—that great repository of the American liberal tradition, which I've been reading straight-through for the first time this past week).
I say the same to the Hebdo staff. And I say the same to John Bolton today. I thank John Bolton for being true to the rights that the multitude were ready to betray. I thank him for insisting on speaking his mind about Trump when so many others—so many rich corporations, law firms, and universities have fallen silent—so loud in their hour of safety, so easily cowed by Trump's intimidation.
If any of our rights as citizens outlast Trump's reign, it will be because of people like Bolton. That's why I can't despise him. That's why a halo edges him round.
Sure, in another hour, another historical moment, I would have had much to disagree with him about; perhaps, when this Trump nightmare is finally over, we can go back to fighting about it. But for now—as Yeats wrote of the 1916 Easter Rising—reflecting on how martyrdom and sacrifice had made into heroes the very people he had once held in the greatest contempt—such men and women all:
Are changed, changed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.
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