In yesterday's post, after devoting about 75% of the piece to expounding all the good reasons to despise Lindsey Graham—I ended by admitted that, in spite of everything, I always sort of liked him.
It was seemingly hard not to. Even during Biden's last State of the Union speech in 2024, he at one point made some inside joke and pointed at Graham. "Lindsey knows what I'm talking about," he said. Cut to a shot of Graham giggling in the audience.
This was at a moment in history when Graham officially supported for the presidency a man who egged on his supporters to storm the Capitol to prevent the certification of Biden's election and who publicly vowed to prosecute and imprison top Democrats if he ever returned to office.
And yet, here were Graham and Biden giggling together like old pals—which they basically were.
Graham giggling was sort of the dominant mental image one associates with him. Throughout the Trump era, he "projected a wink-and-nod, I’m-in-on-the-joke demeanor," as Peter Baker wrote in the New York Times yesterday.
And as I tried to suggest last time—this is the key to both everything that was likable and everything most eerily abhorrent about Graham.
It's hard not to chuckle alongside someone who sees the irony in their own situation.
And yet—what we're talking about here is Graham's support for a president who tried to subvert a presidential election and block the peaceful transfer of power, and who has now invaded two countries and deported or imprisoned uncountable thousands in appalling conditions.
These are not—we know—things that are actually giggle-worthy. As I said last time, Graham's sense of humor may have served him well as a psychological defense mechanism—but it doesn't actually make his complete moral self-degradation amusing.
But it cannot be denied that Lindsey Graham was personally kind of lovable.
His back story is about as sympathetic as they come. After losing his parents in his early twenties, he single-handedly took care of his teenage sister and eventually became her legal guardian and adoptive parent.
As sweet as he was to his sister, though, one still has to ask how far that goes when set beside his support for policies that killed untold numbers of sisters and parents and children in Iran, Iraq, Lebanon, and Gaza.
We are seemingly here back amidst the old problem we had to deal with in the George W. Bush era: namely, the fact that the new president was probably a better person by the standards of marital fidelity and family values than the previous one—but he was meanwhile killing and torturing people in illegal wars and deporting human beings to secret black site prisons.
As Byron wrote of King George III, in his "Vision of Judgment":
I grant his household abstinence; I grant
His neutral virtues [...]
I know he was a constant consort; own
He was a decent sire, and middling lord. [...]
I grant him all the kindest can accord;
And this was well for him, but not for those
Millions who found him what Oppression chose.
So it was with Graham.
His loyalty to family and kin certainly was admirable—and his "household abstinence," as far as anyone can tell, was about as total as it comes*—and all this was "well for him, but not for those / Millions" who suffered under the policies he supported in the Middle East—or here in the United States, for that matter!
Of course, Graham was famously not a "consort" or "sire" in the literal senses of these terms. He was, indeed, one of the most prominent confirmed bachelors in Washington. And this too, undoubtedly, accounts for why I have a soft spot for him.
It's hard for me not to like someone who—when asked how they could run for office as president without a prospective First Lady on their arm—makes a plea for tolerance like this:
"I would tell people — you know, marriage is a wonderful thing. If you’re married with kids and have got a great marriage, that’s a blessing from God. But it’s okay to be single. My goal is to tell every single person you too can grow up to be president."
A friend of mine was pointing out what an odd statement this really is—given that every child starts out life as a "single" person, and it is not usually seen as a fixed trait that one projects into adulthood.
But for someone who just sort of realized in their bones early in life that they did not have the inclination or tolerance to cohabit with another human being, Graham's way of framing singleness as an identity makes perfect sense.
A lot of people of course long assumed that this was all because Graham was actually a closeted gay man** who simply couldn't be out publicly in GOP politics in South Carolina.
And who knows—that could be true.
But it's also possible that Graham's own explanation of his lack of interest in marriage or child-rearing was perfectly accurate. He always said that he was close with his sister and just wasn't really looking for a romantic partner.
(It's also of course possible that he both experienced same-sex attraction and was sincerely not interested in getting married or having kids).
At a time when single and childless people are swiftly becoming yet another scapegoat in the culture wars— due to bipartisan panic over declining birthrates—Graham's request that people live and let live is certainly refreshing.
If my ways are not as theirs, as A.E. Housman once put it, Let them mind their own affairs.
Many people believe Graham must have been lying when he said he was the sort of person who just didn't actually want a significant other, because they believe this is a category of person that does not exist. But as a card-carrying member, I can assure them it does.
Part of me will always love Lindsey Graham for being willing to be a bachelor in public and pleading with people to accept it and not worry themselves about someone else's private life.
One merely wishes he had extended this principle of tolerance to others—and seen that the same impulse that made him want to remove the stigma attached to being single ought also to apply to gay and trans people, immigrants, and many others.
In one of the interviews published in his Required Writing, Philip Larkin is asked at one point about why the theme of "not getting married" was so prominent in his poetry.
Larkin somewhat disingenuously asks in reply: "Is that one of my themes?" Yes, Larkin, it is very much one of your themes.
But he then goes on to explain that perhaps the explanation is as simple as the fact that he just likes being alone more than other people do.
In the range of human diversity that we increasingly discover in every field—perhaps this should not surprise us. Might there not be people who are just not really built for cohabitation or romance? And could we accept them as such?
Could we not just let single people be?
But no, they will not; they must still
Wrest their neighbour to their will,
And make me dance as they desire
With jail and gallows and hell-fire. (Housman)
__
* In listing the few redeeming features of Graham's life, Ken Klippenstein wrote the other day: "Oh, and unlike so many of his male colleagues, no woman has ever accused Graham of sexual misconduct. Wonder why!"
** Ibid.
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