Lindsey Graham

 By any reasonable standards, Lindsey Graham—the Republican Senator from South Carolina who died over the weekend—was a pretty terrible person. 

He knew exactly who and what Donald Trump was. In his own short-lived bid for the White House in 2016, Graham correctly diagnosed Trump as a "xenophobe" and a "bigot." Graham's own policy views obviously inclined him to the paradoxical mix of warmongering neocon hawkism and genuine patriotic idealism that motivated a figure like John McCain—in other words, the polar opposite of a corrupt transactionalist like Trump. 

Yet, despite all this, Graham was perfectly willing to flip-flop as soon as Trump came to power, and became a courtier and flatterer of the new MAGA regime. Even by the standards of a Republican Party that has cynically rolled over for Trump time and again, Graham stood out for plumbing unique depths of self-abasement, offering cringing praise of Trump in ways that showed he was perfectly willing to divest himself of the tiniest scrap of self-respect. 

In short, as Lord Byron wrote of the poet Robert Southey—who made a similar political heel-turn—he "turned his coat—and would have turned his skin [...] Fed, paid, and pampered by the very men / By whom his muse and morals had been mauled." 

When a creature like Stephen Miller pens a glowing posthumous tribute to Graham, talking about how White House meetings with Graham and Trump cabinet officials were "filled with camaraderie, kinship and uproarious laughter," one can see that Graham enjoyed his role of court jester, and that he was indeed kept well "fed" and "pampered" in his new gilded cage—somewhat like the captive Sultan getting stuffed full of crackers in Disney's Aladdin. 

And so, let us have no false tears and misleading posthumous tributes for Graham. As Wendell Phillips once wrote: 

Journalism must have more self-respect. Now it praises good and bad men so indiscriminately that a good word from nine-tenths of our journals is worthless. In burying our Aaron Burrs, both political parties—in order to get the credit of magnanimity—exhaust the vocabulary of eulogy so thoroughly that there is nothing left with which to distinguish our John Jays. The love of a good name in life and a fair reputation to survive us—that strong bond to well-doing—is lost where every career, however stained, is covered with the same fulsome flattery, and where what men say in the streets is the exact opposite of what they say to each other. De mortuis nil nisi bonum most men translate, "Speak only good of the dead." I prefer to construe it, "Of the dead say nothing unless you can tell something good." And if the sin and the recreancy have been marked and far-reaching in their evil, even the charity of silence is not permissible.

In this case, the "sin and recreancy" were indeed "marked and far-reaching in their evil." I'm sure that part of the reason we are still at war with Iran is because hawks like Graham egged Trump and Hegseth on. Over a hundred Iranian children might have grown up to live adult lives if it were not for politicians like Graham whispering that it was a good idea to stage an unlawful war of aggression that led in its opening hours to the mistaken incineration of a school.

The same could be said of a generation of children in Gaza. In the early weeks after October 7, Graham publicly suggested that Israel would be entitled to wage indiscriminate warfare against Palestinian civilians in retaliation—in much the same way that Allied warplanes firebombed Tokyo or dropped nuclear weapons on populated areas in World War II. The Israeli government proceeded to fight their war with methods not unlike the wholesale massacre Graham seemingly praised and envisioned. 

The tributes that have come in after Graham's passing praise his "irreverent sense of humor." I suppose one would have to develop a certain gallows sense of irony in order to wink at mass murder and caper at the end of a chain before the throne of a man one despises. But, however "uproarious" Stephen Miller apparently found the spectacle, it seems distinctly mirthless to me. 

It would be hard under any circumstances to defend Graham's hawkishness and his seemingly total indifference to the human lives lost in the multiple wars he supported in the Middle East. But it might at least have been mitigated if he had adhered to the principled neoconservatism of a John McCain—if he had actually stuck to his guns when it came to, say, supporting Syrian refugees or caring about Bush-style democracy promotion. 

Instead, the president he praised spent the last months of Graham's life stripping temporary protected status from Syrian refugees and trying to deport Iranian dissidents to the clutches of their persecutors—with no conspicuous objection from Graham. 

One could say that this just showed that Graham was capable of the greatest form of self-sacrifice: the sacrifice of integrity and self-respect. He was the sort of man whom Robert Michels describes in a classic work of political sociology: he "offers up his honor to the party, the greatest sacrifice that a man of honor can make." (Paul trans.)

But a sacrifice to what end? Graham perhaps thought that by swallowing without criticism about 90% of the evil Trump wanted to dish out, he could achieve about 10% of good. He perhaps thought that by staying in Trump's good graces and flattering him, he could bend his ear to the occasional piece of good advice. 

And who knows? It's possible that as much as Graham may have played a role in Trump's decision to invade Iran, he also deserves some credit for preventing Trump from completely blowing up his relationship with Zelensky and Ukraine. 

But how much is that small good beside a mountain of evil? As soon as we start accepting murder for the sake of temporary expediency or for some imagined ultimate good to come later on, where does it end? As Arthur Koestler once wrote: "At what precise point does the healer's lancet change into the butcher's hatchet? [...] A system of ethics based on quantitative criteria is a slope on which there is no halt because all is a matter of degrees and not of (qualitative) values."

And even if one did accept some "quantitative" or consequentialist standard of ethics, I think it's clear enough that somewhere in the rubble of Gaza or Minab, the surgeon's scalpel was indeed traded in for the "butcher's hatchet." 

When Trump was deporting asylum-seekers to secret torture prisons in El Salvador—while supposedly claiming to oppose the dictatorial Venezuelan government they fled—or murdering people in extrajudicial killings in the Caribbean—all seemingly without a peep from Graham—the "sin and recreancy" he was willing to excuse had plainly become so great as to eclipse any incremental good he thought he could achieve by playing Grima Wormtongue to Trump's Saruman.  

And so, of Graham's death, perhaps one should say nothing more than what Hugh MacDiarmid said of his "army of mercenaries"—namely, that they "took their blood money and impious risks and died." End of story. 

Indeed, as jarring and surprising as Graham's transition from principled Trump critic to flattering toady was, there's nothing really surprising about it. Better men have been bought before. And as the careers of so many other Trump courtiers have shown—Vance, Rubio, etc.—taking one's thirty pieces of silver seems to be something of a rite of passage to gain membership in his inner circle. 

And so, perhaps we need say nothing more of Graham's life (and death) than Browning's lines:

Blot out his name, then, record one lost soul more,

One task more declined, one more footpath untrod,

One more devils'-triumph and sorrow for angels,

One wrong more to man, one more insult to God!

And yet... and yet... In spite of all this, I find I still have a soft spot for Graham. In spite of everything, I always kind of liked him. 

Why? Perhaps it is because of the genuine note of tragedy in his moral degradation. A figure like Vance or Rubio never struck me as so operatic. They are base opportunists of the classically cunning variety—Shakespearean only in the sense of one of his lesser villains. Graham—though—seemed always like he was actually trying to accomplish something with his crawling self-abasement—something other than his own unmerited elevation to power, that is. Graham seemed to sincerely care about aiding Ukraine, for instance. 

Whereas Vance and Rubio reversed their stance on Trump merely for the sake of power and prestige; whereas they sold out only to "advance themselves /And secure high posts and powers for which / No intrinsic merits qualify them," to quote MacDiarmid—I always got the impression that Graham had sold himself because he thought somehow it would help other people, and there was at least a handful of things he sincerely believed in that he thought could be advanced by him trading in his soul. 

Viz. when so much of the Vance-aligned wing of the party started toying with Groyperism and Neo-Nazi rhetoric, Graham had the common sense and humanity to dismiss this excrescence with the contempt it deserved. "I just want to make it really clear"—he memorably said of the Nick Fuentes phenomenon and of Tucker Carlson's persistent flirtation with Holocaust denialism—"I'm in the 'Hitler sucks' wing of the Republican Party."

It's a pretty great line, and it's almost enough on its own to make me forgive everything else. 

But then, in that same appearance, he also said people ought to support the Republican Party because—quote—"we're killing all the right people." 

:/

So there you have it, folks. That's the paradox and duality of Lindsey Graham right there. But even if we say, with Browning, that we should "blot out his name" and write him off as a "lost soul"—let us recall how Browning ended that same poem: 

Then let him receive the new knowledge and wait us,

Pardoned in heaven, the first by the throne!

As Byron wrote of King George III: it is perhaps "a large economy/ In God to save the like; but if he will / Be saving, all the better; for not one am I / Of those who think damnation better still." And I say the same of Graham too. Let him be saved, whatever we may mean by that term. Let us be certain that he is pardoned in heaven, in whatever sense we believe in it. For, it has been well said it is a place where there is more rejoining over one lost sheep than over 99 who never went astray...