At the Grave of John McCain

March 2025

At the grave of John McCain at the U.S. Naval Academy.

I think (for understandable reasons) the interpretation of McCain’s legacy has been largely an amplification of the dynamics of his career from 2009 to his death in 2018. (The people who now endorse him were largely opposed to his legacy of 2001- 2009, and in many ways were tepid about his presence 2009-2018.) That has been helpful in some real ways and unhelpful in many other ways; for example it largely glosses over his less-well-respected tenure from 2001 to 2009, after his defeat by. George W. Bush in the 2000 Republican primary and before his defeat at the hands of Barack Obama in the 2008 election. (The people who supported his legacy in that time have largely forgotten or opposed his legacy from the times since then.)

Personally I think the most interesting part of McCain’s legacy (aside from the formative years up to 1973) is is his early congressional career, 1982-2001, when the maverick independent and bipartisan patriot mythoses were developed, culminating in the 2000 presidential campaign (the single political event of my lifetime I most regret being too young to remember.) In various ways, those have had negative effects (I think they formed the modern political reform mindset, which has been either impotent or actively harmful, as well as the nonpartisan patriotism mindset, which has devolved largely into arrogant dismissals of ethical partisanship.) But the purer forms of those are very, very compelling as myth, and in general do not seem to have been studied or utilized much since then, nor is McCain remembered for those days anymore. (Various of his former staffers have told me that the only political McCain they recognize is the McCain of the Straight Talk Express in 2000.)

Nobody seems to have written on McCain’s circles, either, especially including Robert Gates and Jon Huntsman; the former served his rivals Bush and Obama, and the latter served his rivals Bush and Obama and Trump, and in quieter ways both emulated the old McCain approach to politics. Nor have many written on his bipartisan friendships with major electoral rivals Biden and Lieberman. To be clear, I think that generation of politicians largely failed to reform the old order and put us in the circumstances of oligarchy and kludgeocracy that made the breakdown of the last decade inevitable (note the handling of the crises of 2001-2003 and 2008-2009 among many others, as well as the policy failures for a generation before that.) But the style of that generation is obviously missing in public, no matter how much it might exist quietly under the radar in Congress and the statehouses and the bureaucracies.

But governance is not the measure of political order. Public trust and faith in their governors is. That generation, which once held the faith of the country, lost it over time, and probably refused to admit it, McCain most of all. Yet the model McCain and his generation practiced in style, especially while the public still trusted them, remains I think the beau ideal of the best styles in every generation of American governance, even as it is always a minority among less dignified styles.

Nobody has tried, to my knowledge, to update and practice that model under the conditions of the past decade for our own times, successfully. It would necessarily look quite different from the old, even while recognizably maintaining the spirit. That is something I’m looking for. A good and dour friend told me the old unconditional goodwill patriotism for every American in the Union “died with your hero McCain.” I do not believe that. I am not ready to stick a fork in the American project yet; and even as he watched everything he’d lived for crumble, for better or for worse, as he died, I don’t think McCain was ready to either.