McCain's Point

Why would John McCain have asked Barack Obama and George W. Bush to eulogize him, anyway?

Bush and Obama have a couple of things in common, but one stands out above all: they were the two men who defeated John McCain in presidential campaigns--Bush did it in 2000; Obama did it in 2008.

McCain's most avid supporters would probably cry foul about the way that those campaigns played out--both were hard-hitting campaigns, and McCain was the victim of some tough attacks. But that's the game as it's played--politics is rough-and-tumble in America, and somebody has to lose. In 2000 and 2008, it was McCain.

It would be easy for McCain to have held a grudge--to think that he would have been a better president than his two opponents, to believe that it could have gone differently. Maybe he did hold a grudge, in his heart.

But in the gesture of inviting those two men to deliver eulogies, McCain reminds us of a simple truth: after the campaign, we have to live together.

Campaigns can be tough, feelings can get hurt. Politics matters, after all, and the two parties have very different visions of American society right now. But the American system is finely tuned to be a sort of pendulum--elections are predictable and scheduled, and as such can't be timed by the ruling party in an attempt to hold onto a majority. We are going to disagree, sometimes angrily--and nothing can change that. But we have to live together in spite of our disagreements. In this framework, it's best to limit the scope of our fight: keep the politics in politics, but be civil to one another, and judge people on their personal qualities rather than their political views or group participation. That was McCain, through and through.

This is an interpretation of politics that has become increasingly outmoded--first on the online political Left, and more recently on the new (awful) Right. McCain is seen as a vicious warmonger, an enabler of the imperial state, a collaborator with the evil of Republican economic policy and social spending. In this view, opponents are reduced to their policy preferences, or the people that their policies directly benefit. (Note that second-order effects are utterly ignored.) A disagreement over the responsibilities of government and the effectiveness of specific policy choices becomes a moral failing, rather than an understandable difference of opinion.

The stakes are high, so this perspective is understandable. But McCain believed that this was a dead-end. To McCain, this was a question of shared values: he wrote, "we have always had so much more in common with each other than in disagreement" in his final letter to America. This is a modernized update of an old sentiment, matching McCain's rhetorical style to the substance of the peroration of Lincoln's First Inaugural:

We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.

These sentiments of similarity, whether true or not, are useful. The "crush one's enemies" perspective fails because of the regularity of politics: sometimes we are bound to win, and sometimes we are bound to lose. To the victor goes the spoils, certainly, but we don't have an elected dictatorship in America; we have a republican system with multiple levels of government, constitutional limits, and checks and balances to prevent the tyranny of narrow majorities. Neither side will be permanently vanquished, even in a violent war**. Thus, we have to live together, and we're better off associating with one another to foster empathy, rather than isolating ourselves and developing only contempt.

McCainian magnanimity fits in that system perfectly, and his final wishes reflect that perhaps better than anything he did in politics.

Rest in peace, Senator. You earned it.

**It's reasonable to argue that the Civil War vanquished a gross evil: chattel slavery. This was, in one sense, the triumph of incivility. But unfortunately, the Civil War did not solve racial inequality in America, and it's hard to see how a second violent conflagration would; we still live with the sins of ourselves, our ancestors, and the distant settlers of the American continent, and there is nothing quite as tangible as the ownership of property to vanquish.