On Civility and Empathy in Politics
With the death of John McCain, media outlets and online personalities are tripping over each other to express their adoration of his political legacy. McCain, after all, has been hailed over the years as one of the few remaining honorable politicians. A man of deep personal integrity who held service to his country above party allegiance. A man known as a ‘maverick’ who would frequently buck the party line in favor of what he believed was the right thing to do. McCain, it has often been said, is the paragon of what politics is supposed to be: A passionate yet ultimately mannered commitment to higher ideals of democracy and public service.
The hagiography of this storied politician began immediately upon his passing. From his request that President Trump not attend his funeral to his wish that former president Barack Obama not only attend but also speak, McCain has, according to pundits, once again shown himself to be a statesman of the utmost class and integrity, setting an example for others on how to reach across the aisle and carry on that most admirable ideal of American politics: bipartisan cooperation.
None of this - from his reputation as a rebel to his supposed commitment to civility - is borne out by reality.
During his decades as a politician McCain consistently embraced reactionary positions on social issues and opposed LGBT rights. He repeatedly voted against the Employment Non-Discrimination Act (he later voted in support in 2013, but only when it was overwhelmingly set to pass making his vote functionally irrelevant) and vocally opposed equal marriage rights until after national polls showed a majority of the country favored marriage equality. On environmental issues, he brought on Sarah “Drill Baby Drill” Palin as his running mate in 2008 (a campaign which saw him make an astonishingly racist remark that is, tellingly, being heralded as one of his finest moments). McCain famously opposed making Martin Luther King Day a holiday in 1983 and maintained his opposition until 1990. In 2008 he claimed there was strong evidence tying vaccines to rising autism diagnoses in children. He opposed affirmative action and was a strong advocate for mandatory minimum sentencing and expanded use of capital punishment.
But McCain wasn't just a loyal Republican, when it came to matters of imperialism and war he was often to the right of his colleagues.
Unjust wars are not less horrific because the people in charge maintain decorum while waging them.
McCain was one of the leading proponents of the Iraq war and was a committed ally to Saudi Arabia in the Senate, particularly during their present genocidal campaign in Yemen. He once sang “Bomb bomb bomb Iran” to the tune of the Beach Boys “Barbara Anne” at a public televised speaking event. Before he became a politician, McCain volunteered to join the military and requested to be given combat duty, eventually flying planes as part of Operation Rolling Thunder which dropped an estimated 864,000 tons of bombs on Vietnam killing tens of thousands of civilians.
Interpersonally, McCain adamantly defended his ongoing use of the slur “gook” when discussing his time in Vietnam and publicly called his wife a cunt. He was impatient with journalists who challenged him, hot-headed with his colleagues, and derided protesters of noted war criminal Henry Kissinger (no stranger to vocal allies from both parties). As a policy figure John McCain was a warmonger with grand imperialist visions, and as a person, he was an openly cruel bigot seemingly indifferent to the suffering of others.
Yet even if we were to grant him the image he carefully cultivated for himself as a ‘maverick’ who put country before party, he would still not be an admirable man or politician.
Image over substance
John McCain's best trait, according to those quick to lionize him, was that while he occasionally did the right thing (debatable), he always treated those who opposed him with respect and brought civility to political debate. This (again, not true) may be respectable in a small business or within a community group, but when discussing politicians who have the power to cause the deaths of hundreds of thousands and deny fundamental human rights to millions, the tendency to be polite (which McCain wasn’t) hardly seems more important than the actions they choose to take.
Unjust wars are not less horrific because the people in charge maintain decorum while waging them.
This, however, is what McCain is praised for: being the last bastion of good manners in a time of un-mannered politics. It should be noted, however, that this praise is coming not from the right, but from the left.
Curiously, for a staunch right-wing politician who helped galvanize the white supremacist Tea Party movement in 2008, McCain’s legacy and passing have been most vocally defended by liberals, not conservatives. A poll released a week before his death found that while a majority of Democrats viewed McCain favorably, a majority of Republicans held a negative view of the Senator.
While some conservatives expressed sorrow at his passing, the Jake Tappers, Ana Novarros, MSNBCs, and Daily Shows of the media world have been the most vocal in honoring McCain’s past and declaring him one of our nation’s greatest political figures, despite the fact that the material history of McCain's politics goes against everything Democrats supposedly stand for.
This is because McCain represents the Sorkin-esque liberal ideal: An immaterial political world brokered by political elites where the two parties of US politics represent the full spectrum of legitimate policy and where the ultimate political sin is not passing destructive policy but disrespecting those on the opposing side as all political ideas deserve respect and consideration.
Bipartisan economic meeting with Congress. Photo Credit: White House photo by David Bohrer
While McCain may have represented the ideal Republican to those on the left, he was a barely acceptable vestigial appendage to those on the right. McCain was a begrudging compromise, a PR project useful to the right for retaining respectability among liberals who would otherwise struggle to find anyone on the right they could hang their hat on when arguing for the value of bipartisan cooperation. Without McCain and the few others likes him, the right becomes utterly indefensible to those on the left holding out for a politics rooted in polite debate.
But the liberal fascination and adoration of McCain, particularly in death, speaks not just to liberal political ideals, but also to a fundamental component of the liberal worldview: a deferential belief in the dignity of all human beings we personally know or know of.
McCain may have sponsored untold litanies of murder and devastation, but we don’t have specific names and faces to pair with his bureaucratic slaughter. On the other hand, McCain is someone we know. We saw him on the news, we heard him on the radio, and if we’re particularly sycophantic, we read his Tweets. He was, to many, a fully embodied human being who elicited empathy and affection. He was mannered in his atrocities so it was easy to filter the violence of who he was through the tone he used to portray himself as reasonable and honorable.
His death has earned him literally inhuman praise from reporters and journalists, in part out of a deeply ingrained sense that there is a moral obligation to offer respect, empathy, and generosity at the time of a human being’s death (as long as they are someone you are familiar with. Beyond a certain degree of familiarity the opposite becomes true; bringing up the deaths McCain is responsible for is treated as a cruel distraction).
Even when speaking critically of his legacy most reporters, journalists, pundits, and commentators are careful to offer an ample cushion in the form of seemingly heartfelt condolences to his family and expressions of tremendous grief at McCain's passing. Whether these expressions are sincere or not is irrelevant – for many, it is considered inhumane to not show respect and solemnity at the occasion of anyone’s death, even political opponents, particularly in regards to surviving family and those charged with mourning the deceased.
It was McCain's funeral, however, that was the true catalyst for all the platitudes and praise being ascribed to the dead politician. For many, it was seen as the perfect distillation of what politics should be, drawing stark contrast to what it has not been since January 20th, 2017.
McCain’s request that Trump not attend his funeral has been heralded as a strong moral stance against the President. The New Yorker declared the service "the biggest resistance meeting yet", while Meghan McCain's eulogy was lauded as a powerful condemnation of the sitting president.
That the McCain family's primary issue with Trump is that he made fun of John, rather than any of the substantive policy decisions he's made since taking office, does not, apparently, preclude them from being part of the "resistance".
Neither, apparently, does McCain's request that George W. Bush and Henry Kissinger should speak at his service merit any suspicion. Presumably, this is not only because Bush’s own legacy has been aggressively rewritten, or because Kissinger's crimes were never that interesting to the American public, but also because former president Obama was asked to speak, thus supposedly exemplifying McCain's bridge-building reputation.
Whether these are bridges that should even exist is seemingly of a secondary concern.
Too much hate
There is a deeply held belief that our chief political crisis is hate; that there is simply too much derision and hatred in politics today and that we must do everything in our power to come together over our shared love of country and community. According to this line of thought, displaying kindness and understanding toward one’s political foes, especially during times of loss, is essential for achieving the ultimate goal of unity during a time of great conflict and strife.
This belief - that hate and division are the true enemies of justice and prosperity - has traditionally been framed as an unassailable first principle from which certain norms must flow, including treating deceased politicians - regardless of their political allegiance - with the same empathy and consideration we would a family member. This dovetails naturally with other elements of political engagement and discourse that frame political matters in terms of individual experience (balancing the national budget as akin to balancing your checkbook, environmental regulation as comparable to recycling trash and picking up litter, engaging in wars abroad as tantamount to defending your home, etc).
However, like all the other ways our individual experiences are misappropriated to illustrate political ideas, treating influential elites and political figures with the same regard we treat our family is not only unhelpful, it's fundamentally at odds with any capacity to hold the powerful to account; it is a fundamental abuse of the experience of empathy that ultimately serves to rewrite history and absolve political powers of their crimes and misdeeds.
The notion that divisive language and scornful denunciations are at times ethical and important parts of the political process can be a difficult concept to embrace. This is doubly true once you introduce the idea that speaking critically of the deceased is sometimes not only be morally justified but historically essential.
The legacy of influential and powerful people must reflect not just the facts of their lives, but also the ethical and material consequences of their actions in a manner that imbues them with appropriate weight and moral context.
For many people across many cultures speaking ill of the dead is seen at best as rude and at worst as inviting negative cosmic repercussions into one's life. The dead, after all, cannot defend themselves against the accusations of the living. Others have explained, however, why respect for the dead is a norm that ought to be reserved solely for private individuals and not for public figures whose power and influence affects the lives of millions.
The death of a public figure is never a neutral time for mourning or reflection. The deceased's supporters will invariably begin framing the perceived virtues of the deceased as the true legacy left behind. Once that process begins, it is only right that such accounting be made as comprehensive as possible, including any negative, harmful, or controversial parts of the person’s life.
But even this is insufficient in many ways. A simple accurate recounting of the life of a powerful and influential individual, particularly if they were a politician, does not capture that person's total impact or the consequences of their actions.
If we were to list out all of the atrocities, war crimes, economic hardships, and stripping of rights that McCain inflicted and sponsored, it would only provide a moral taxonomy for holding his legacy to account. It would utterly fail at encapsulating the lived reality of the callousness that he and his family (forever defensive of, and thus complicit, in the wrongs he oversaw) carried out publicly and privately over decades. Facts alone provide no moral context, it's up to those keeping track to offer moral clarity.
History is evidence that it is simply not enough that the wrongs of politicians and public figures be remembered; it reduces their actions to raw data, denying any associated gravity or import and thus allowing any conceivable narrative, good or bad, to take hold. Aforementioned war criminal Henry Kissinger is a perfect example. As it stands, he is widely respected and regarded as one of the great foreign policy experts of all time. He even has a Nobel Peace Prize to show for it. Simply acknowledging that he spearheaded horrific political initiatives fails to capture the totality of the horrors he inflicted.
No amount of writing or data can capture what it means to start a needless war that kills hundreds of thousands of innocent people. The severity of such acts can only ever be captured, imperfect though they may be, through narratives. The legacy of influential and powerful people must reflect not just the facts of their lives, but also the ethical and material consequences of their actions in a manner that imbues them with appropriate weight and moral context.
In the case of someone like John McCain, that legacy must include the reality that his wrongs were not incidental but intentional acts of moral and social depravity. He may have thought he was doing right by his country, but that claim has been made by every infamous political leader in history. To treat his informed decisions as mere blunders would be to engage in a disingenuous naivety that allows human rights abuses and crimes against humanity to be viewed as morally relativistic acts that politicians can engage in ethically as long as they claim to mean well.
For a recent example, consider former president George W. Bush.
George W Bush 4th state of the union address, 2005. Photo credit: White house
Bush left the White House on January 20th, 2009. During the prior eight years, he started multiple wars leading to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of civilians, began an unaccountable program of drone bombings, opened black site torture prisons across the globe, started the aggressive testing No Child Left Behind program, exempt fracking from the environmental regulations every other type of fossil fuel extraction method is subject to, oversaw and ignored the devastation of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina followed by pushing for the privatization of the city’s education system (among other things) during reconstruction, signed off on numerous offshore drilling operations including the Deepwater Horizon rig that would explode in 2010 causing the largest oil spill in history, created the Department of Homeland Security and agency known as ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement), and enabled and accelerated the subprime mortgage crisis that would lead to the Great Recession in 2008 among countless other crimes, abuses, and harmful policy acts.
Yet Bush’s legacy has quickly arranged itself around a concept of him as a lovable grandfather/uncle who cared about his country but made some policy errors along the way (sound familiar?).
Instead of being accountable for any of the deeds above, Bush disappeared for a while, returned presenting a variety of strange paintings and laughing it up on late night shows, and now has a reputation among both the right and the left as a charming goofball who did his best. The right, of course, has plenty of incentive to rehabilitate the image of any of their own. The left, on the other hand, has done so in spite of opposing incentives and needs.
Bush, once public enemy number one, is now the occasionally disagreeable politician who nonetheless handled his tenure with humanity and class. Of course, this can somewhat be attributed to the shock of Trump's presidency - it’s easier to view the behavior of past presidents with rose-colored glasses when the current leader is so blatantly unfit. But even this doesn’t fully explain Bush’s newfound popularity. After all, this was the man who, besides sanctioning and pursuing war crimes, regularly behaved with such little professionalism or intellect that criticisms of his presidency were often reduced to simply laughing at his garishly undignified, sloppy, and boorish behavior.
So how exactly did George W. Bush come to be remembered with such fondness?
Real-time revisionism
Just as McCain is becoming, before our very eyes, the patron saint of respectable politics, so too was Bush's departure from political life followed by a rapid cherry picking of history.
Upon his exit from the political limelight Bush's humanity became unimpeachable and the motivations behind the most destructive of his policies became obscured. His detractors held their tongues because it was considered wrong to "litigate the past", while his supporters began crafting exculpatory and glamorizing narratives that would set the tone for things to come.
When Obama took office one of the first proclamations he made was to make clear there would be no looking back, in this case a euphemism for refusing to hold power to account. In regards to Bush’s torture programs, Obama said, “This is a time for reflection, not retribution. I respect the strong views and emotions that these issues evoke. We have been through a dark and painful chapter in our history. But at a time of great challenges and disturbing disunity, nothing will be gained by spending our time and energy laying blame for the past."
And in regards to other Bush-era programs such as warrantless wiretapping, he said that Obama declared he had “a belief that we need to look forward as opposed to looking backwards.”
These statements set the tone early that, as far as the federal government was concerned, nothing Bush had done was so egregious, unlawful, or morally reprehensible that it merited consequence or even examination. When the Obama administration was critical of the actions of Bush, it was in the context of the economy and it was in language that abstracted any specific responsible entities outside of "the previous administration"; Obama was said to have “inherited” a “mess”.
The press, eager to begin following the popular new president, was not going to spend its time unpacking the crimes of the past – they largely took their lead from Obama, following his narratives and policies intently while quickly letting go of any threads relating to Bush sans a general dissatisfaction with the economy (this, too, would quickly get overshadowed by healthcare debates, ultimately exonerating Bush in the economic conversations that would resurface down the line).
Culturally, people moved on as well. Popular political late night shows like The Daily Show and Colbert Report were quick to change their focus, as well, frequently noting Republican hypocrisy but reluctant to hold Bush and his administration to account in any other capacity. The hubris and callousness of Wall Street were front and center, yet Bush’s own negligence and corruption were rapidly being brushed under the rug.
But the true rehabilitation of Bush came over the course of the following years as Obama and the media would let go of any notion of criminality precisely because the most violent and repugnant parts of Bush’s legacy were to continue.
New START Treaty meeting, November 18th, 2010. Photo Credit: White House
The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq weren’t brought to a close, the Patriot Act was renewed and expanded, ICE would be empowered with a new more violent anti-immigrant zeal, drone bombings expanded to new nations, fracking became commonplace throughout the US, and Wall Street would continue apace, un-prosecuted and only superficially restricted.
The standards and norms of civility politics demanded that we not assail the humanity or personhood of anyone, regardless of their actions or speech. Rather, any issues we may raise were to be resolved through a debate of ideas and a battle of facts. For Bush, this meant not ascribing any intention or agenda to his presidency by instead attempting to evaluate his terms in office on their objective political and material impacts. While there remained plenty of dissent on the left, critiques of Bush would often focus on the specific policies and actions he took as president, becoming long wonkish screeds condemning the administration in terms unapproachable to those outside beltway.
Absent any accessible storytelling tying Bush to the horrors of his presidency, the consequences of his actions as president became obscured by the emotional narrative building around him as a humble quiet ranch man no longer interested in political life.
If Bush was a corrupt war criminal bought and paid for by fossil fuel interests and arms dealers then that would mean Obama, who continued many of his policies, was amenable to such things and that was out of the question.
The narrative of Bush as benign retired farm boy became increasingly easy to latch onto, in part because to be critical of George W. Bush the person for his actions and policy choices would mean to be critical of Obama the person and the president. This, too, would go against the precepts of civility politics; Obama was, after all, new to office and deserved the benefit of the doubt for as long as it could be maintained. Obama's motives for his actions couldn't be assailed and since so many of his actions were extensions of Bush's, neither could his.
By the time it was socially acceptable to criticize Obama’s decision to maintain the worst parts of Bush’s legacy, such policies had become so normalized that to treat them as morally egregious or even criminal would be to adopt positions considered “extreme” or “purist”.
Liberals, having vested so much political and social capital in Obama being the savior president, embraced the story that politics was about compromise and that Obama did the best with what he inherited, acting as a good-faith mediator between the two extremes of the American political spectrum. In order for that narrative to fit, Obama couldn’t be seen as engaging in human rights abuses, corrupt financial dealings, or violent imperialism. Nor, by extension, could Bush. If Bush was a corrupt war criminal bought and paid for by fossil fuel interests and arms dealers then that would mean Obama, who continued many of his policies, was amenable to such things and that was out of the question.
Therefore, Bush became a right-wing president who acted in disagreeable ways and made a policy blunder by going to war with Iraq, and Obama was a liberal centrist who did his best to balance various competing, legitimate interests.
It wasn't the facts that changed, it was the emotional and moral context.
The stories we tell
No one claims that Bush didn’t start a global torture network or that he didn’t begin an unaccountable domestic spying program or that he didn’t start multiple wars that led to the murder of hundreds of thousands of innocent people across numerous countries. Neither does anyone claim that Obama didn’t continue those wars or that he shut down that spying program or that he held Wall Street accountable for the financial collapse that began his presidency.
Instead, those facts are re-contextualized through an emotional lens of empathy, civility, and benefit-of-the-doubt that says that any harsh criticism of Bush or Obama is a criticism of democracy itself and is inherently unreasonable.
This is how war criminals are rehabilitated. Not because the facts change, but because stories and emotions define how history is perceived and generosity towards those in power, especially at the time of their departure, allows those remaining in power to define which stories and emotions take hold.
So it is that it can be not only important, but necessary to speak critically, skeptically, and even mockingly or derisively, of dead politicians. The distinction between what constitutes appropriate consideration and empathy for civilians and what that looks like for political powers is stark, with the divide between the two bound only by the limits of power.
We are doomed to repeat history if we allow those who hold power to be remembered only in the most generous terms.
There is no material way to hold anyone in power to account for the scale of atrocities, crimes, and abuses they are able to commit. If you commit a verbal offense than a verbal apology can be sufficient in redressing the harm caused. If you destroy property than restoring or replacing that property can be a fitting way to atone. There is, however, nothing any system can do to sufficiently punish or reprimand an individual for causing the deaths of hundreds of thousands, for dropping chemical weapons on a region leading to severe illness and early deaths for generations, for giving an international voice to ethno-fascist ideologies, or pursuing global military conquest. The only thing that can be done is to ensure that history and society at large regard such acts with a commensurate level of horror, outrage, and unimpeachable opposition.
History shows us that there will always be those who regard human rights as frivolous and ethics as dispensable. But history also shows us that most of humanity does not view the world that way. Most of humanity values human rights and sees ethical and accountable leadership as indispensable to a just world. Our job then is to ensure that those responsible for such atrocities - the war in Iraq, the war in Vietnam, the destruction of ecosystems, the exploitation of the many for the financial gains of the few - are held to historical account so that we may do our best to prevent such people from taking power again.
We are doomed to repeat history if we allow those who hold power to be remembered only in the most generous terms.
Treating those responsible for great crimes and moral wrongs with respect and dignity allows future figures who fit similar molds to reasonably argue that they, too, should be given the benefit of the doubt and are deserving of power without apprehension.
If John McCain is to be remembered as a good-hearted man who put the well being of his country above the interests of himself and his party and whose moral wrongs were merely good faith policy mistakes, then we are damning future generations to believing that history’s only villains are those who liberal civilians find rude or socially offensive, not those whose actions are materially destructive, violent, or dehumanizing.
What to many feels petty or childish – mocking McCain’s death or his family’s grief – is, ultimately, an act of proactive historical dissent. History won’t remember the specific barbs, jokes, or derisive remarks directed toward McCain, but it may remember his passing as a time of great division, where many who aligned with principles of global justice and equity saw his passing as a time of great relief and respite from a morally atrocious grifter who used the theater of politeness to distract from the heinousness of his beliefs and actions.
Politics is divisive by nature. Unity can only exist where there are no competing interests of any real consequence. As long as people’s lives hang in the balance, politics will remain a realm of strife and division. The insistence for unity serves only to benefit the status quo and power structures that receive implicit immunity from the framing of dissent and accountability as dangerous sowers of division.
When the status quo is faced with a formidable challenge, or when a powerful public figure dies, these are the times when history is most vulnerable to being rewritten.
Emotions are high, narratives have yet to take hold, and the stories that will come to populate the minds of future generations can be written by anyone. This is why it is not only acceptable but also vitally important that when someone whose legacy is as destructive, murderous, and generationally traumatizing as John McCain’s, we must take every opportunity upon their death to insist that history remember them with fitting amounts of scorn and disdain, up to and including the mocking and belittling of their memory and existence.
To do any less is to allow history to remember their humanity as more memorable and important than that of all the people whose lives they ravaged, exploited, and destroyed.
If you still doubt this, ask yourself one question: Are there any historical figures universally regarded as morally reprehensible that we speak about with dignity and respect?