Lindsey Graham and the rot of modern conservatism
From Gingrich to Trump, Graham was a fixture as the GOP became increasingly malignant.
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The sudden death this weekend of Lindsey Graham at age 71 — young, by today’s gerontocratic standards — is a personal parable for the changes within the conservative movement and modern Republican Party during Graham’s political career.
Indeed, few national elected officials so perfectly bridge the rapid rise of the Newt Gingrich-led GOP to the steady gutting of American conservatism by Donald Trump over the past decade.
Graham is not the sole member of that bridge generation; the career of fellow Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley, for example, spans back further, to the days when Barry Goldwater remained conservatism’s intellectual beacon. But Graham perfectly embodies the post-1990s morphing of conservatism into the malignant force that, today, animates Eric Hoffer’s famous observation that every great cause “begins as a movement, becomes as business, and eventually degenerates into a racket.”
Southern prosecutor stands out
Fittingly, Graham was first elected to the House in the 1994 “Republican Revolution” cycle.
The 73 Republican freshmen whom Gingrich helped recruit, fund, and train included a number of ambitious members. Some, like Mark Foley and Mark Sanford, later disgraced themselves via sex scandals; Joe Scarborough, the future talk show host and Trump critic, later built a career as a crossover moderate and party defector.
“They came in with such high ambition and on such a self-proclaimed moral high ground. Especially for guys who professed that they were setting a higher standard, they failed at the benchmark they set for themselves,” wrote Linda Killian, author of the definite book on the 1994 GOP class, “The Freshmen: What Happened to the Republican Revolution?”
To answer the rhetorical question posed by Killian’s book subtitle, Lindsey Graham is what happened.
Four years after his arrival in Washington, Graham got a rare, early-career opportunity to separate himself from that famed “revolutionary” class: He was appointed to serve as one of 13 House managers for Bill Clinton’s impeachment. A graduate of University of South Carolina’s law school, Graham argued that Clinton’s “process” crimes — perjury, obstruction of justice — rose to the Constitution’s “high crimes and misdemeanors” standard for impeachment, which he and the other dozen GOP House impeachment managers recommended to the full chamber.
Like future Supreme Court justice Brett Kavanaugh and media firebrand Ann Coulter, Graham quickly realized that Gingrich’s slash-and-burn attack style rewarded those willing to destroy opponents. An entire generation of Republicans, including Darrell Issa, Jim Jordan and James Comer, later emerged as aggressive avatars of the same approach to political power and attention that Graham, Gingrich, and their mid-’90s cohorts introduced.
Some paid a price for their aggressions. One of only two Republican impeachment managers more junior than Graham, California’s James Rogan, first elected in 1996, lost his seat in 2000 to none other than Adam Schiff. Most notably, after his impeachment crusade and his unforced policy errors on Medicare backfired on him, Speaker Gingrich resigned in failure after just four years leading the House.
Graham, by contrast, shrewdly combined his impeachment bona fides, his emergent friendship with veteran Arizona Sen. John McCain during the 2000 presidential campaign, and his facility on radio and television in the early years of Fox News to catapult himself from unknown backbencher into a solid, second-tier national party fixture. Alongside conservative Democrat and defeated 2000 Democratic VP nominee Joe Lieberman, Graham became one of the McCain-led troika of free-thinking “mavericks.”
It was not the last time Graham, the chameleon, would change his political spots to fit what he believed — often wrongly — was the Republican zeitgeist.
The war monger
Whatever lingering tensions existed between the Republican Party’s Bush and McCain factions largely disappeared after September 11 and the start of Bush’s wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. As did almost every congressional Republican, Graham rallied behind Bush’s decisions and rhetoric. At the time, the party’s isolationist wing was so small it could fit inside an SUV.
Graham thundered on behalf of Bush’s “war of choice” in Iraq. He established himself as a foreign policy interventionist who parroted McCain’s calls to support Bush’s “stay the course” plan — including the ill-fated 2007 troop “surge” that Bush’s Pentagon believed would finally deliver an American victory in Iraq.
When he and 16 other Republicans ran against Donald Trump for the 2016 presidential nomination, Graham dismissed Trump as a dangerous kook who would destroy the Republican Party.
Yes, some of Graham’s critiques stemmed from Trump’s policy ignorance, reckless financial and personal history, and crass behavior and language. But he also mocked Trump as an unserious foreign policy and military isolationist best relegated to the GOP’s kiddie table with the likes of Ron Paul.
Graham decried Trump’s major April 2016 foreign policy speech as unserious: “This speech was unnerving. It was pathetic in its content, and it was scary in terms of its construct. If you had any doubt that Donald Trump is not fit to be commander in chief, this speech should’ve removed it.”
Unnerving, pathetic, scary — powerful words. But Trump shocked Graham and the crowded field of 2016 Republican presidential wannabes by vanquishing them in surprisingly easy fashion. Although Graham may have secretly hoped that Hillary Clinton — whose foreign policy instincts and policy command far better matched his own — would win that November, Trump eked out a narrow Electoral College victory.
It was time for Lindsey to change his colors again.
Lindsey ❤️s Donny
Has America ever witnessed a capitulation on policy, politics, and personal integrity so completely self-abnegating as Graham’s conversion from snarling Trump critic into swooning Trump cheerleader and apologist?
His reversal was — to borrow the late senator’s preferred adjectives — unnerving, pathetic, and scary.
The same Graham who used mere process crimes to impeach Bill Clinton turned a blind eye to Trump’s far more numerous actual crimes, constitutional violations, and self-dealing corruption. The same Graham who loathed Trump for mocking his close friend McCain’s service as a prisoner of war turned tail and praised Trump’s toughness as commander in chief. The same Graham who dismissed Trump as a fool and kook turned into an eyelash-batting, sacrilegious fanboy who, in front of Trump, recently told him “you’re not far behind God.”
For a brief moment on January 6, 2021, after he and his Republican colleagues survived a Trump-instigated attack on the Capitol, Graham seemed to come to his senses.
“Trump and I, we had a hell of a journey,” he pronounced from the well of the Senate, sounding like the Graham of 2016 again. “I hate it being this way. All I can say is count me out. Enough is enough.”
But just two weeks later, Graham could not muster the courage to join seven of his fellow Republican senators to vote to convict Trump during his second Senate impeachment trial.
Dying of shame
Lindsey Graham died a coward. His three-decade career in national politics should be remembered for more than his shameless, pusillanimous capitulations — but not, unfortunately, for some noble pursuit or purpose he used his chameleon-like political skills to secure. He should instead be remembered for using his power to bow and scrape, to change his political colors, largely if not solely in service to himself.
Conservative figures like the deathly-ill Mitch McConnell or Chief Justice John Roberts have been described as destroyers and “gravediggers” of American democracy. But at least they have wielded their shovels to bury America’s constitutional traditions and safeguards in pursuit of their own pinched and petty political philosophies.
Lindsey Graham, American chameleon, did nothing of the sort. He cowered and capitulated for three decades in Congress merely to be at the center of power. From 1994 revolutionary to 2026 poltroon, he embodies the movement-to-business-to-racket transformation of modern conservatism. He lived for nothing and died the same way.
May he rest in pusillanimity.
That’s it for today
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Incredibly well-written; so emblematic of the tragic trajectory we witness daily.
Thank you.
Well said! Thank you!