Liberty and Death: Lindsey Graham and the America We Live In
Lindsey Graham is dead. He was not a great public servant, but he was, for better and worse, an important
Liberty and Death: Lindsey Graham and the America We Live In
3 min read
Lindsey Graham is dead. He was not a great public servant, but he was, for better and worse, an important one. And like all important public figures, his death has offered the country an occasion to think about itself.
There is great writing out there that engages with Graham’s moral descent. You should read Jamelle Bouie’s column on how Graham embraced Donald Trump despite knowing better, even despite warning us that Trump would cost us everything. And you absolutely must read Will Saletan’s remarkable deep-dive exploration of Graham’s turn to Trumpism, “The Corruption of Lindsey Graham.”
Just about every thoughtful obituary for Graham has noted that he transformed himself in the last decade from a defiant anti-Trumper to a man at the very centers of Trump’s failed insurrection and subsequent political comeback. Senators have mourned the loss of a friend, one who, as Sheldon Whitehouse put it, “loved being a Senator.” And many progressives have spit on the grave of a man who was happy to trample over their rights and dignities to serve the new head of his morally fallen party.
I can’t find much sympathy for the image of the man who “loved being a Senator” so much he forsook every sacred oath entailed by the job. But I also know that the hate I’ve seen in others—and, frighteningly, in myself—this last decade is its own kind of loss. After all, I have written more than once here at Liberal Currents that liberal democracy can’t survive when we close our hearts and minds to our fellow citizens.
I think a lot these days about Learned Hand's famous speech on the “spirit of liberty,” wherein he said:
Liberty lies in the hearts of men and women; when it dies there, no constitution, no law, no court can save it; no constitution, no law, no court can even do much to help it.
It’s clear that Graham allowed that spirit to die within his own heart long before he passed from this earth. I find that death, and the millions like it that have occurred in this decade of Trumpism, to be profoundly tragic. I don’t think this demands that I misremember who Graham was or what he did to aid the desecration of our republic. But it does mean retaining, as Hand insists, the essentially liberal values of empathy and other-mindedness. This is how Hand defined the spirit of liberty:
The spirit of liberty is the spirit which is not too sure that it is right; the spirit of liberty is the spirit which seeks to understand the minds of other men and women; the spirit of liberty is the spirit which weighs their interest alongside its own without bias; the spirit of liberty remembers that not even a sparrow falls to earth unheeded; the spirit of liberty is the spirit of him who, near two thousand years ago, taught mankind that lesson it has never learned, but has never quite forgotten—that there may be a kingdom where the least shall be heard and considered side-by-side with the greatest.
By his own admission, Hand was informed by a sense of Christian charity and grace. So I think it’s fitting to turn to a Biblical quotation, one from Christ himself, to enhance Hand’s own words here:
For whoever would save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will save it. For what does it profit a man if he gains the whole world and loses or forfeits himself? (Luke 9:24–25, English Standard Version)
Graham’s passing reminds me of all the little ways we can die before we fully leave this life—of the costs of hubris, selfishness, and cowardice. And it reminds me that not only is each human death a tragedy because each human life is sacred, but that the little ways we kill ourselves are their own sources of grief. Of course, there have been more visceral deaths these last few days.
When ICE officials handcuffed the lifeless body of Joan Sebastian Guerrero—a young man and father, here legally—in a parking lot in Biddeford, Maine, we saw the America that Lindsey Graham warned us about in action. It’s an America he helped create.
But republics don’t end because of individual men. They wither slowly but surely in the hearts and minds of everyday people. Americans put this administration back in power knowing exactly the nature of Trump and his closest allies. We had to know people would die. We had to know our communities would be poisoned. The majority of Trumpism’s victims have been unwitting and innocent. Another number, from voting booths to Capitol Hill, have been complicit. They are all tragedies.
I want to leave with a quote from Aeschylus—the same one shared by Robert Kennedy on the night Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated:
In our sleep, pain which cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart until, in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God.
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