The Republican Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina died on Saturday, after what reports have called a "brief and sudden illness" following an official visit to Ukraine. He was 71. In 2003 Graham succeeded ancient dread Confederate mummy Strom Thurmond in the Senate, and was an actively malevolent force in American society for all the remaining 23 years of his life, at a scale larger than he'd been an actively malevolent force in American society for the preceding 48.
Graham's hatreds and bigotries were bog standard for his party, and they were legion. He hated gay and queer people; he hated black and brown people; he hated Muslims; he hated liberals; he hated efforts to make the nation more just, the environment cleaner, the future better. He hated free speech and the free press and privacy for anyone else. He hated the idea that the United States ought ever to be constrained by anything other than its own self-interest, as defined exclusively by guys like him. He hated the expectation that the United States would ever project its might with anything less than maximal imperial violence and bloodlust. He hated all of these with blithe good-ol'-boy cheer and the sneer of the frontrunner. He went on The Daily Show a bunch, so that both sides could playact a kind of broadminded comity that the suckers they both held in contempt just lap right up. Guh hyuk hyuk hyuk, isn't it charming how I want all of y'awl dead.
For a little while in the aughts and again at intervals Graham played at a kind of shriekingly insincere, cornpone Bible College John McCain act, pretending to part with his party on judicial nominees, on immigration reform, on gun control, on vaccines, when that fake disunity could be performed safely at the "sponsoring a doomed, dead-on-arrival bill" or "going on Meet the Press" stage and abandoned long before anybody had to cast a vote. Like many in his party he pretended to care about decorum and civility when he thought Donald Trump was just a freak novelty act the establishment would eventually crush; like everyone in his party he ditched that pretense as soon as the prediction turned out to be wrong. He spent the last decade of his life letting Donald Trump wear him as a glove and telling himself it was the other way around. It bought him the war with Iran he'd worked for decades to make happen, and he fucked off the mortal coil before he could be made to reckon with it being a failure.
Anyway here is what California Senator Adam Schiff, a Democrat, had to say on Bluesky about Graham on the occasion of that nasty little rat's death (emphasis mine):
What I'll remember most about Senator Graham was his sense of humor and how he deployed it to move his policy positions forward. Though we did not often agree, Senator Graham was never disagreeable.
And I will fondly remember our travels around the world along with Senator McCain to advance America's national security interests, and the respect world leaders had for him.
His staunch support for Ukraine, his willingness to reach across the aisle, and his quick wit and larger-than-life energy are all part of his memory and legacy.
I will let that stand in for any number of similarly worded statements by other Democrats over the weekend, because the work of rounding them up will make me want to die. This is something like the pure spore form of the rot at the heart of American politics: Praise for a guy who worked every day to produce actual lived misery in the very people whose hopes and interests Schiff nominally represents at the highest levels of government, because that guy did that evil work in a genteel and witty way.
The moral and personal calculus here are precisely backwards. Good humor and interpersonal charm do not ameliorate the malignity of a guy like Graham; that he had the capacity to be a fun golf partner while pushing cruelty and hate into the actual laws the rest of us are made to live by all the more vividly illustrates his total, indisputable moral depravity. If what you'll pledge to remember about the unrepentant sadist who flayed your neighbors alive is that he never let it get in the way of a good joke, you are no less sick than he was. And, crucially, you are no friend to your neighbors.
A bad analogy is a dangerous thing. People talk about Senators and congresspersons as colleagues, and implicit in there is a duty to collegiality. But, whatever it might seem like for the people who work there, Congress is not, for the United States or its people, a normal workplace, with colleagues who are all ultimately on the same team. Quite the opposite: It is an arena of conflict, by design. It is where the interest Adam Schiff's trans and queer and black and brown constituents have in being regarded by the law as human beings with rights meets Lindsey Graham's intention to crush them and drive them out of American public life.
If the person who actively seeks to prostrate your neighbors, friends, and supporters—who wants to see them miserable and afraid and unsafe, who fights to enshrine into law that they may live no other way—isn't your enemy, the word has no meaning. It is no exaggeration to say that Lindsey Graham did far more harm to vulnerable Americans than Osama bin Laden—whose sparkling wit received no hosannas from anybody when he fucked off—and no less directly. That Graham was himself an American, and that, as such, other polite Americans are expected to send him off with warm affection, is an indictment of the entire idea of national identity.
Lindsey Graham made a horror of his life. Continually, day by day, on purpose, for decades. He built a tower of monstrosity right up to the sky and then died. Do him the honor of acknowledging his life's work. You can't be trusted to burn down what you're pretending not to see.
