Anyone inclined to believe that social media have hardened our public discourse will have found ample evidence last week, when John McCain died.
Twitter in particular was flooded with words of condolence, panegyrics from old friends and adversaries, lamentations for the republic, admiring tributes to a life well lived. Then, very quickly and decisively, politics intervened. The sincerity of the sentiments was second-guessed and praise for Senator McCain was reinterpreted for what it might have been intended to say about President Trump. Trump, in turn, was admonished to say something on the subject (which he did) and, simultaneously, warned not to say anything at all.
By the second day, McCain’s critics on the left were recounting their version of his crimes and misdemeanors while Trump’s admirers on the right were making the same arguments. McCain, whose humor had a decidedly cynical edge, would have savored the extent to which his death serially united critics and admirers across the political chasm.
There was ugliness, even savagery, in many of the things said on Twitter, but I am not sure that this is Twitter’s fault. Writers tend to believe that the means by which humans communicate with one another—cuneiform tablets, the printing press, telegraph, TV, the Internet—are decisive under such circumstances. But human nature is considerably older than any medium, and the casual cruelty and paralyzing rage found on Twitter are nothing new.
It is true that social media expose more people to more evidence of these facts about our species. But it is equally true that humans have been griping about the loss of civility since civilization began.
On a more prosaic note, however, one feature of the thousands of eulogies stood out: McCain was almost universally praised for his spirit of “bipartisanship,” his evident willingness to cross party lines on principle and maintain friendly personal relations with public adversaries. With his death, nearly everyone agreed, the poisonous atmosphere in political Washington has grown a little more poisonous, and McCain’s blend of conviction and harmony is obsolete.
If I may be excused for saying so, this is a comforting piece of mythology that sustains the political class (of which I am an associate member) in the nation’s capital: that there was once a golden age of comity and well-mannered combat in public affairs that has largely evaporated, especially in Congress. Speaking as one who admired Senator McCain and cast my vote to elect him president a decade ago, I am bound to say that the same obituary tributes tend to be paid to people—Hubert Humphrey, for example, or Gerald Ford—whose characters are comfortably blended with leadership qualities.
John McCain was not the first nor (I suspect) the last of this breed. Yet one defining attribute has been largely overlooked. McCain’s extraordinary heroism while a prisoner of war in North Vietnam has tended to overshadow the extent to which his behavior was informed by a personal code. No prisoner suffered greater torments in Hanoi than McCain endured, but his history as an ex-prisoner is nearly as impressive.
From the time he entered Congress, less than a decade after his release, this manifestly conservative lawmaker and faithful guardian of American power was an advocate for recognition of, and above all reconciliation with, his onetime enemies. Such an attitude is a decidedly military virtue, which McCain, the son and grandson of admirals and descendant of officers since the revolution, instinctively understood. Indeed, it brooks comparison with the famous declaration of another warrior-politician, Winston Churchill:
In War: Resolution
In Defeat: Defiance
In Victory: Magnanimity
In Peace: Good Will
If anyone in public life was entitled to bear the memory of his captivity like an open wound and practice ill-will toward the People’s Republic of Vietnam, it would have been John McCain. And from my civilian’s perspective, it has never been entirely clear that the regime in Hanoi was worthy of the senator’s regard, much less forgiveness. But McCain surveyed the landscape from a soldier’s perspective, and saw the North Vietnamese in honorable, even empathetic, terms.
Of course, this is not intended to draw a parallel between the North Vietnamese and McCain’s adversaries on the Senate floor. But it does suggest that he drew a line from his experience of war to his life in politics and felt the necessity, in the words of another soldier-statesman, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, “to keep the soldier’s faith against the doubts of civil life, more besetting and harder to overcome than all the misgivings of the battlefield. . . . [T]hese things we learned from noble enemies in Virginia or Georgia or on the Mississippi, thirty years ago; these things we believe to be true.”
The experience of war is now severely limited among Americans, and the military virtues that McCain personified—the soldier’s resolution, defiance, magnanimity, and goodwill—have largely disappeared from public consciousness and discourse.
Which is a shame: The sense that conflicts of the past need not poison the present used to be characteristic of American life—you can find lots of historic footage of Civil War blue-gray reunions on YouTube—and may yet revive. But it’s not entirely a coincidence that in the same week that John McCain died, a throng of demonstrators at the University of North Carolina toppled a memorial to Chapel Hill students who had died for the Confederacy. And “noble enemies” are hard to find, on Twitter or anywhere else these days.