John McCain, Donald Trump, and the Legacy of the American Upper Class – Talking Points Memo

 

A boy needs both physical and moral courage. Neither can take the place of the other. When boys become men they will find out that there are some soldiers very brave in the field who have proved timid and worthless as politicians, and some politicians who show an entire readiness to take chances and assume responsibilities in civil affairs, but who lack the fighting edge when opposed to physical danger. In each case, with soldiers and politicians alike, there is but half a virtue. The possession of the courage of the soldier does not excuse the lack of courage in the statesman and, even less does the possession of the courage of the statesman excuse shrinking on the field of battle.

Theodore Roosevelt - The American Boy - 1900

In this thoughtful essay John Judis locates John McCain in the American upper class.  Descended from plantation owners, the grandson and son of four star admirals, he married well and served his country.  He admired Theodore Roosevelt, a high-minded patrician soldier, imperialist, and maverick.  He detested the trashy ostentation of the dubiously acquired wealth of our current president, who, McCain made clear, was not to be welcome at his funeral.  - gwc

John McCain, Donald Trump, and the Legacy of the American Upper Class – Talking Points Memo
by John Judis

***[John] McCain became enchanted with Roosevelt’s words and example. His 2000 campaign echoed Roosevelt’s maverick campaign in 1912 as the candidate of the Progressive Party. It’s not easily remembered now, but McCain condemned George W. Bush’s proposals for favoring the rich.

But McCain was also inspired by his reading of Roosevelt, and by his acquaintance with two other TR fans, William Kristol and Robert Kagan, to move from a cautious realism in foreign policy to an expansive form of American neo-imperialism. Roosevelt the progressive was also the proponent of American expansion overseas. He was principally responsible for an invasion of the Philippines that led to a fourteen-year war. 

McCain became the leading Senate proponent of an invasion of Iraq. In his last two decades, McCain combined a passionate embrace of an American ideal of democracy and human rights with a willingness, when all else failed, to send in the troops. In 2008, for instance, he wanted to send NATO troops into Georgia on Russia’s border. He rejected the Obama administration’s attempts to withdraw troops from Iraq and Afghanistan.

As a member of America’s upper class, McCain inherited a commitment to honor and country and disdain for corrupt arrivistes like Trump; he also inherited a propensity to seek solutions by force of arms that led him to embrace policies that were very much not in the country’s interests. It’s hard to separate the two, but in the wake of his death, it’s worth doing so. The McCain of honor and noblesse oblige was a blessing to American politics. It is what he had in common with the Roosevelts, the Kennedys, George H.W. Bush, John Kerry and other scions of the upper class. You don’t have to be rich and famous and fancily educated and raised to be of service to American politics, but if you are, it’s better you be like them than like a Trump or Koch.