Anne Applebaum argues that the late Lindsey Graham was “The Quintessential Politician of This Era.” She does not mean that as a compliment.
She trods much the same ground that I did in my obit, but takes it in a somewhat different direction. She makes a strong case that the Graham that I admired for decades was not a facade:
Graham’s background and biography made him, during the first part of his career, a fervent American patriot, with a special devotion to the cause of American leadership in the democratic world. Born and raised in a small town in South Carolina, he got himself and his younger sister through college after his parents died while he was still in his 20s, with the help of an ROTC stipend and then an Air Force salary. He became a military lawyer, served in West Germany during the Cold War, and stayed in the Reserves for two decades, traveling to work in Iraq and Afghanistan even while in the Senate. “The Air Force has been one of the best things that has ever happened to me,” he said in 2015. “It gave me a purpose bigger than myself. It put me in the company of patriots.”
Like his close friend John McCain, Graham believed that America should stand at the center of a broad democratic alliance. The few times I met him were in that context, at the Munich Security Conference or at other European-American gatherings, which he once attended with great regularity. He also took seriously the practice of American democracy at home. In a 2014 conversation with The Atlantic, he described himself as a pragmatic politician who eschewed populist slogans. “I know Washington is broken, but what’s broken about it is everybody yelling and nobody trying to fix it,” he said. “I’m trying.”
But, of course, there was the sharp MAGA pivot. While I chalked it up to a politician cravenly doing what he needed to do to remain relevant, she sees something darker and more familiar.
But then, like many other Republicans—and, more important, like many other people who have lived under political occupation or experienced radical regime change—he made the decision to abandon his previous ideals, to bury the patriotism that was once so important to him, and to become, instead, a loud, opportunistic collaborator. [emphasis mine] Graham went out of his way to telegraph his closeness to the president. He played golf with Trump, made excuses for him on television, and supported him as he slowly destroyed the alliances that Graham had defended all his life, even as he undermined the institutions of democracy at home. In 2021, Graham refused to vote to convict Trump, even after he assaulted the Capitol and tried to reverse the results of the election.
Graham’s motivations remain a mystery. Perhaps he craved proximity to power. Perhaps he feared losing his Senate seat, and with it any claim to relevance. Deep down, though, he must have known he was betraying the ideals of his younger self.
Both because she frames the rest of the piece around his dogged attempts to get Trump and the Congress to support Ukraine (which continued literally to the end) and because some of the piece is written as though Graham were still alive, I suspect the column was essentially written before his untimely and surprising death.
She closes:
Perhaps Graham understood, at some level, that he had betrayed the moral code that he grew up with. Perhaps that was why he maintained his attachment to the cause of Ukraine. But now he is gone, and one of the few voices in Trump’s orbit that had any connection to the old Republic falls silent.
Many of us in government service have had to make some compromises during the Trump era, and especially in this second administration. But Graham went full collaborator. You never go full collaborator.
UPDATE: In the first comment below, Steven Taylor reminds me of Applebaum’s July/August 2020 essay, “History Will Judge the Complicit.” There, she defines her terms more explicitly than above:
In English, the word collaborator has a double meaning. A colleague can be described as a collaborator in a neutral or positive sense. But the other definition of collaborator, relevant here, is different: someone who works with the enemy, with the occupying power, with the dictatorial regime. In this negative sense, collaborator is closely related to another set of words: collusion, complicity, connivance. This negative meaning gained currency during the Second World War, when it was widely used to describe Europeans who cooperated with Nazi occupiers. At base, the ugly meaning of collaborator carries an implication of treason: betrayal of one’s nation, of one’s ideology, of one’s morality, of one’s values.
More instructively,
Since the Second World War, historians and political scientists have tried to explain why some people in extreme circumstances become collaborators and others do not. The late Harvard scholar Stanley Hoffmann had firsthand knowledge of the subject—as a child, he and his mother hid from the Nazis in Lamalou-les-Bains, a village in the south of France. But he was modest about his own conclusions, noting that “a careful historian would have—almost—to write a huge series of case histories; for there seem to have been almost as many collaborationisms as there were proponents or practitioners of collaboration.” Still, Hoffmann made a stab at classification, beginning with a division of collaborators into “voluntary” and “involuntary.” Many people in the latter group had no choice. Forced into a “reluctant recognition of necessity,” they could not avoid dealing with the Nazi occupiers who were running their country.
Hoffmann further sorted the more enthusiastic “voluntary” collaborators into two additional categories. In the first were those who worked with the enemy in the name of “national interest,” rationalizing collaboration as something necessary for the preservation of the French economy, or French culture—though of course many people who made these arguments had other professional or economic motives, too. In the second were the truly active ideological collaborators: people who believed that prewar republican France had been weak or corrupt and hoped that the Nazis would strengthen it, people who admired fascism, and people who admired Hitler.
Hoffmann observed that many of those who became ideological collaborators were landowners and aristocrats, “the cream of the top of the civil service, of the armed forces, of the business community,” people who perceived themselves as part of a natural ruling class that had been unfairly deprived of power under the left-wing governments of France in the 1930s. Equally motivated to collaborate were their polar opposites, the “social misfits and political deviants” who would, in the normal course of events, never have made successful careers of any kind. What brought these groups together was a common conclusion that, whatever they had thought about Germany before June 1940, their political and personal futures would now be improved by aligning themselves with the occupiers.
I don’t know that Graham ever became an enthusiastic supporter. But, certainly, he believed his political and personal future would be improved by alignment.
