Monday
Few politicians have more openly sold their souls than Lindsey Graham, the one-time maverick senator from South Carolina who became one of Donald Trump’s chief sycophants and who died suddenly yesterday at 71. Yet perhaps to prevent himself from losing his moral bearings altogether, he did remain true to one higher cause, prompting Atlantic columnist Anne Applebaum to invoke Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot in yesterday’s reflection on the man.
Let’s look first at the betrayal. Although Graham once allied himself with John McCain as one who put principles over partisanship, Apppelbaum writes that
like many other Republicans—and, more important, like many other people who have lived under political occupation or experience 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.
Appelbaum first compared Graham to collaborators living under autocratic regimes in a 2020 piece where she conducted an in-depth exploration of the phenomenon. In addition to looking at those who resisted communist dictatorships in Eastern Europe and those who didn’t, she examined Republicans who broke with Trump after his January 6 coup attempt (Mitt Romney) and those who joined him (Graham). As she reported at the time,
A friend who regularly runs into Lindsey Graham in Washington told me that each time they meet, “he brags about having just met with Trump” while exhibiting “high school” levels of excitement, as if “a popular quarterback has just bestowed some attention on a nerdy debate-club leader—the powerful big kid likes me! ” That kind of intense pleasure is hard to relinquish and even harder to live without.
In that article Appelbaum turned to Czesław Miłosz, the dissident and Nobel-winning Polish poet who defected to the west after observing close up how writers and intellectuals justified collaborating with authoritarian rule. In “The Captive Mind” Milosz noted that careerism could not provide a complete explanation for their capitulation:
To be part of a mass movement was for many a chance to end their alienation, to feel close to the “masses,” to be united in a single community with workers and shopkeepers. For tormented intellectuals, collaboration also offered a kind of relief, almost a sense of peace: It meant that they were no longer constantly at war with the state, no longer in turmoil. Once the intellectual has accepted that there is no other way, Miłosz wrote, “he eats with relish, his movements take on vigor, his color returns. He sits down and writes a ‘positive’ article, marveling at the ease with which he writes it.”
George Orwell sums up this sense of peace in the concluding paragraph of 1984:
He gazed up at the enormous face. Forty years it had taken him to learn what kind of smile was hidden beneath the dark mustache. O cruel, needless misunderstanding! O stubborn, self-willed exile from the loving breast! Two gin-scented tears trickled down the sides of his nose. But it was all right, everything was all right, the struggle was finished. He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother.
In the article that appeared yesterday, after noting the many ways that Graham telegraphed his love of Trump, Appelbaum cites the one exception: he supported Urkaine, even though he well knew that Trump sought to curry favor with Vladimir Putin. Appelbaum reports that Graham
made 10 trips to Ukraine; he returned from the last one the day before he died. He repeatedly proposed legislation to sanction Russia, doing so with such frequency that his bill became a kind of joke, the Waiting for Godot of Congress, always proposed and never accepted by a president who did not want to make trouble for his Russian friends.
In Beckett’s absurdist play, Vladimir and Estrogen wait fruitlessly for the appearance of one Godot, who may be God or meaning or even just something different. Occasionally they are given glimmers of hope, as when a messenger boy shows up and informs them, “Mr. Godot told me to tell you he won’t come this evening but surely tomorrow.” At the end of the play, however, they are once again fruitlessly waiting.
Appelbaum reflects that, absurd though Graham’s hopes were, he may have remained loyal to Ukraine’s struggle because he knew, at some deep level, that “he had betrayed the moral code that he grew up with.” Without this one unbroken commitment (and here I borrow a line from another existentialist parable, Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness) life would “have been too dark—too dark altogether.”
I suppose this struggle differentiated Graham from those around Trump who, like T.S. Eliot’s hollow men, bend with the wind. It made him slightly more complicated and slightly more interesting.
Yet, for all that, he was a lost soul.
