Just like the Founders, McCain blended the concept of honor with the understanding of public virtue.
T he spontaneous outpouring of bipartisan tributes that flooded social media in the hours after Senator John McCain’s death worked a minor miracle. It momentarily cleansed the body politic. With no warning, the reeking muck of three years’ worth of deeply degraded political discourse was washed away.
For a few hours, politically engaged Americans glimpsed the shimmering surface of a once cherished American ideal — national unity.
The cause of this collective embrace across ideological divides was the death of an honorable man.
Descriptions of McCain, a contemporary politician, were filled with ancient words: courage, valor, integrity, patriotism. Many elected officials, particularly those who entered politics after military service, exhibit these same traits, though few ever did so as spectacularly as John McCain did. So what made McCain different?
His sense of honor.
McCain blended the military concept of honor with the understanding of public virtue adopted by the Founders in their quest to create and preserve the union.
In the founding era and early Republic, McCain’s blend of courage and honor would not have seemed unusual. At the turn of the 21st century, it made him unique.
For a brief period following the dawn of the Enlightenment, aristocratic elites in the West gentrified ancient codes of honor, mixing them with republican virtues so they would be more suitable for the emerging semi-democratic age.
Tribal honor, which consisted primarily of meeting insults or challenges with shows of force, was being civilized. Men — gentlemen, specifically — would be expected to demonstrate their honor not by risking injury to obtain status, but by forsaking personal gain for both the body politic and for the republican ideals on which it was being formed.
It was no mere rhetorical flourish when the signers of the Declaration of Independence unanimously agreed to “mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes, and our sacred Honor.”
The Founders recognized immediately that purely tribal appeals to unity would not bind the multi-tribal nation they needed to form. Tribalism, or faction as they called it, would tear apart a large, diverse nation. To bind it together, men who defined honor as putting the nation above faction were essential.
Neither the Founders nor the Victorians, creators of the Christian gentleman, killed the primitive conception of tribal honor. An outgrowth of human nature, it remains with us. Andrew Jackson lived and Alexander Hamilton died by it. The current president of the United States has built his entire public life upon a flamboyant adherence to it.
In the 2016 Republican presidential primary, Donald Trump loyalists chanted, “He fights!” This is honorable according to the ancient code. When the tribe is threatened, sacrificing personal power for abstract ideals is seen as not only foolish but dangerous. Gentlemanly adherence to principle is weakness, and weakness risks tribal defeat.
McCain, having internalized the Founders’ sense of honor, never agreed with this. To lead a party is to lead a faction. To fight for the party is to fight for a faction. This was an irreconcilable problem for him. He was never comfortable putting party or personal ambition above country. And it likely cost him the presidency.
It is debatable which was a greater impediment to McCain’s ambitions: his impulsiveness or his sense of honor. A case can be made for both, though on balance it would seem that his inconsistency as a partisan was the trait that tripped him up more often, and in the most critical moments.
At its best, his devotion to enlightened honor showed his gift for genuine statesmanship, as when he famously corrected the woman who called President Obama an Arab during a television town hall meeting. But from a modern political point of view, it proved a weakness.
McCain instinctively understood how a statesman was supposed to behave, but he never wore the duties of a factional leader with ease or understanding. He was suited for national leadership, not partisan combat. A fierce warrior for his country, he was uneasy being the same for his party.
Through tenacity and determination, rather than flattery and deceit, McCain at last won the leadership of his party on his own terms. As the Republican presidential nominee in 2008, he then lost the presidency to a man who spoke like a statesman but behaved like a bare-knuckled political brawler. Eight years later, McCain became the primary in-party opponent of an instinctive and passionate brawler who rejected the very concept of statesmanship.
Throughout his career, the culture of the country he loved so much shifted further from the ideals on which McCain modeled his life. He ended his career a party of one, a man of enlightened honor in an age that doesn’t recognize the term.
John McCain was a spirit from an earlier age stubbornly reminding us that something in the character of public men has been diminished as the Founders’ ideal of the honorable public servant fades with him into the mists of history.
Andrew Cline is president of the Josiah Bartlett Center for Public Policy, a free-market think tank in New Hampshire.
