In yesterday’s Wall Street Journal, Bret Stephens
identifies John McCain as the presidential
candidate of “American honor” and says that that is the reason why,
at least within the Republican Party, he is winning this time in
spite of having lost last time, in 2000:
Last time, he ran and lost as an anti-establishment,
“moderate” Republican. This time, although he continues to depend
heavily on the votes of independents, his fundamental appeal is to
American honor, which is also the trait he uniquely embodies among
the GOP contenders. He seeks to turn his personal code of honor —
the “No Surrender” slogan — into a national code. He rails against
a news media that only begrudgingly recognizes American military
gains, repeatedly citing as Exhibit A Time magazine’s
refusal to name Gen. David Petraeus as its Person of the Year for
2007. Above all, he not only warns against the policy consequences
of a failure in Iraq, but also stands against a philosophy, or
psychology, that seeks to make a virtue of failure.
I don’t disagree with this in general, but I’m not so sure about
that word “uniquely.” All the Republicans in the race except for
Ron Paul are in favor of victory, so far as I am aware, though it
is true that Senator McCain’s personal history gives him a unique
standing to identify himself and his candidacy with that word, as
well as with honor. But there are other parts of his record that
bring him closer to the news media and (not, of course,
coincidentally) the Democratic Party’s presidential candidates in
his understanding of honor. For such people, as Mr. Stephens says,
“if it means anything at all to them, it seems to be mainly in the
sense of the good opinion of America’s traditional friends, many of
whom opposed the Iraq venture from the start.”
As an example, I would mention the countenance and the
credibility that the senator’s animadversions on “torture” by the
Bush administration give to America’s enemies, for whom the t-word
is an invaluable propaganda tool. An essential element of honor has
always been loyalty, and loyalty has never been Senator McCain’s
strongest suit. Rather, he has always been proud of being a
“maverick” — a man who likes to be thought of as one whose friends
and comrades are less important to him than his own exquisite
conscience. To be sure, we also honor those whose independence of
mind makes them less than reliable party men — if we didn’t, there
would be no reason for the senator to make such a point of
demonstrating such independence — but it is the honor of the
senator rather than his country which is thus enhanced.
Moreover, the media and popular culture routinely exaggerate the
extent to which the “whistle-blower” mentality may be expected to
trump the honorable one in public life. As a result, Senator McCain
has made quite a habit of appealing to higher considerations than
mere party, and on every such occasion he has thereby characterized
his fellow Republicans as, to say the least, less morally sensitive
and clued-in than his good self. Such moral preening and posturing
has doubtless played a big part in making him so popular among
Democrats and Independents and therefore in making him the
front-runner for the nomination at the time of writing. It’s his
form of “triangulation,” just as “compassionate conservatism” was
President Bush’s in 2000.
Fair enough. A politician, like a soldier, has presumably got to
do what he’s got to do in order to win. But it also suggests that
“honor,” in Senator McCain’s conception of it, is rather more
flexible and convenient for his own purposes than I would find
quite comfortable. Moreover, in the case of “torture,” he is
setting himself up as morally superior to and entitled to judge not
just a bunch of Republican Party hacks, not just the unpopular Bush
administration, but also the security forces of his country, to
whose honor such victories as are won in America’s War on Terror
will have principally to be credited.
Everyone in those security forces understands that there is a
line to be drawn between what is and what is not morally
permissible in defending their country from further terrorist
attacks, and that there are few easy calls about what falls on one
side or the other of that line. But the media and Senator McCain do
an immense favor to their country’s enemies by suggesting, through
their use of the word “torture,” that the calls are easy
and that we — “we” in the sense of our side in this long war —
have made them wrongly. There’s no reason not to admire Senator
McCain for caring so much about the honor of Senator McCain, but we
should also recognize that this is not always identical with the
honor of his country.
