Political lives almost always end in failure, or at least anticlimax, but Lindsey Graham went to his reward while in the midst of achieving his goals. Indeed, even the timing of his death might advance one of the causes dearest to him. He had just returned from a visit to Kyiv and his fellow advocates of greater US involvement in the Russia-Ukraine war have questioned whether he might not have been murdered by Vladimir Putin. The evidence is against that but the South Carolina senator certainly had deadly enemies: he was high on Iran’s hit-list as well. For decades, he’d called for the use of force against the ayatollahs’ regime and he lived to see that call answered.
The Republican aviary still has many other hawks. But can any take Graham’s place?
Graham might also be fortunate in not having to see what happens next. Americans have not been pleased with the way their wars have ended for most of the past 80 years. After World War Two, only the 1991 Persian Gulf War felt like a clean win – yet even that was tarnished by the illnesses afflicting our troops afterward and the bitter experience of the second war with Iraq that dragged on for a decade. President Trump is conducting the Iran War very differently from the ground wars of the two Bushes, but Tehran is so far not interested in giving peace a chance. Senator Graham would happily accept that. His eagerness for a fight wasn’t in the least diminished by the outcomes of the long wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The same couldn’t be said about the morale of the American people or the Republican party.
When John McCain died in 2018, Graham was ready to take his place as the GOP’s foremost advocate for foreign intervention. And if he was less distinguished than the former prisoner of war, Graham was a more politically effective advocate. Like McCain, he had been a NeverTrumper. But while McCain’s stubbornness rankled Trump to the very end – and beyond, with Trump continuing to lambaste the Arizona Republican after his death – Graham learned to ingratiate himself with the President and win his trust. He wasn’t the only hawk to do so but he appeared to be the most successful. Graham earned himself the obloquy of much of the Washington establishment, including former friends, for cultivating Trump in this way. But his strategy paid off for the foreign-policy causes he cared about most.
The Republican aviary still has many other hawks. But can any take Graham’s place, the way he took – and even surpassed – McCain’s? Another South Carolinian, Nikki Haley, might be eager to take Graham’s place in the party as well as in the Senate. Yet there’s little chance Governor Henry McMaster will appoint her to fill the few months remaining on Graham’s term or that the state’s voters will nominate her to take Graham’s place on the November ballot. Her relationship with Trump is also more like McCain’s than Graham’s. Her 24-year-old son Nalin Haley, meanwhile, has drawn attention for being representative of his generation’s changing right-wing views, including on immigration and foreign policy. There may be another Graham among his fellow Baby Boomers but his internationalist priorities are less common among younger Republicans.
Yet Senator Graham’s example contains lessons even for those who want a less interventionist foreign policy. Graham was certainly a product of his time – the Cold War, the living memory of World War Two, and an era of Middle East upheavals with global consequences. He was also a product of his place, however. South Carolina has a tradition of pugnacity hundreds of years old. The state was the first to attempt secession after the election of Abraham Lincoln and fired the first shots of the Civil War. A South Carolina congressman, Preston Brooks, nearly caned Massachusetts senator Charles Sumner to death on the floor of the US Senate in 1856 in retaliation for what Brooks took to be racially and sexually charged insults directed at his kinsman, South Carolina senator Andrew Butler. (Civility, it turns out, has often been in short supply in Washington.)
Although Americans are taught to think about South Carolina’s violent past only in light of slavery, the state very nearly seceded and went to war with the federal government in 1832 over high tariffs. Slavery also wasn’t the driving force in 1812, when the young South Carolina senator John C. Calhoun was one of the most ardent supporters of going to war with Britain and invading Canada. When Calhoun opposed the Mexican War in the 1840s, he was out of step with his state’s popular sentiment, which was strongly in favor of the fight. Lindsey Graham, on the other hand, would have fit right in.
America’s states and regions have characteristics, even personalities, that run deeper than any ideology. At the end of the 20th-century, there was an ideological divide on the right between “neoconservatives,” who favored a high degree of foreign interventionism, and “paleoconservatives,” such as Pat Buchanan, who opposed foreign wars. The paleoconservatives also, however, tended to praise the South as a bastion of traditional conservatism, while the neoconservatives were notable for thinking of the South in much the same terms as liberals: that is, as a fundamentally racist and incipiently fascist region that could only be redeemed by the cultural equivalent of the kind of nation-building a liberal America would attempt in the Middle East and Afghanistan.
Senator Graham was a confusing character in this ideological context. Shouldn’t a state like South Carolina be electing Buchananites? Why was the South a breeding ground of conventionally hawkish Republicans – who usually favored free trade, another policy opposed by paleocons, as well? Graham’s critics on the right were convinced he was gay, yet rumors about his sex life never seemed to harm him in the GOP primaries. He was defined by his hawkishness and that’s what voters again and again accepted.
There is no mystery here, only an excess of ideological self-deception. South Carolina is certainly a conservative state, but it’s also a traditionally hawkish state, and that disposition persists through different ideological contexts. There’s no contradiction between being quick to take up arms for slavery and being quick to take up arms against foreign tyrannies – the habit is consistent whether or not the ideas are. And while this doesn’t mean South Carolina’s politics are defined entirely by the fighting disposition, or that every politician exemplifies it, or that certain circumstances might not override this reflex at times, it does mean that one should expect South Carolina to give rise to politicians who aren’t shy about employing force.
Progressives, as is their way, tend to reduce this phenomenon to an effect of slavery. With brief fluctuations, South Carolina had a slave majority from early 18th-century colonial times until the Civil War and – so the theory goes – South Carolina whites had to be ready to use military force to put down any potential slave rebellion.
That’s true as far as it goes but there is more to the story, too. The Carolina Province – originally consisting of North and South Carolina together – was set up by King Charles II in part as a military outpost to stop the Spanish from moving north from Florida toward Britain’s already-established colonies. The Carolina Province was not unique among British colonies in having to be ready for war with Indians as well as rival European colonial powers, of course. But the population center of the province, Charles Town (now Charleston, South Carolina) was remote and not easily accessible from the other colonies: it was, in strategic terms, an island surrounded by enemies.
The area was settled by islanders, too. Although the province attracted settlers from Britain and Virginia, it early on was influenced by a significant population from Bermuda and subsequently an influx from Barbados. The “Barbardian adventurers” brought with them slaves in numbers characteristic of the sugar islands of the Caribbean, which is what set the young province down the demographic path to its slave majority. The Barbadians brought their Caribbean slave codes with them, too. Meanwhile, pirates menaced Charles Town much as they did the islands of the Caribbean.
South Carolinians have long experience with being outnumbered and in existential danger
Thomas Jefferson was ashamed of slavery but Virginia always had a free majority and so the social contract theory of John Locke and the Declaration of Independence posed no problem in principle: if all men were created equal and a majority of equal men was sufficient to institute a political order, Virginia, as well as New England and the middle colonies, could follow the philosophical rules Locke had set out and a political order not entirely unlike the one Virginians already knew would be the result. But if one tried to imagine that same procedure in a state where the majority was enslaved, the outcome would be profoundly different. South Carolinians could accept the Declaration of Independence in the context of the thirteen colonies, with their free majority in the aggregate, but could they conceive of such a social contract in their own homeland? Likewise, South Carolina was quick to adopt the United States Constitution but what would happen if the balance between slave states and free states started to shift in favor of the free?
South Carolinians have long experience with being outnumbered and in existential danger – from enemies on their borders and on the seas in colonial times; from a majority in chains at home; and ultimately from other states in the Union with different origins and a different view of the social contract. Charleston was a rich city that feared being plundered by everyone and when federal tariffs restricted the trade on which the city thrived, the fighting spirit and long sense of existing apart led South Carolina toward its first dreams of secession. The state’s defeat after its second venture in the Civil War only heightened the feelings of separation and existential peril.
Those feelings, of course, are not only felt by South Carolinians. They’re also the feelings that a young Norman Podhoretz experienced growing up as a Jewish kid in a rough New York neighborhood; the feelings he expressed in “My Nego Problem – and Ours.” Jews have often been in situations where this was a natural way to feel and this arguably applies to the state of Israel itself, surrounded as it is by more numerous nations of people with incompatible beliefs and often violently hostile dispositions. It’s no wonder if Lindsey Graham made Israel’s cause his own – Israel and South Carolina have had some parallel formations. And if Graham was indeed gay, isolation and peril, the need to meet threats with force might have a personal dimension as well as a civic one. The nexus of neoconservatism, Southern politics, and perhaps Republican homosexuality has a logic, with consequences for domestic political coalitions and foreign policy alike.
There will be other Lindsey Grahams because the historical experience that makes the warlike South Carolinian an enduring type is not going to vanish any more easily than, say, the tribal culture of Afghanistan. America’s hawks and doves alike have to reckon with the persistence of historically-rooted regional and group personalities. Failure to do so only leads to ideological confusion, political frustration and perhaps endless wars that never make Americans feel like victors.
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