Lindsey Graham, Republican senator for South Carolina since 2003, died suddenly on Sunday (Saturday evening in the United States) at the age of 71. He is worth an obituary, not for his importance as an individual but as a representative of what has happened to the Republican Party over the last three decades.
Graham first entered politics in 1992, serving one term in the state legislature and four terms in the House of Representatives before moving to the Senate. In Australia such longevity in office is relatively unusual – by my count, only five of our 76 senators have reached Graham’s age – but the US is much more sclerotic; Graham was only a few years above the median age, which has hovered in the mid-60s for the last few terms.
His entry into Congress coincided with a major shift in the American south, in which the last pillars of the old Democrat ascendancy in the region tumbled – a process that had begun with the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The Republicans won a majority in the House for the first time since 1952; Graham won a district that had not elected a Republican since 1874. The Republican Party became a more southern-based outfit, with a harder, more conservative edge.
Although Graham held conservative policy positions in such areas as national security, immigration, foreign policy and abortion, he did not present as a hardliner; he maintained good relations with those on the other side of the aisle and cultivated his reputation as an independent thinker and deal-maker. Alongside his friend and colleague John McCain he seemed to value the collegiality of the Senate, where those from different parties could sometimes co-operate to get things done.
It was primarily that willingness to work with Democrats, rather than any policy difference, that earned him the enmity of the Tea Party, the nativist rank-and-file Republican movement that emerged after Barack Obama’s victory in 2008. That put Graham, in a relative sort of way, on the left of his party, and it was on that basis that he briefly sought the presidential nomination for 2016 and attacked the eventual nominee, Donald Trump, calling him a “a race-baiting, xenophobic, religious bigot.”
But while Graham went further than most Republicans, refusing to endorse Trump or even to vote for him, like McCain he could not bring himself to endorse the only person actually in the field against him, Hillary Clinton. And once Trump won, the picture – from Graham’s point of view – changed completely. It became clear that when he had said “If we nominate Trump, we will get destroyed,” it was only electoral and not moral destruction that he was concerned about.
Graham became a vocal Trump partisan, and remained one until the end. He gave credence to Trump’s outlandish claims of fraud in the 2020 election (although he eventually conceded that Joe Biden had won), voted against both impeachments and was one of Trump’s early backers for the 2024 election. His reversal was so blatant and so comprehensive that it stunned even some of the most cynical Washington observers.
Among Trump’s signature policies, the only one Graham seemed unable to embrace was his support for Vladimir Putin: Graham remained a strong advocate of military aid for Ukraine and participation in NATO. Like many other Trump supporters, he rationalised this by simply denying, in the teeth of the evidence, that Trump disagreed with him. And it’s hard to see him as motivated by any principled resistance to aggression, since he also remained a fervent supporter of Benjamin Netanyahu and war against Iran.
Graham may only merit a footnote in history, but it will not be a flattering one. Although his apostasy was more bare-faced than most, it differed only in degree from that of the majority of his party. Most of them loathed Trump from the start, and in their private thoughts they probably still do, but conscience, decency and principle mean so little to them that they were easy prey to his confidence, his bluster and his meagre electoral success.
And the aggregate of the personal failings of Graham and others has been an institutional moral collapse that now imperils the world.
The World is Not Enough 