The Perils of Being on the Wrong Side of History
What Philippe Pétain, Jefferson Davis & Lindsey Graham have in common.
In his latest piece in The Atlantic, “The Most Pathetic Men in America,” Mark Leibovich zeroes in on Donald Trump’s most slavish congressional enablers, Kevin McCarthy and Lindsey Graham. With his rapier-like pen, Leibovich describes Graham as a boy in his father’s small town saloon:
Short and pudgy, Lindsey was a tagalong figure who played the child mascot to the small-town characters who passed through the saloon. They nicknamed him “Stinkball.” He always gravitated to custodial, larger-than-life figures, or “alpha dogs,” as he called them.
We all knew Stinkballs like Graham growing up. They slunk around the school bullies like pilot fish, cravenly feeding their egos with false praise, hoping that in doing so they could bask in glimmers of reflected glory, and, at least as importantly, for self-preservation. Feed the beast others so as to save one’s own hide.
More noteworthy than their cravenness, however, is their rank, shameless hypocrisy. After all, before his meretricious conversion to golf course toady and Trump-whisperer, Graham had called Trump a “complete idiot,” “a xenophobic, race-baiting, religious bigot” whose ascendancy to the presidency “would be an utter, complete and total disaster.” Senator Stinkball later somehow changed his tune, praising the twice-impeached, disgraced failed president:
“He’s doing a really good job on multiple fronts.”
“I’ve determined we can’t grow without him.”
“You know what I liked about Trump? Everybody was afraid of him, including me.”
You can place Ted Cruz, Elise Stefanik, Marco Rubio and a host of other oleaginous politicians with quicksilver tongues alongside Graham and McCarthy.
Only two in the GOP congressional caucus have chosen to stand on the right side of history and, in doing so, have courageously made themselves political martyrs: Adam Kinzinger and Liz Cheney, who admonished her Vichy GOP colleagues: “There will come a day when Donald Trump is gone, but your dishonor will remain.”
History is replete with those who got on its wrong side. Pétain and Laval. Lord Haw-Haw and Tokyo Rose. Jeff Davis and Robert E. Lee. Ceausescu and Honecker. George Wallace and Bull Connor. Malan and Verwoerd. Caligula and Nero.
I find William Franklin particularly interesting. Son of Founding Father Benjamin Franklin, William remained staunchly loyal to the Crown, even organizing guerrilla warfare and espionage operations against the rebels. He was eventually taken captive and jailed for two years. Upon release, William settled in Britain where he was leader of the exiled Loyalist community there. Father and son never reconciled.
Of course, one side’s historical sin is another’s historical virtue. Up to a point.
Today’s most history-crossed Republicans are those who are enraptured with that charismatic exemplar of latter day czarism, Vladimir Putin. These include representatives Marjorie Taylor Greene, Matt Gaetz and Senator Rand Paul, among others. “Paleoconservative” Pat Buchanan described Putin as “one of us,” an ally in the apocalyptic struggle “against the militant secularism of a multicultural and transnational elite.” (N.B: add Pat Buchanan to the growing Wrong Side of History list.) Totally fine with Ukraine becoming a slave colony of Moscow, these GOP radicals see Putin as defender of patriarchal traditional Christian nationalism — or, to cut to the chase, white (male) supremacy.
But, you may ask, “Aren’t they worried about their legacy?”
Stinkball Graham confided to Mark Leibovich that the reason he chose to sell his soul to Trump (not his words; mine) was to “try to be relevant.”
Some Vichy Republicans reveal they either made their Faustian pact long ago, or never had a soul to begin with. “My attitude about my legacy is: Fuck it,” Rudy Giuliani told New York magazine’s Olivia Nuzzi. Along the same lines, yet with more erudition, former Attorney General (and Olympian pedant) William Barr mused in a CBS interview that “everyone dies. I don’t believe in the Homeric idea that immortality comes by, you know, having odes sung about you over the centuries.”
Me neither. But it sure beats the scorn generations of historians will heap on you for aiding and abetting a seditionist crime-boss president.
What Rudy, Kevin, Rand, Perjury (Marjorie), Stinkball, et al. hold in common is that, in cowering before and enabling Trump, they have chosen the comfort of opportunism over the risks of moral principle. “Relevancy” vs Integrity.
Equally as morally squalid as the collaborationist-political wing of the GOP are the propaganda shills of Trumpism: Fox, Breitbart, OAN, Newsmax, etc. Tucker Carlson, of course, wins the Joseph Goebbels Prize for Excellence in Bombastic Mendacity.
I place these media manure spreaders into three categories: 1) true believing falangists; 2) the mentally deranged; and 3) media whores who actually know better.
In the first batch, we see Lou Dobbs, Laura Ingraham, Alex Jones. In the second lurks Lara Logan, whose sorry plunge from hallowed “60 Minutes” correspondent to crazed fringe conspiracy theorist (which was even too much for Fox, who dumped her) began after the psychological trauma she suffered from her sexual assault in Tahrir Square. And then there are her Afrikaner roots. The third category breeds the most denizens of rank hypocrisy: those who form a long line before Beelzebub’s counter eager to pawn their souls in return for riches and fame. These folks, the Tucker Carlson’s, Maria Bartiromo’s, the Fox & Friends puppetry, share with their Ivy-educated GOP politician counterparts the fact that they certainly know better — e.g., that the Big Lie is indeed a lie, that Obama is U.S.-born, etc., but abase themselves before Trump for their 15 minutes of warped fame. Hannity, in my view, straddles categories 1 and 3. A lowly educated dimwit, he largely believes the claptrap he spews daily. On the other hand, his frantic messages to Mark Meadows during the GOP J6 Putsch to get Trump to call off the assault on the Capitol reveal a scintilla of sanity in the man.
So… let us take stock of the perils of aligning oneself on the wrong side of history. The examples are so plentiful that I’ll examine a particularly apt parallel with today’s Trump-collaborationist GOP: Vichy France.
Philippe Pétain, Head of State: sentenced to death by firing squad, later commuted to life imprisonment. He died at 95 in confinement on a small island off the French coast.
Pierre Laval, Prime Minister: convicted of treason and executed by firing squad.
Philippe Henriot: Secretary of State for Information and Propaganda. Assassinated by the Résistance in 1944.
Pierre Pucheu: Minister of Interior. He personally selected 89 fellow citizens for execution in reprisal for attacks on German officers. Executed by firing squad in 1944.
Lucien Rebatet: writer, journalist, and intellectual who was an exponent of fascism and antisemitism and was a leading media figure for the Vichy regime. His death sentence was commuted to six years of hard labor.
Henri-Robert Petit: Vichy propagandist and chief editor of the collaborationist newspaper Le Pilori. Having lived on the lam for years, he was amnestied in 1959, and lived out his remaining years as a disgraced and obscure right-wing agitator.
Abel Bonnard: writer and politician, member of the committee of the Groupe Collaboration to promote closer cultural ties between France and the Third Reich. Bonnard, expelled from the Académie française after World War II, lived in disgrace in exile.
Let me go on the record that I deplore firing squads. It’s no way to deliver justice, second amendment notwithstanding. In fact, eternal ignominy and shame and destruction of one’s reputation constitute better punishment than any prison sentence or execution. And I am convinced that such fate will befall Trump’s amoral, conscience-free enablers.
And that begs the question: if, intellectually and in their hearts, Josh Hawley, Ted Cruz, Elise Stefanik, Lindsey Graham, Marco Rubio, J. D. Vance and all but a few dead-enders of the 147 members of Congress who cynically voted not to certify the 2020 election know what they are doing is wrong, if not evil, why do they do it? One can imagine that, like their equally delusional Vichy French spiritual forebears, they have convinced themselves that the malicious enterprise they inhabit and promote is here forever; that either history is indeed on their side, or, in the words of that fallen angel, Rudy G., “My attitude about my legacy is: Fuck it.” But history won’t accept it. Their great-great grandchildren will be reading about them in their school texts as members of the Sedition Caucus who came close to destroying the American Experiment. Enemies of democracy. After the war, the French government stripped nearly 50,000 collaborators of their political, civil and professional rights in a process called, dégradation nationale, a stain that forever is attached to their names.
That great firebrand of the American Revolution, Thomas Paine, held no mercy for such people when he wrote of Loyalists to the British Crown (“Tories”), “Every Tory is a coward; for servile, slavish, self-interested fear is the foundation of Toryism; and a man under such influence, though he may be cruel, never can be brave.”