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It is an extraordinary thing to watch specific moral values being celebrated at the same moment that they are being defiled. Often by the same people.
The world’s media has, in recent days, been filled with tributes to the life of John McCain. Aside from his exceptional bravery as a captive in Vietnam, the main quality that these tributes focused on was McCain’s willingness, later in his life, to transcend political boundaries. It was not simply that McCain was willing to work with, befriend and advise Democrats as well as Republicans in the Oval office. Nor was it just the fact that on issues including campaign-finance reform, he was willing to push bipartisan legislation. Or that in 2008 he even suggested that Joe Lieberman (still a registered Democrat at the time) might be his running mate in his Republican campaign for the Presidency.
It was not the specifics that commentators and politicians noted, so much as the remarkable general attitude. It’s a frame of mind that is diminishing in American political life, just as it is retreating from political life in Britain and other major democracies.
When he was a Senator, McCain always held the view that reaching across the political aisle was a natural thing to do; he believed that what unites people elected to political life is greater than anything that can divide them. He saw political differences as just that – differences of politics but not differences in allegiance to the wellbeing of the nation.
Of course, it is easy to speak well of the dead. Any challenge they once posed is diminished, if not completely erased. And so it is interesting to observe such celebration of bipartisanship in the dead, when it’s the last thing to be lauded among the living.
During the week in which the world honoured John McCain, one of the very few figures in British politics who could be said to embody remotely similar ideals to those of the late Senator resigned from his party. In Britain, barely anyone has a career-long reputation for reaching across the political divide between Labour and Conservative. As in America, most people bemoan the lack of cross-party cooperation – but do little in practice to alter the reality. Not so the former Labour MP Frank Field. During his decades in Parliament, Field has been unusually morally consistent.
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