|
Lindsey Graham and the rot of modern conservatism
From Gingrich to Trump, Graham was a fixture as the GOP became increasingly malignant.
|
| |||||||||||||||
 |
This edition of PN is made possible by paid subscribers. Become one ⬇️
The sudden death this weekend of Lindsey Graham at age 71 — young, by today’s gerontocratic standards — is a personal parable for the changes within the conservative movement and modern Republican Party during Graham’s political career.
Indeed, few national elected officials so perfectly bridge the rapid rise of the Newt Gingrich-led GOP to the steady gutting of American conservatism by Donald Trump over the past decade.
Graham is not the sole member of that bridge generation; the career of fellow Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley, for example, spans back further, to the days when Barry Goldwater remained conservatism’s intellectual beacon. But Graham perfectly embodies the post-1990s morphing of conservatism into the malignant force that, today, animates Eric Hoffer’s famous observation that every great cause “begins as a movement, becomes as business, and eventually degenerates into a racket.”
Southern prosecutor stands out
Fittingly, Graham was first elected to the House in the 1994 “Republican Revolution” cycle.
The 73 Republican freshmen whom Gingrich helped recruit, fund, and train included a number of ambitious members. Some, like Mark Foley and Mark Sanford, later disgraced themselves via sex scandals; Joe Scarborough, the future talk show host and Trump critic, later built a career as a crossover moderate and party defector.
“They came in with such high ambition and on such a self-proclaimed moral high ground. Especially for guys who professed that they were setting a higher standard, they failed at the benchmark they set for themselves,” wrote Linda Killian, author of the definite book on the 1994 GOP class, “The Freshmen: What Happened to the Republican Revolution?”
To answer the rhetorical question posed by Killian’s book subtitle, Lindsey Graham is what happened.
 |
|
Four years after his arrival in Washington, Graham got a rare, early-career opportunity to separate himself from that famed “revolutionary” class: He was appointed to serve as one of 13 House managers for Bill Clinton’s impeachment. A graduate of University of South Carolina’s law school, Graham argued that Clinton’s “process” crimes — perjury, obstruction of justice — rose to the Constitution’s “high crimes and misdemeanors” standard for impeachment, which he and the other dozen GOP House impeachment managers recommended to the full chamber.
Like future Supreme Court justice Brett Kavanaugh and media firebrand Ann Coulter, Graham quickly realized that Gingrich’s slash-and-burn attack style rewarded those willing to destroy opponents. An entire generation of Republicans, including Darrell Issa, Jim Jordan and James Comer, later emerged as aggressive avatars of the same approach to political power and attention that Graham, Gingrich, and their mid-’90s cohorts introduced.
Some paid a price for their aggressions. One of only two Republican impeachment managers more junior than Graham, California’s James Rogan, first elected in 1996, lost his seat in 2000 to none other than Adam Schiff. Most notably, after his impeachment crusade and his unforced policy errors on Medicare backfired on him, Speaker Gingrich resigned in failure after just four years leading the House.