Don’t Care About the Comment Section. RIP, John McCain.

One would be forgiven for assuming I hate John McCain.

Hell, that’s an understatement… one would be forgiven for thinking I might even have some appreciation for his death today. Plenty in my circle seem to.

One would be wrong, but they’d be forgiven all the same.

If the Senate is a spectrum, a range of beliefs within what is possible to express while still being elected to the “world’s most deliberative body” (it’s not), then you would think my estimation of Rand Paul as America’s greatest Senator on one side would be countered by McCain’s tie (with Lindsey Graham) of the Republican’s worst Senator on the other. He’s the neoconservative’s neoconservative while I’m a non-interventionist. He was one of the longest serving members of the Senate, while I believe that as a general rule the longer someone serves in government, the worse of a human being they tend to become.

But the kind of glee that some of my political allies seem to have been experiencing over an old man dying of cancer has absolutely turned my stomach. Apparently, the kind of compassion that motivates many in the anti-war movement is reserved for those seen as innocent, or at least not those seen as guilty. At least if they ain’t foreign.

However…

I supported McCain in the 2008 primary, actively. I’ve read every one of his books (and, although short… that’s still something like half a dozen). Hell, I once had a John McCain fuckin’ calendar on my wall (please forgive me).

This wasn’t meaningless, or before the start of my conversion away from big R values that I once allowed Rush to fill my head with daily. In fact, John McCain, as unbelievable as it may seem, helped me reach my libertarian beliefs.

From the eyes of many libertarians, including me, it seems as though McCain had never met a war that didn’t make him swoon, and he wasn’t all that libertarian on domestic economics either. This is the man who once sang about bombing Iran on the campaign trail, who… near as I can tell, didn’t start believing Iraq was a mistake for a decade and a half despite all the evidence to the contrary. He supported funding several foreign groups that represented America’s enemies, including ones the American military was actively fighting.

But this wasn’t the McCain that I knew, or at least this wasn’t the whole story.

In 2008, there were only two Republicans running for President who were opposed to Guantanamo Bay. Only two. There was McCain, who was a prisoner of war himself and understood incarceration mixed with deplorable conditions divorced from the Geneva Conventions from an empathetic standpoint, and there was (obviously) Ron Paul. To 2008-era me, Ron Paul seemed far too extreme. But McCain?

McCain did plenty to convince me that there were plenty of excesses in the war on terror that nobody, from the shaggiest hippy to the most manly, bearded, flag wrapped Republican, should ever accept as anything other than a moral travesty. What line is placed on that could be up for debate, but torture never should be, nor did McCain ever pretend it was negotiable.

Reading about his experiences of torture in Vietnam helped force me to see what Bush forced the law to call “enemy combatants” as what they were… people never convicted of a crime who were being punished regardless based on nothing other than the government’s word for years. People treated without the protections of prisoners of war because… well… the war on terror may not be a war, but those who argue against their rights seem to simultaneously argue it is one.

He stood up, even to his own party, when he believed he was right (even the times that he was utterly wrong), because he believed it was for the best. To this day, nobody has been able to convince me that McCain was motivated by donations from the military industrial complex, a hatred of citizens of foreign nations or a crusade against non-Christian religions. Hell, during the cold war he may have hated the commies, but in my book that’s a positive. No, I think he was motivated by a morality that was wrong about how even if it was right about why.

Now, this only rides so far. There are innocent people overseas, who are dead because of the decisions of politicians like McCain. Him believing that the ends would justify the means and that the world would be a better place with a more aggressive American foreign policy does not bring them back or excuse their deaths. As Milton Friedman said,

“Concentrated power is not rendered harmless by the good intentions of those who create it.”

and

“One of the great mistakes is to judge policies and programs by their intentions rather than their results.”

However, we’re not talking about judging policies, but judging a man who promoted them.

I believe there are those on the left who sincerely believe they are advocating what’s best for the poorest among us, whether or not their policies would expand rather than alleviate poverty. There are those on the right who love their country enough to do everything they can protect it from the threats they perceive, even if they’ve never heard of blow-back or immigration statistics in context. And among those who are so sincere in these types of benevolent beliefs that they put it all on the line for what they believe would best serve others?

Especially enduring savagery like torture without breaking in defense of what you see as western values or refusing to fall in line completely with whatever your party leadership commands?

Well, they are deserving of a certain type of respect, even during the times that we who disagree with their solutions and fight against the negative consequences of their well-meaning policies. They are good faith actors, and their contributions aren’t meaningless. We can work with them in good faith, without worrying about which selfish motivations are fueling their error, and trust that what’s necessary to convince them they’re wrong isn’t appealing to their self-interest, but the interest of humanity as they see it.

John McCain was wrong about nearly everything, yet in some ways… we need more Senators like him.

RIP, and may the courageous, principled politicians of the future agree with my policy prescriptions rather than merely meaning well.