McCain's Strong Condemnation of White Nationalism

From Esquire

John McCain has faced a journey of his own in the Age of Trump. It began in 2015, when candidate Donald Trump mocked McCain's military service in Vietnam. That was a period that saw McCain serve multiple years, enduring torture, as a prisoner of war while Trump faced his "personal Vietnam" trying to avoid sexually transmitted diseases in 1970s New York. More recently, in July, McCain was diagnosed with an aggressive form of brain cancer, and has been undergoing treatment ever since. But, based on a speech McCain gave Monday on being honored with the Liberty Medal by the National Constitution Center, it seems that what happened in between affected the Arizona senator most deeply.

In stirring remarks after he was introduced by former Vice President Joe Biden, McCain made thinly veiled reference to the politics of the Trumpian far right - and went on the attack. He decried the rise of "half-baked, spurious nationalism," and the drive among some to see the United States abandon its role as a leader on the world stage. He seemed to characterize both sides of the Trump appeal as fundamentally unpatriotic.

Now, there are more questions about American leadership, and America's adherence to its own values, than McCain is willing to confront. "We are the custodians of those ideals at home, and their champion abroad," he said. But the citizens of Nicaragua or Laos or Cambodia might ask which ideals we were championing when we intervened within their borders through the years. The Yemenis might ask now. And many citizens of color, women, and LGBT citizens here at home would question whether we have done enough to champion them here. The Republican Party of which McCain has been a defining part in the modern era (voting the party line the vast majority of the time) has flirted for decades with the forces of xenophobia and ethnonationalism that fueled Trump's rise. The Dear Leader did not appear from the ether, and he does not exist in a vacuum. After all, his brand of politics still enjoys the support of 79 percent of Republican voters.

Still, McCain's unequivocal rejection of the rhetoric of "blood and soil" was refreshing in an age of spineless equivocation and outright lies. That slogan was one of the calling cards of the white supremacists who came to gather, armed, in Charlottesville this summer - an event that saw one white supremacist murder an anti-racist protester with his car. McCain hinted at something that stirred up so much anger among Americans watching those scenes: that our fathers and grandfathers did not travel across the world to fight the Nazis just so they could appear here at home among some entitled, "disaffected" little white men.

The United States is not a nation for any one race or ethnicity. In fact, that's a completely incoherent claim considering the melting pot - even among different European backgrounds - that the country has always been. It is a nation for anyone willing to come here, work hard, and live by the principles laid out in its founding documents.

Beyond that, McCain remains a ceaseless advocate for American moral leadership in the world. While we have not always lived up to that mantle, it must be our identity as a nation to constantly strive to do so. While McCain has never come to grips with the ugly side of American Empire, his call for American participation in an increasingly interconnected world is not just a moral call-to-arms, but an acknowledgement that there is no withdrawing from a globalized world. Hopefully, our future interventions will involve fewer bombs. The only choice for a moral nation as rich and powerful as the United States is to forge a path that makes the lives of citizens at home, and other human beings abroad, better. Otherwise, we won't be the first empire to fall.

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