John McCain‘s funeral exposed the cynicism of Anti-Trumpism.
So now we know what ‘the resistance’ really is. It’s the establishment.
It’s the old political order. It’s that late 20th-century political set, those
out-of-touch managerial elites, who still cannot believe the electorate
rejected them. That is the take-home message of the bizarre political spectacle
that was the burial of John McCain, where this neocon in life has been
transformed into a resistance leader in death: that while the anti-Trump
movement might doll itself up as rebellious, and even borrow its name from
those who resisted fascism in Europe in the mid 20th-century, in truth it is
primarily about restoring the apparently cool, expert-driven rule of the old
elites over what is viewed as the chaos of the populist Trump / Brexit era.
The response to McCain’s death
has bordered on the surreal. The strangest aspect has been the self-conscious
rebranding of McCain as a searing rebel. In death, this key establishment
figure in the Republican Party, this military officer, senator, presidential
candidate and enthusiastic backer of the exercise of US military power
overseas, has been reimagined as a plucky battler for all that is good against
a wicked, overbearing political machine. ‘John McCain’s funeral was the biggest
resistance meeting yet’, said a headline in the New Yorker,
alongside a photo of George W Bush, Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton, Al Gore, and
soldiers from the US Army, the most powerful military machine on Earth. This is
‘the resistance’ now: the former holders of extraordinary power, the invaders
of foreign nations, the Washington establishment.
The New Yorker piece,
like so much of the McCain commentary, praises to the heavens the anti-Trump
theme of McCain’s funeral. McCain famously said Trump couldn’t attend his
funeral. And that in itself was enough to win him the posthumous love of a
liberal commentariat that now views everything through the binary moral
framework of pro-Trump (evil, ill-informed, occasionally fascistic) and
anti-Trump (decent, moral, on a par with the warriors against Nazism). Even
better, though, was the fact that orators at the funeral, including McCain’s
daughter Meghan and both Bush and Obama, used the church service to slam
Trumpism, without explicitly mentioning it, and in the process to big-up what
came beforeTrumpism, which of course was their rule, their
politics, their establishment. The Washington political and media set might
seem bitterly bipartisan, said the New Yorker writer, but it
is also ‘more united’ in one important sense – ‘in its hatred of Donald Trump’.
Hatred of Trump has become the
moral glue of the bruised elites who have been either pushed aside or at least
dramatically called into question by the populist surge taking hold in the
West. And so motored are these people by the shallow moralism of Anti-Trumpism
that they are happy to marshal even a life as complex and interesting and
flawed as McCain’s to the service of hurting Trump. A former Al Gore adviser,
Carter Eskew, wrote in the Washington Post: ‘In death, John McCain
is about to exact revenge on Donald Trump.’ Unwittingly revealing the Old
Testament streak to the new elite religion of Hating Trump, Eskew said that as
‘McCain ascends to heaven on an updraft of praise, Trump’s political hell on
Earth will burn hotter’. On why it suddenly started to rain when McCain’s
coffin was brought into the Capitol, a CNN journalist said: ‘The angels were
crying.’ What century is this?
The religious allusions, the talk
of vengeance against Trump, the misremembering of McCain’s life so that it
becomes a moral exemplar against the alleged crimes of Trumpism, exposes the
infantile moralism of the so-called resistance. Albert Burneko, assessing some
of the madder McCain commentary, says there is now a ‘condition’ that he calls
‘Resistance Brain’, where people display an ‘urge to grab and cling on to
anything that seems, even a little bit, like it might be the thing that Finally
Defeats Donald Trump’. Even if the thing they’re grabbing on to is actually a
bad thing. Like a seemingly endless FBI investigation into the elected
presidency. Or George W Bush, whose moral rehabilitation on the back of
Anti-Trumpism has been extraordinary. Or neoconservatism: this was the scourge
of liberal activists a decade ago, yet now its architects are praised because
they subscribe to the religion of Anti-Trumpism. Being against Trump washes
away all sins.
Some on the left have criticised
the moral rehabilitation of McCain. ‘Let’s not forget that he wanted war with
Iran and lots of other places too!’, they cry. Yet the truth is they paved the
way for his posthumous rebranding as one of the great Americans of the late
20th century. Since 2016 they have talked about Trump as a uniquely wicked
president, a shocking aberration, the closest thing to Hitler since the 1930s.
Their anti-Trump hyperbole, driven by their own political disorientation and
increasing sense of distance from the electorate, has allowed any politician
who is not Trump to mend their reputations and gloss over their own destructive
behaviour. The transformation of Trump into the bête noire of
all right-minded people, a pillar of unrivalled wickedness that we all have a
duty to protest against in our pussy hats and orange wigs, has been a boon to
the wounded pre-Trump political class keen both to whitewash its own crimes and
to prepare for its return to the position of power it enjoyed before the
electorate was corrupted by ‘post-truth’ hysteria.
‘The resistance’ is the fightback of the establishment against the
people. As it is in Britain, too, where the rich and influential people
fuelling the war on Brexit – the largest act of democracy in British history –
like to refer to themselves as ‘insurgents’. It is the height of Orwellianism
for these acts of elitist reaction against democratic dissent to dress
themselves up as forms of resistance. But it is not surprising. From the
get-go, the so-called resistance has been more a pining for the old
establishment, for Hillary’s rule and for the continued domination of Britain
by the EU, than it has been any kind of daring strike for a new politics. Look
closely at the funereal elitism of McCain’s burial and you will see one of the
saddest and most striking political developments of our time: how self-styled radicals
preferred to throw their lot in with the old establishment under the umbrella
of ‘the resistance’ rather than heed ordinary people who were saying: ‘Let’s
tear up the old order.’
Brendan O’Neill is
editor of spiked. Find him on Instagram: @burntoakboy
