The perfect conservative

OBITUARY: Lindsey Graham (1955-2026)

On July 29th, 2015, when Ipsos released its latest figures on the upcoming Republican primary, the world seemed to have turned upside down. Two weeks prior at a speech in Iowa, Donald Trump had savaged the Arizona Senator John McCain, a darling of the Republican Party establishment who, amongst the Washington press pack, enjoyed the reputation of a war hero. ‘He was a war hero because he was captured,’ said the president in spē, ‘I like people who weren’t captured.’ Not the sort of comment that one might assume would play with the voters of a party that had so recently led the country to war in Iraq; a party whose insiders continued to criticise the outgoing President’s reticence to intervene in the ongoing Syrian Civil War, and which sought to make opposition to the 2015 nuclear deal with Iran a defining theme of their campaign. By the time the Ipsos poll came out, enough time had transpired for the base to digest Trump’s remarks, and — lo and behold — the numbers showed the Trump Train steaming full speed ahead, up ten percentage points on the previous figures, and roughly in line with other polls that trundled in later that week. The Republican faithful, less bellicose than any of the party worthies had grasped, had issued a stern rebuke to McCain, a man who like no other stood for the pre-Trump GOP’s commitment to exporting democracy by force of arms.

Like the Apostle Paul, the Republican establishment had been interrupted on their way to Damascus, although it would take longer for them to be converted. Their Ananias was to be Trump’s primary opponent Lindsey Graham (1955-2026), the late US Senator for South Carolina and a convert to Trumpism (or at least to Trump) himself. Graham, the hawk’s hawk, ran a primary campaign bizarrely centred on foreign policy that put him at odds with the comparatively isolationist Trump, whom he spared no floridity of tongue in condemning and for whom he demonstratively refused to vote at the general election.

By 2017, Graham had had the good sense to recognise that the winds had turned, becoming one of Trump’s most vocal supporters in the upper chamber and a reliable vote for the President’s legislative agenda. Graham’s patience finally paid off when, on February 28th of this year, the President launched an unprecedented campaign of aerial strikes against the South Carolina Senator’s peculiar Erbfeind, the Islamic Republic of Iran. Though the final victory over the mullahs remains elusive, one may presume that Graham, who passed away on Sunday of an apparent heart attack with the Ukraine War heating up and Trump poised to launch renewed strikes on Iran in breach of the Memorandum of Understanding, died with a smile on his face.

Who was Lindsey Graham? Eloquent, but hardly an intellectual; uncompromising, but with no apparent worldview deeper than the usual Republican platitudes — this son of working class descendants of Ulster Scotsmen who rose from humble origins in the Appalachian foothills to become Israel’s firmest friend on Capitol Hill was always an enigma to Washington. Conspiratorial explanations for the life and legislative record of this septuagenarian confirmed bachelor readily suggest themselves, but fall short for a man so intensely under the influence of his time and place. The only way to understand Graham is as a South Carolinian, whose long Senate career brought the gradual South Carolinification of American politics in the 20th century to a successful close.

Not unlike Graham’s beloved Israel, South Carolina in the 19th century was an old land on an important modern commercial route, its politics traditionally dominated by a militaristic landowning aristocracy. Though the United States had won its independence from Britain, Charleston remained something of a trojan horse for British interests in the union, the planters being reliant on British markets and not seldom in debt to London’s banking houses. Reactionary, globalist, militarist, and anglophile — a homegrown neoconservatism flourished in South Carolina long before anyone had ever heard the names Podhoretz or Kristol, and its great exponent was John C. Calhoun, who as James Monroe’s Secretary of War laid the foundations for the modern department that bears that name.

Though the old elite was supplanted towards the end of the nineteenth century by the democratic movements of poor whites to which one could trace Graham’s political genealogy, if not his policy positions, its spirit persisted in the statehouse in Charleston, leaving South Carolina elites well-suited temperamentally to thread together the disparate strands of the mid-20th century American Right: free trade, traditional values, and an aggressive, globally-oriented foreign policy. Graham embodied this catholicity, and his great achievement in the conservative movement’s internal politics was to reconcile its mainstream to its prodigal son Donald Trump, although whether this particular ceasefire holds will depend on the outcome of the war that he so passionately championed.

The Right’s post-Trump disdain for ‘forever wars’ makes it easy to forget that American conservatism was from the very beginning a martial undertaking. The conservative movement that Graham joined was in large part the brainchild of former officers in the Air Force (Graham’s own service branch), who dreamt of a vast empire of democracy stretching across the Pacific and beyond. Soul-searching over the communist takeover of China — a ‘sister republic’ with whom the old East Coast elite had enjoyed extensive commercial, cultural, political, and personal ties — provided the impetus for the creation of early conservative lobby groups like the Committee of One Million, a pro-Kuomintang pressure group which provided the organisational backbone and a testing ground for the campaign methods employed by the Goldwater campaign in 1964.

Anticommunism was not the kind of cause that could be spun to the capitol’s newshounds as responsible, principled conservatism — the men who fought it were social pariahs, pilloried by a hostile, Democrat-aligned media establishment as paranoid kooks or deranged warmongers of the kind satirised by Stanley Kubrick in Dr. Strangelove (a film not so much about the army as about the eccentricities of Air Force men specifically). Yet theirs was an unmitigated success, won within the span of the movement’s first real shake at the presidency under Reagan (Nixon, whose staff was largely drawn from the old Rockefeller men who had previously run the party, was still too much a man of the liberal age).

With no more battles left to win abroad, conservatives might have turned their attentions to cultural and institutional renewal at home. Though the conditions were auspicious — in 1994, in the midterm wave that swept Graham to Congress, Republicans took control of the House for the first time since 1952 and held it until the 2006 midterms — Graham’s generation of conservatives dropped the ball, abandoning the culture wars at home in order to wage them on behalf of liberalism in Iraq and Afghanistan. These expensive sorties, whose explicit justification was the social and political reordering of distant lands according to an abstract ideological template with little root in the soil, were rather far indeed from the defence of the ‘American way of life’ — and contradictory to its basis: the right of free peoples to live as they will — that conservatives had understood to be at stake in the struggle against communism.

The movement’s embittered ‘paleoconservative’ veterans suspected foul play, and pinned the blame on their old Reagan-era rivals, the neoconservatives, who had indeed mustered their intellectual powers to steer conservatism behind the Iraq escapade, behind American Nibelungentreue to Israel, behind an Iran War, and away from bread and butter issues of national security, like rising immigration or the loss of America’s industrial puissance. But the neocons were not in power, and Graham, not being a poor Ashkenazi Jew from the outer boroughs of New York who went to City College in the 1930s, was not a member in their club, but favoured these causes for other reasons.

Graham’s political patron was the Cold Warrior par excellence — Strom Thurmond, Governor of South Carolina from 1947 to 1951 and US Senator for the state from 1956 to 2003. It was with Thurmond’s endorsement and logistical support that Graham was first elected to Congress; it was Thurmond who handpicked Graham as his successor in the Senate upon his resignation in 2003. Thurmond, who set the ball rolling on the Republicans’ ‘Southern Strategy’ when he crossed the Senate floor in 1964, who endorsed Barry Goldwater’s presidential campaign in protest against the Civil Rights Act, and whose fervour in opposing the ideas of the 1960s was matched only by his zeal in the fight against communism, was the many spirits of American conservatism gathered together in a single body.

His Senate office was a revolving door for the Air Force deep state’s more eclectic figures. Philip J. Corso, who served in a number of extremely sensitive OSS postings during WWII and later wrote a memoir asserting that the United States had recovered extra-terrestrial technologies at Roswell (there are, in fact, obvious terrestrial origins attributable to any technologies of which the US armed forces suddenly came into possession around 1945, but Corso was a man in full command of his senses, and his book appears to have been successful in bolstering a longstanding belief in the paranormal in certain high-ranking military circles at the expense of other, somewhat more disconcerting explanations), was a Thurmond aide at the time of his defection to the GOP. So too was Victor Fediay, an even more mysterious figure about whom little biographical information is available in spite of his long and colourful career in the fight against communism, which involved interpreting for Alexander Solzhenitsyn during his stateside visits, organising an ultimately aborted coup attempt in the Azores during the Carnation Revolution, and coming up with the idea for the Heritage Foundation.

It is worth pointing out that US Air Force intelligence, according to Richard J. Aldrich, enjoyed better relations with its British counterparts during the early Cold War (and there is no reason to believe anything has changed) than it did with other American agencies — an odd historical consonance with Charleston’s older ties to London (to be renewed if, as rumour has it, Soros Fund Management old boy and South Carolina native Scott Bessent runs for Graham’s empty seat). To say any more on this point would be to leave the firm ground of facts for the province of speculation, although it must conceded that ‘sticking to the facts’ is not a particularly useful interpretative heuristic for understanding South Carolina politics.

The South Carolina elite naturally had other predilections beyond Cold War shadow fighting; predilections of a quainter, more rural sort. Thurmond and Graham’s campaign manager Richard Quinn, an eclectic figure and kingmaker in South Carolina politics until his recent fall at the hands of a corrupt probe, was founder and for many decades editor-in-chief of Southern Partisan, a niche journal of ideas that nevertheless provided a reliable outlet and source of funds for paleoconservative luminaries like Sam Francis, Mel Bradford, and Thomas Fleming, as well as contributing to the postmodern revival of the southern agrarian tradition more generally. None of this precluded Quinn from enjoying the full respect and confidence of the Republican mainstream, having been hired by none other than John McCain to manage his presidential campaign in the South in 2000 and 2008. This was the double life of the American conservative movement, which, in defence of interests as concrete as those of the South Carolina political class, could be neo- or paleo- as suited the occasion, or even both at the same time. Graham’s turn to Trumpism was a reactivation of this old dualism, trampled on the national stage by the less syncretic, more missionary northern neoconservatives in the late Reagan years, but still alive in his swampy homeland.

All this should be borne in mind when assessing Graham’s defence of the State of Israel and his hawkishness vis-a-vis Iran. Graham inherited a political economy that had been transformed by Thurmond’s long tenure as chairman of the Senate’s Armed Services Committee, in which role he used his oversight over the Department of Defence budget to channel untold billions in defence contracts to South Carolina, today the 8th largest state recipient of DoD funds as well as an important USAF logistical node. The armed forces’ presence in South Carolina accounts for 11.2% of state GDP according to an estimate by the state’s Department for Veteran Affairs, with the Air Force providing the lion’s share. Graham’s successor need not have any service background himself to be the Air Force’s man.

In other words, Graham owed his continued presence in the Senate to the organisational power of the old Thurmond/Quinn network and the structural power of the Air Force in South Carolina; if his advocacy for the Jewish State or regime change in Iran was displeasing to these authorities, it would have been no small matter for them to primary him. Though the deep politics of the US military are beyond any outsider’s ability to decipher — some of these people believe in aliens, after all — it requires no great mental feat to see why the Air Force would favour a quick campaign of punitive bombing in the Middle East, which will cause demand for military industrial production to soar and allow it to reward its clients. Graham’s successor will continue his political line; whether he does it with quite the same results is another matter entirely.

In the end, Graham was a nonentity, a hollow vessel for the past to enter and wreak havoc with the present — in short, the perfect conservative. A telegenic but profoundly strange man who parachuted into politics during a profoundly strange period in American history as the smiling face of normality, only to spend his days fantasising about killing people; Mr. Bateman goes to Washington. We will surely see his like again.

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This article was written by Franz Pokorny, a Pimlico Journal contributor. Have a pitch? Send it to submissions@pimlicojournal.co.uk.

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