American Samizdat: Character and Courage

The Republican Opposition to Trump

Experience is a vital teacher if one will learn from it well: people are mistaught and mistaken all the time. History is experience writ large, so we try to learn from it, too, but recorded history is not lived history. The most vital lessons of history are the lived lessons, but one has to choose to live them. Everyone lives through history, swirling and eddying and erupting all around us. One has to live in history to truly learn from it.

In 1956, then Senator John F. Kennedy, already aiming at the U.S. presidency, published a work of popular history, Profiles in Courage, that went on to win the Pulitzer Prize. In the book, Kennedy profiled eight U.S. senators who over the course of American history had acted courageously from conscience, from John Quincy Adams, who over foreign policy broke with his father’s Federalist Party, which had appointed him to a vacant Massachusetts senate seat, and subsequently lost reelection, to Robert A. Taft, who criticized the Nuremburg Trials for applying ex-post facto laws and then lost his chance for the 1948 Republican nomination for President. The book, certainly meaningful to Kenndy, was intended to burnish his stature in preparation for that presidential run.

The epigraph at the front of Profiles in Courage, from Englishman Edmund Burke, offers praise of another English politician, a fellow figure of his day, not well known today, 18^th Century Whig leader Charles James Fox, for his strong attack on the abusively powerful East India Company.

He well knows what snares are spread about his path, from personal animosity…and possibly from popular delusion. But he has put to hazard his ease, his security, his interest, his power, even his…popularity… He is traduced and abused for his supposed motives. He will remember that obloquy is a necessary ingredient in the composition of all true glory: he will remember…that calumny and abuse are essential parts of triumph… He may live long, he may do much. But here is the summit: He never can exceed what he does this day.

Burke’s description of the fate that awaits the public figure who acts daringly from conscience is exact and bracing. As it turned out, Burke’s praise itself was not everlasting, if predictive, as the friendship between the two ruptured over Fox’s support of the French Revolution, against Burke’s famous opposition to it.

About courage, it need be said that among those character virtues Aristotle discusses in his Nicomachean Ethics, it is the first to receive his attention.

About Kennedy and his book it need be said that the book was not recommend for the Pulitzer Prize out of committee but was rather the fortunate recipient of an influence campaign by the senator’s wealthy and powerful father, Joseph P. Kennedy. Then, too, it became very soon known that the book was quite substantially researched and ghost written by Ted Sorenson, who would serve as speech writer to Kennedy for the remainder of the future president’s life. Sorenson had not shared in or received acknowledgement when the Pulitzer Prize was awarded; neither was he acknowledged by Kennedy in the book’s introduction until the ghost writer requested it. Father Joseph threatened to sue ABC TV over the claims of dubious authorship unless executives issued a retraction, which they did. Sorenson, ultimately, was handsomely compensated for his work, especially as the 1960 campaign approached.

Fortune smiles on the ruthless and rich.

That Kennedy was a man of a certain very notable kind of courage – one thinks immediately of PT 109 and the Cuban missile crisis – cannot be denied. That in the book affair he shined far less brightly in exhibition of other Aristotelian character virtues, virtues not unrelated to another kind of courage, from magnanimity to truthfulness to modesty, seems also hard to deny.

In the era of Trump, physical courage has mostly not been required, though, of course, Capital police officers on January 6 come quickly to mind as exceptions, for which Trumpists continue to shit on them. See Edmund Burke above.

The vital education of lived history over the past near decade of American life reveals how rare intellectual and moral courage are found to be, rarer perhaps than the physical variety, which a study of recorded history and the present will tend to support. Hundreds of thousands, even millions of people around the world risk their lives in war or emergency services every year. In tragic contrast, among the otherwise abundant agricultural riches of the United States, the past decade yielded a shriveled crop of rotten cowardice enough to foreclose the family farm. I won’t name names. We know them well enough, and they deserve to be forgotten faster than Charles James Fox, who didn’t deserve it at all.

On the contrary, my purpose is to praise the brave, and as circumstance would quite reasonably have it, they are rooted in the same earth as the cowardly. I refer, whether they respond to the sobriquet or not, to those known as Republican Never-Trumpers. Some are no longer Republicans; others still await whatever historical development they think it is that will save them the final destabilized political identity to come from abandoning that label. Whatever the case, it is they and not anyone of the left who deserve to be recognized for their moral courage, their integrity, and their character.

Those of the left can rather content themselves with having been right about Trump from the start – which is no mean consolation prize. But it took no courage for a Democrat or anyone else of the left to oppose Trump, and in most cases, the opposition was accompanied by the comforting chorus of the likeminded, though, for some, it’s true, there have been relationships lost.

For any Republican, however, there was some degree of courage required.

According to the Pew Research Center, only 4-5% of self-identified Republicans or Republican-leaning voters did not vote for Trump in 2020. That’s what they told a pollster anyway, and their ballots were secret. Surely, there were people in red, Trump supporting states, towns, and families who vocally rejected him and paid a price, in human relationship and psychological well being, for their principled opposition, and every act of courage, however great or small, deserves acknowledgement.

It is the public figure, though, of whom more will have seemed required because of that chosen life in the public square. The office holder, the political or media figure, the opinion journalist all will have faced an expectation that they declare themselves, and more than once as the significance and severity of the national situation regularly increased and reasserted itself over these nine years. Particularly for those already and long identified as Republicans, this can have arisen as no happy and welcome test of character. It is easy, and not without reason, for others to feel that the choice was obvious and the test, rightfully, no test at all. As I wrote from the start, recognizing Trump for what he is, and the worst in human nature to which he appeals, for what they are should have presented no notable difficulty.

Yet we see that it did.

Aristotelian Virtues and the Golden Mean

We have to see the world for what it is. Human nature, too. Most people are not especially brave. Most people do not seek to lead, to represent, to influence, or to exercise power and responsibility for others. That’s what makes those who do, and any courage they exhibit, so admirable. If we will judge severely those who by the roles they sought in life were called upon to conduct themselves with courage and character and failed to do so, often from the petty seductions of influence and prestige, then we must raise up in our sights those who meet the moment.

Noble achievements and notable conduct are not the norm from which any shortfall is an automatic degradation to be casually and carelessly condemned. They are ascents above the common rung of our ordinary weakness, to be admired all the more for their rising up toward something greater.

If we haven’t performed the act ourselves, we should be slow to belittle the achievement. If we wish to highlight for all to see the awful foulness of Trump, then we should shine a spotlight on all those who offer the greatest contrast, those who risked and sometimes sacrificed more than the rest of us for some greater principle and higher purpose than themselves: those whose courage revealed itself at the time of stress to be a pillar of core character sunk deeper than any socially congenial, ideological or tribal allegiance or worldly comfort.

Those Republican public figures of moral courage have stood out sufficiently in their uniqueness that there is a Wikipedia page dedicated to listing them. They are few enough in number that there can be a Wikipedia page dedicated to listing them.

There are conservative journalists and political operatives who refashioned their careers to accommodate their rejection of Trump and to call out the GOP submission to him. Even today, the boldest and most committed of them argue with other conservatives that mere dissent from Trump is insufficient to the peril and the test we face: they must all, whatever their ideological discomfort, affirmatively support the election of Kamala Harris as a baseline commitment to the preservation of democracy and the republic.

There are those, like Liz Cheney – of whom there could be no more representative figure of the normal politics Democrats disdained and opposed – who sacrificed her House seat, a possible future career in government, and many relationships, earning cruel enmity and vilification, in order to do right and serve democracy. She served, further, on the House Select Committee that investigated January 6, with all Democrats but one, and sat as its most outspoken member of all in condemnation of Trumpist insurrection. You may find it hard to forget her conservative politics, but in defense of your democratic home, there is no tougher, fiercer ally against the invader you could hope to find or wish to fight beside.

Longtime political operative Stuart Stevens, who worked on Mitt Romney’s 2012 presidential campaign, was among the earliest to reject Trump and give full-throated endorsement to the Democratic opposition in 2016. But he did something more sweeping and impressive. He looked back on his entire 40-year political career in light of where the party he served had been led. He concluded that Trump’s emergence in the Republican Party – Trump’s choice of it as the ready vehicle for his methods and ends – was neither accidental nor incidental but rather an inevitability inherent to what the party had been making itself for decades. He renounced it all and published It Was All a Lie.

All of these immutable truths turned out to be marketing slogans. None of it meant anything. I was the guy working for Bernie Madoff who actually thought we were really smart and just crushing the market.

The courage and character of Stevens’s self-criticism is outsized. “Blame me,” he wrote: “I had been lying to myself for decades.” He put forth the “crazy idea that a return to personal responsibility begins with personal responsibility.”

There are more notable examples that could be named, and they include Adam Kinzinger, the Air National Guard Lieutenant-Colonel who, like Cheney, sacrificed a House seat because of his opposition to Trump and who was that other Republican to serve with Cheney on the House Select Committee. He voted to impeach Trump after January 6, and in a farewell speech from the floor of the House criticized the GOP for what it has become. Kinzinger, like former Lieutenant Governor of Georgia Geoff Duncan, spoke at the recent 2024 Democratic convention. He was well received. He should have been rousingly hailed a hero, but one suspects he knew there would be limits to the love he received that night in the house of Democrats come to hail and champion Democrats. One walks such a path as Kinzinger’s not for the flowers tossed at one’s feet but rather with the conviction of a strong spine that stands one straight along the way.

Besides, what could represent any less what Kinzinger deserves than his treatment by his own family? Two days after the Capital riot and Kinzinger’s criticism of Trump for it, the then congressman received a handwritten letter – authored by his cousin, Karen Otto – from eleven of his family members. It begins:

Oh my, what a disappointment you are to us and to God. We were once so proud of your accomplishments! Instead, you go against your Christian principals (sic) and join the ‘devil’s army.’

The letter further states, "It is now most embarrassing to us that we are related to you. You have embarrassed the Kinzinger family name." It offers a postscript, too.

For your information, many more family members feel the same as we do. They just didn’t have the courage to sign the letter or write their own letter. Not us, we are thoroughly disgusted with you!! And, oh by the way, we are calling for your removal from office.

That was nearly four years ago, and clearly Kinzinger’s commitment was not discouraged, and he has not wavered in his course. We can hope he knows and recalls Burke’s praise of Fox, Burke’s and Kennedy’s emblematic modern man of moral courage.

Charles James Fox (1782) by Joshua Reynolds

… He is traduced and abused for his supposed motives. He will remember that obloquy is a necessary ingredient in the composition of all true glory: he will remember…that calumny and abuse are essential parts of triumph… He may live long, he may do much. But here is the summit: He never can exceed what he does this day.

AJA

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Poet. Storyteller. Dramatist. Essayist. Artificer.

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