Cindy McCain, the widow of John McCain and lifelong Republican, seemed optimistic in an interview last month with The Economist’s Anne McElvoy. As one of a handful of GOP faces present at Joe Biden’s starkly silent inauguration, McCain appeared ready for her party to recover itself, to set the last four years aside, and return to the more harmonious, bipartisan political era which her late husband has come to embody.
Her party, however, had other ideas. Within a few days of Mrs. McCain’s interview airing, she, along with fellow Arizona party grandees Jeff Flake and Governor Doug Ducey , had been censured by her state Republican Party. Mrs. McCain had vowed in her Economist interview that, regardless of the GOP’s post-Trump direction, she would never abandon her party. Nonetheless, the actions of the Arizona state Republicans suggest that her party is quite happy to abandon her. Mrs. McCain was condemned for a trifecta of sins. Firstly, she ‘supported globalist policies and candidates’. Next, she dared to condemn ‘President Trump for his criticism of her husband’. Lastly, and most heretical of all, she ‘erroneously placed behaviours over actual presidential results’.
Ignoring the poor wording of the above sentence, it crystallises all that is rotten at the heart of today’s GOP. In this moment, we see a political party formally punishing a veteran member for refusing to go along with the political fantasy that Donald Trump’s election victory was stolen. McCain has been a stalwart in Arizona Republican politics for decades, and nonetheless her repudiation of far-right lies has left her in political Siberia.
The episode that unfolded in Arizona exemplifies how difficult it will be for the GOP to disentangle themselves from such dangerous Trumpian conspiracy theories. Yet to do so is vital, not only for the Republicans’ electoral future but for the future of American democracy.
In Joe Biden’s inaugural address, the dominant theme was of ‘unity’. However, America can only truly reunify with an act of political atonement. At the very least, those 8 U.S. Senators and the over 100 Republican Representatives who voted against certifying the results of a free and fair election must disavow themselves of the great ‘stolen election’ lie. To continue repeating the lie is to give fuel to conspiratorial and antidemocratic elements which could destroy for good the institutions that Donald Trump spent the last 4 years attacking.
As noted by Yale historian Timothy Snyder recently in the New York Times Magazine, ‘the lie that Germany lost the First World War in 1918 because of a Jewish “stab in the back” was 15 years old when Hitler came to power’. Americans cannot afford to give this great lie any more credence. We have already allowed it to take root, as demonstrated by the Capitol insurrection of January 6th and by the actions of the Arizona GOP today. The lie may not bear its poisonous fruit for years to come. But Biden’s plea for unity will be futile if America fails to root it out entirely.
Prospects for unity are slim, and possibly already out of reach. But it is beholden upon all Americans to push for atonement. The Republican Party must face a reckoning in the wake of recent events, and America must fight to hold its representatives to account.
