By Robin Givhan / The Washington Post
It’s easier to rewrite history than reckon with it.
So that’s what more than a few Republicans have decided to do. They have been loose with facts and impenetrable to truth. And they have been unconcerned with their legacy. Reverence for one’s legacy was supposed to be the safety valve, the narcissistic self-defense mechanism that also has the effect of offering salvation to others. The guardrails are gone.
The country has been at war with the truth for some time. So in many ways, it’s not surprising that Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., has begun to peddle the false notion that the insurrection at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6 wasn’t actually an “armed” attempt to stop the certification of the presidential election. He apparently requires a full arsenal of confiscated artillery — rather than an assortment of bats, metal poles, bear spray and various projectiles — before being willing to acquiesce to the accuracy of the term. And it was inevitable that some supporters of the former president would argue without evidence that antifa — a loosely knit group of far-left activists — was behind the Capitol riot, rather than his followers.
But Americans tend to be creatures of both optimism and habit, and so when their public officials are faced with difficult decisions, they tend to reflexively believe — hope and pray — that their leaders’ choices will be driven by concern for their personal legacy. They rely on the notion that people care about the way in which future generations will remember them and so, rather than allow their name to be inscribed on the pages of time as a coward or an autocrat or a racist, they will respond with integrity, enlightenment and kindness.
But like so many parts of the culture that have been beaten down and left for dead during the Trump era, the reverence many people once had for personal legacies has passed away. There it lies, alongside the culture’s respect for facts and truth. In some quarters, it’s all over except the burying.
To care about one’s legacy means concerning oneself with the future. It means being able to step outside of oneself and walk in someone else’s shoes; to allow someone else’s gaze to become your own so you can see yourself the way others do.
The fate of one’s legacy used to be a reason to pause and reconsider some intemperate act, some plundering of institutions. No more. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., has made his disinterest in his legacy plain. He is not a man concerned with the way in which he will be viewed by history. His focus is on how much power he has right now compared with how much was in his grip back then; back when men like him didn’t have to worry about whether their words mattered or that their pronouncements would be questioned.
Back when McConnell’s party was in the majority, he refused to schedule the impeachment trial of Donald Trump while he was still the sitting president of the United States. Instead, McConnell grumpily ensured that the trial would not begin until Trump was out of office, at which point McConnell argued that the Senate no longer had constitutional jurisdiction over Trump because he was no longer the current president. So McConnell voted to acquit him of inciting a riot, based on a loophole of his own imagining.
And then McConnell, who typically swallows his words as if he’s choking on his own hubris, stood on the Senate floor over the weekend and spoke with startling precision and clarity and relative generosity toward his colleagues across the aisle about the former president’s role in the attack of the Capitol: “There’s no question — none — that President Trump is practically and morally responsible for provoking the events of the day.” And then McConnell went on to explain his sleight of hand in an essay in The Wall Street Journal in which he bragged about respecting the limits of the Constitution rather than addressing the reality that any actual limits were simply those that he had placed upon himself.
McConnell penned himself in where he deemed the ground to be the most fertile for his personal power to continue to flourish. How will history view his duplicity? What does it matter? He’ll be long gone. There was very little about McConnell’s actions that appeased either side of the argument. His two-sided gestures moved no one to his corner. The former president issued a statement Tuesday calling McConnell “a dour, sullen and unsmiling political hack, and if Republican Senators are going to stay with him, they will not win again.” But movement wasn’t the point. McConnell simply wanted to stay precisely where he has been for so long.
The consequences of the impeachment trial will be carried forward by a generation. It is a burden the country will have to bear. History will remember the seven Republican senators who defied the momentum of their party. Perhaps history will recall their integrity or exasperation.
But along with a bit of this country’s innocence and self-confidence, the importance of legacy has seemingly died; or at least been significantly diminished. Grand historical assessments by academics and intellectuals are as unimportant among some citizens as science.
Caring about one’s legacy is no longer seen as the considered act of a statesman, but rather the snobbery of the elite. Of course, legacy-tending was always a kind of self-indulgence. Envisioning how one’s story might be told in classrooms or how one’s biography might be assessed by pedigreed researchers are highfalutin considerations. They are bold aspirations, not just of individual greatness, but greatness in the service of others.
But now, there’s little concern about the judgment of extraordinary minds. The focus is on catering to the smallest of them.
Robin Givhan is senior critic-at-large writing about politics, race and the arts. A 2006 Pulitzer Prize winner for criticism, Givhan has also worked at Newsweek/Daily Beast, Vogue magazine and the Detroit Free Press.
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