To honor McCain's memory, fight the plague of distrust | Opinion

In the last year of his life, John McCain was haunted by the fear that his fellow Americans were losing their capacity to see themselves as, well, fellow Americans.

That anxiety infused the memorable speech McCain gave when he returned to the U.S. Senate last summer to cast the decisive vote against his party’s last-ditch effort to repeal the Affordable Care Act. McCain himself had opposed the ACA, but he argued that, in ignoring Democratic overtures to collaborate in amending it, Republicans were repeating the mistake congressional Democrats had made when they first enacted Obamacare without the support of a single GOP lawmaker.

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The inevitable stalemate arising from such tit-for-tat politics, McCain noted, were producing nothing of even incremental value for Americans of any political stripe. The only remedy, he added, was to renounce the illusion of absolute victory, recognize that lawmakers in both parties sought a health care solution that worked for their constituents, and negotiate a health care compromise both sides could accept. 

“Let’s trust each other,” he pleaded — a prescription that carried particular poignancy coming from a warrior who’d spent 35 years in Washington’s legislative trenches.

A plague of distrust

A year later, the contagion of distrust McCain sought to arrest has become the plague of our time. President Donald Trump has been its Typhoid Mary, but we have all become carriers, as McCain acknowledged when he confessed that he, too, had sometimes "made it harder to find common ground because of something harsh I said." 

As it turns out, newspaper columnists enjoy no immunity from this epidemic. A couple of weeks ago, making my way through the parking garage my employer shares with several federal agencies located near the Free Press’ offices in downtown Detroit, I passed a dozen spaces marked by signs reserving them for employees of U.S. Immigrations and Custom Enforcement, the same agency implicated in the separation of immigrant parents and children taken into custody crossing the U.S. border.

“Bastards!” I muttered aloud, imagining the faceless, brutish apparatchiks the spaces belonged to.

Even with no passenger on board to witness it, this exclamatory dismissal surprised and embarrassed me. I had, after all, never seen any of the ICE employees for whom these parking paces were reserved, and I knew nothing about what had prompted them to seek employment with the agency, one of the many that sprang to life after the 9/11 attacks.  

On reflection, it seemed likely that the surge of patriotic feeling that arose in response to those attacks had inspired more than a few Americans to pursue careers with ICE — and equally unlikely that any of those employees had been motivated by a desire to separate immigrant children from their parents. Some, no doubt, had been at least as horrified as I was by reports of infants lost in ICE’s vast network of ad hoc shelters and foster facilities. 

My reflexive condemnation of everyone associated with the agency, however private, was a victory for the campaign of division and distrust I so frequently criticized. I had warned about the dangers implicit in White House efforts to vilify the federal judiciary, the Department of Justice, and the FBI for daring to scrutinize the president's conduct; now, I was mirroring the same mindless contempt for the workforce of a different federal agency.

This is precisely the reflex McCain urged us to overcome in his 2017 speech to the Senate, and in the farewell statement released this week after his death.

"We are three-hundred-and-twenty-five million opinionated, vociferous individuals." he wrote. "We argue and compete and sometimes even vilify each other in our raucous public debates. But we have always had so much more in common with each other than in disagreement."

That McCain possessed the capacity to discover the decency and good intentions in those with whom he disagreed was manifest in his dealings with Democratic rivals like the late Ted Kennedy and Barack Obama.

He also found it easy to recognize and acknowledge his own errors of judgment, at least in hindsight, without shame or melodramatic remorse. This distinguished him from most people in his line of work. It also made him hard to pigeonhole, because he was always under construction, a work in progress. 

Many of us who disagreed with McCain in life are inclined to give him the benefit of doubt in death. But if we are to really honor the example he set throughout his turbulent, remarkable life, we need to extend that same courtesy to one another.

Brian Dickerson is the editorial page editor of the Free Press.