What is John McCain?

There are many political issues. If you know someone’s position on a single given issue, you can make a reasonable, though far from certain, guess as to their positions on other issues. If you support the Iraq War, for instance, then you are likely a conservative and take conservative positions on other issues. However, this is only a likelihood. There are liberals and others who support the war in lower numbers, and there are conservatives who do not. If you know someone’s position on three issues, you will have a better sense of where they will end up on other issues. If on five issues, even better than that. And if you know someone’s position on every issue but one, you can generally deduce with great certainty the nature of the exception.

The reason for this is ideology. In general, we do not pick our opinions at random. Rather, our opinions are the product of deeper opinions and inclinations. There are many ways that these deep inclinations might manifest themselves in practical terms, but these ways are finite and tend to organize themselves into families, making the full spectrum of political opinion generally comprehensible. Understanding what ideology motivates someone—especially someone in high office—can be important not only in that it allows one to predict where he will end up on an unknown issue, but also to determine at what priority he will hold the various matters before him, how specifically he might address them, and generally what makes him tick. Due to the great scrutiny they are put under, it’s usually pretty easy to get a fairly good sense of the ideological orientation of major presidential candidates.

John McCain is an exception to this. All of his positions are well-documented, but they do not fit together in any way that I can discern. If you don’t happen to know McCain’s position on, say, the minimum wage, you would have no basis for guessing at it with any more certainty than a coin flip. (Indeed, he doesn’t seem all that sure himself, having voted both for and against.) Though his positions on existing issues can be found, there is no way to predict how he will react to any new issues that might arise in the future, and we only have limited understanding of what makes him tick. And whatever McCainism is, we do not have the advantage of any McCainists—other than McCain himself—who might be able to shed light on the subject with their own words. Instead, he has had only a series of sidekicks who have tended drift off after a few years of service in this capacity: Fred Thompson, Chuck Hagel, and now Lindsay Graham. In an effort to start the process of coming to understand what, ideologically speaking, John McCain is, let us examine some of the options that are closed to us.

Is McCain a conservative? Clearly not. Though he has called himself a conservative, he has (with varying degrees of consistency) come down on the opposite side of the usual conservative position on the issues of campaign finance reform, immigration, waterboarding, embryonic stem cell research, “tax cuts for the rich,” affirmative action, global warming, carbon caps, drilling in ANWR, the question of whether pharmaceutical companies are “the big bad guys,” tobacco taxes, the International Criminal Court, the Federal Marriage Amendment, the question of whether evangelical leaders are “agents of intolerance,” drug reimportation, the question of whether people who disagree with him on immigration are “nativist[s],” the “gun-show loophole,” fetal tissue research, English as an official language, CAFE Standards, the Patients’ Bill of Rights, the question of whether the Swift Vets were “dishonest and dishonorable,” the question of whether radio stations have the right not to play the Dixie Chicks, the estate tax, the Gang of 14, Guantanamo Bay, the minimum wage, and other matters that may have slipped my mind.^* There is no One, True Conservatism to which all conservatives must subscribe in every detail. Many conservatives take some of these positions while remaining conservatives. At least I hope so, because I am one of them. But if one can be called a conservative while disagreeing with so many other conservatives on all these matters, then the word has lost all meaning.

^*Details of McCain’s positions on most of these matters can be found here, here, here, and here. Google should be able to provide citations for the remainder, especially with the aid of the direct quotes.

Is McCain a liberal? Clearly not. McCain is, for instance, pretty reliably anti-abortion. There are pro-life liberals, of course, but these are very unlikely to support free trade. But even if there are some economically literate pro-life liberals out there, they are certainly opposed to the Iraq War. If a liberal can dissent from liberal orthodoxy in all these areas simultaneously, then the word liberal is meaningless.

Is McCain a moderate? Clearly he is, but not in any way that is meaningful for our purposes here. There are a number of ways that one can be a moderate: One can be an economic conservative and a social liberal, or an economic liberal and a social conservative, or a domestic liberal and a foreign-policy hawk, or a domestic conservative and a dove. One can try to find the middle ground on every issue, or one can follow the vagaries of public opinion. Each of these species of moderatism is governed by an organizing principle that allows observers to understand and predict the behavior of any moderate of one of these types. However, none of these applies to McCain. His positions cannot be organized according to any fiscal-social or foreign-domestic scheme. And very many positions that he does adopt, he seems to adopt fully and does not waver in the face of the position’s unpopularity. Without finding such an organizing principle, it is mostly meaningless to describe him as a moderate.

Is McCain a fiscal conservative? This is an interesting term, since it is used in two very different ways in modern political discourse. According to the first and traditional sense, a fiscal conservative is someone who is especially devoted to the usual conservative positions on economic issues. There is some dispute as to whether fiscal conservatism in this sense should put greater emphasis on balanced budgets or tax cuts, but surely neither side of this debate could muster any defense for someone who decries “tax cuts for the rich” and the “growing gap between the haves and have-nots,” not to mention all of his policy positions in opposition to economic conservatism.

It seems to me that the second sense of the term fiscal conservative must have developed according to the following fallacious, but linguistically understandable logic: Fiscal conservatism is the opposite of social conservatism; therefore, someone for whom it is a great political priority to fight the influence of social conservatism must be a fiscal conservative. Many people whose only claim to economic conservatism is that they have not called for the dictatorship of the proletariat are therefore often called fiscal conservatives. However, this does not apply to McCain. Though he is not the most consistent social conservative he has not (outside of a few heated moments in 2000) gone out of his way to stick his thumb in the eye of social conservatives, as is the raison d’être of fiscal conservatives of this type—even though he has stuck his thumb in the eyes of many other constituencies. In neither sense, then, is he a fiscal conservative.

Is McCain a media whore? This is not, strictly speaking, an ideological question, but it is ideological by proxy, in that a media whore makes himself subservient to the ideological tendencies of the mainstream media. This has often been put forth as an explanation of McCain’s behavior. However, this explanation does not hold up to scrutiny.

Media-whorishness is not an uncommon phenomenon in American politics, and it is well established what the media-johns like. First, just as with the second type of fiscal conservative, they want you to stick your thumb in the eye of social conservatives, and they pay extra if you actually become pro-choice. McCain has not done the former recently, and never the latter. Second, while they don’t mind if you support popular wars, they want you to denounce wars very loudly from the moment they first show signs of becoming unpopular, so that they can live out their fantasies of being Walter Cronkite losing the Vietnam War for America. Thirdly, they want you to denounce every attempt to hold Democrats accountable for their misdeeds, especially if they involve sex. But despite already having acquired a reputation for media-whorishness by the late 90s, he voted guilty on both counts of Bill Clinton’s impeachment, putting him to the right of Fred Thompson and a number of other reliable conservatives on this question. (And he did so in terms that seem to me sincere and consistent with his views on a number of other topics.)

If McCain is a whore, he’s a bad one. He does do plenty that the media likes, but he’s clearly giving it away for free.

Is McCain an anti-corporate populist? It is odd that many of the people who are the most vociferous supporters of McCain’s porkbusting ways were his most vociferous opponents with respect to campaign finance reform—the Club for Growth types, for example. This oddness might be explained if McCain has different motives for fighting pork than others do. Most of his supporters in these efforts are advocates for smaller government in general: lower taxes, less spending, less regulation (like McCain-Feingold). On the other hand, when McCain speaks about both campaign finance and cutting pork, he often speaks about reducing the influence of powerful corporations, just as many do on the very far left.

If anti-corporatism were one of McCain’s main motivations in politics, it would explain a number of other peculiarities: his reluctance to cut taxes, his very un-Republican class-warfare rhetoric while opposing the Bush tax cuts, his opposition to the pharmaceutical and other industries, his onerous carbon-emissions plan, his unwillingness to allow oil companies to drill in ANWR, and other things.

However, if this were his primary motivation, we would expect to find him on the other side of a number of other issues. If this were the case, why would he support government subsidization of the biotechnology industry in the form of funding for embryonic stem-cell research (or any other way)? Why would he favor an immigration policy that had the effect of lowering the wages of the working class while providing cheap labor to corporations? (Those of the anti-corporate left do so on the basis of identity politics, for which McCain has demonstrated no sympathy, as far as I’m aware.) And why would he fail to take into account the many conspiracy theories—popular on both the anti-corporate right and the anti-corporate left—about how Afghanistan and Iraq are “wars for oil [companies]”? Anti-corporatism cannot be any more than a partial explanation for McCain’s beliefs, if that.

Is McCain a neoconservative or a national-greatness conservative? The founding generation of neoconservatives first came to be influential in conservative circles and the Republican party in the late 60s and early 70s. Many of them had been liberals and, before that, communists—Trotskyites in particular—and many of these had academic backgrounds, especially in fields like sociology. They became disenchanted with American liberalism and the Democratic party as their former allies came under the influence of the New Left—which, in the eyes of the neoconservatives, caused them to fail to appreciate the dangers of communism (which many of them had witnessed from the inside) and to adopt many other unfortunate policies.

When the neoconservatives took their case to conservatives and Republicans, it was well received. The first main element of this case was that conservatives should make their peace with the New Deal (though not necessarily the Great Society). Having done that, they should try to direct the power of these government programs to conservative ends, like fostering families of the traditional structure, rather than just stopping liberals from directing this power towards liberal ends. The second main element of their argument was that conservatives should be both more aggressive and more idealistic in their struggle against communism (and similar forces), in contrast to the less assertive and more cynical policy of détente. Both of these elements can be seen to have had great influence upon Republican policy over the last few decades, although, curiously, few if any elected Republicans have either embraced or been tagged (by rational people) with the label neoconservative.

In 1997, two members of the second generation of neoconservatives, William Kristol and David Brooks, wrote a widely-discussed article proposing a “national-greatness conservatism.” Unsurprisingly, their proposal shared much with neoconservatism as traditionally understood. In fact, I would go so far as to describe their effort as a mere rebranding of neoconservatism, adding only a greater emphasis on patriotism and national unity, and associating (quite reasonably) the ideas of neoconservatism with the compelling image of Theodore Roosevelt and that of similar figures. Its most controversial element was its advocacy of “limited but energetic” government, directed towards conservative ends. This version of neoconservatism, however, was associated with an elected politician—John McCain—and Kristol, Brooks, and other like-minded people were vociferous supporters of McCain in the 2000 primaries on these very grounds.

But should they have been? McCain does give off a TR-like vibe as national-greatness conservatism was intended to project. However, with respect to the more substantial aspects of both national-greatness and neo-conservatism, there is rather little to separate McCain from any other Republican. His foreign policy is certainly consistent with neoconservatism, but so is that of almost every other Republican. And where he is supportive of big government, it is not at all clear that it is for conservative ends. Indeed, even where he is for small government, it is not at all clear that this is for conservative ends. It doesn’t seem particularly enlightening to describe McCain with either of these terms.

Is McCain a partisan of the New Class? The inconsistently-capitalized New Class was a term originally coined by Marxists in an effort to explain the bizarre and otherwise incomprehensible fact that the Russian Revolution had some not entirely desirable consequences. The short version of this explanation was bureaucrats and party officials, who by their empowerment through the revolution acquired an unproletarian class consciousness as the New Class and hence undermined the inevitable glories of true communism. This idea was introduced to the conservative movement by the first generation of neoconservatives, and it was shown to have some merit in explaining some political phenomena in modern America, though the American New Class was conceived of somewhat more broadly than the original version. In Irving Kristol’s words:

Today there is a new class hostile to business in general, and especially to large corporations. As a group, you find them mainly in the very large and growing public sector and in the media. They share a disinterest in personal wealth, a dislike for the free-market economy, and a conviction that society may best be improved through greater governmental participation in the country’s economic life. They are the media. They are the educational system. Their dislike for the free-market economy originates in their inability to exercise much influence over it so as to produce change. In its place they would prefer a system in which there is a very large political component. This is because the new class has a great deal of influence in politics. Thus, through politics, they can exercise a direct and immediate influence on the shape of our society and the direction of national affairs.

Most people in Republican circles, then, are opposed to the New Class, at least in theory. Is McCain for it? His “for patriotism, not for profit” rhetoric is pretty consistent with Kristol’s description, and his close relationship with the press can hardly argue against it. More importantly, many of McCain’s policies have the effect of empowering the New Class. In particular, McCain-Feingold strengthened the hold of the media and government bureaucrats over American political discourse at the expense of ordinary citizens and political donors. And his positions on torture, global warming, and other matters adhere to the priorities of the New Class and might be expected to increase the power and influence of New Class organizations like the United Nations and Amnesty International.

However, the paradigmatic example of the New Class in America is the teachers’ unions, who have been able to influence enough Republican politicians to foil many attempts at enacting school choice policies—but not, apparently, McCain, who seems to be a fairly consistent, if less than vocal supporter of school choice. Also, his proposal for a League of Democracies can only serve to undermine the UN and its New Class-dominated affiliates. McCain’s relationship with the New Class seems to be as complicated as his relationship with every other group.

Does McCain just call ’em as he sees ’em? I’m sure he does, just as I’m sure that politicians of more easily recognizable ideologies do. But to be satisfied with such an answer—to this and the many other questions that amount to the same thing—is to evade the real question, which is, How does he see ’em? Ordinarily, when somebody says, “I call ’em as I see ’em,” the phrase amounts to nothing more than a shrug—a signal that the question of how and why he sees things as he does is not worth pursuing, and often enough it is not. John McCain, however, might be months away from being the most powerful human being on the planet. It matters very much how and why he sees things as he does.

But having spilled all these words on the matter, I’m still in the dark. Do you have any ideas?