Idealism is in short supply in Donald Trump’s America. Domestically, few political leaders are interested in tackling long-term challenges. In foreign policy, realism and neo-Jacksonianism are en vogue as politicians choose to shirk rather than embrace America’s international commitments.
But as Senator John McCain reminds us in The Restless Wave: Good Times, Just Causes, Great Fights, and Other Appreciations, his new book with longtime writing partner Mark Salter, it’s America’s ideals that “distinguish our history from the history of other nations.” From our origins as struggling, disjointed colonies to today’s “big, boisterous, brawling, intemperate, striving, daring, beautiful, bountiful, brave, magnificent country,” generations of Americans have fought at home and abroad for our fundamental freedoms. It was our forebears’ idealism in pursuit of causes greater than themselves, not nativism or cold calculating realism, that brought America to the pinnacle of global power.
McCain touches on many subjects—including his bipartisan work in the Senate on immigration policy and campaign finance regulations, his fight with the George W. Bush administration on torture, and his controversial July 2017 health care vote—but what makes this book worthwhile is the love for America expressed in its pages.
It is a love of America’s diversity, its history, its institutions, and its values.
It is a love for the physical geography of his adopted state of Arizona and the natural landscape and wildlife on his family’s serene ranch.
And it is a love of the men and women who choose to risk their lives to defend our country. McCain notes that since 2003 he has spent every Fourth of July and often other holidays with the troops deployed in Afghanistan or Iraq. He writes wistfully of his final trips to war zones and describes the emotional naturalization and promotion ceremonies he witnessed on remote outposts.
In today’s political climate, though, the chapter on America’s destiny to be “part of the main”—to be “involved in mankind”—is the book’s most timely. After nearly 17 years of war, many Americans have grown skeptical of overseas commitments, and there are few national leaders willing and able to articulate the need for a robust American presence on the world stage. The Restless Wave is essentially McCain’s closing argument in a life lived in defense of this responsibility.
In a moving account of the multitude of dissidents and activists he has worked with during his career, many of whom have been harassed, jailed, or assassinated, McCain urges Americans to remember that a “shared devotion to human rights is our truest heritage and our most important loyalty.”
No reader of this book will be unaware of the two unhappy facts looming over it. First, McCain has an insidious form of cancer. “My predicament,” he writes, “is, well, rather unpredictable.” Second, large swaths of the Republican party—the party that just a decade ago made him its presidential nominee—now reject McCain and the bipartisanship, compromise, internationalism, and openness to immigration that he represents.
McCain writes that he remains a “Reagan Republican”: “Not a Tea Party Republican. Not a Breitbart Republican. Not a talk radio or Fox News Republican.” But for now, the Republican party is increasingly the party of Trump, and McCain does not offer much advice for how his own views might return to favor. What little political optimism he does offer is grounded in an assessment of the country’s demographic future, as evidenced by his own state, where the “blend of Hispanic and Anglo influences” means nativism is an electoral loser. If Republicans “want to maintain our competitiveness in the fastest-growing communities in the country we’ll stop letting the zealots drive the debate.”
Can the party to which McCain devoted his political career find a way to couple a commitment to principle with an effort to address the concerns that have led so many to abandon idealism in favor of angry, alienating populism? Maybe—with the right political leadership. Unfortunately, as McCain writes, he likely won’t be around to see this, but his life and legacy will have played a significant part in restoring America to its rightful place as “part of the main.”
