Mr. Romney is Leaving Washington

Remember how pleasantly surprised you were last Wednesday when our twenty-four-hour media information complexes broke away from their near constant coverage of breaking news to cover, live, Senator Romney’s final speech as a Senator of these United States of America? Wasn’t it inspiring to listen to segment after segment of pundit after pundit analyzing said farewell, while praising the retiring Senator’s decision to choose settled norms and constitutional principles over party tricks and purity tests, regardless of the political consequences as an example to aspire to and emulate. And what of the sparkle of hope you felt, remember that, when you reflected on all the nuanced and thoughtful coverage a good man’s and a decent politician’s farewell had elicited, reminding you that, if nothing else, at least we hadn’t lost the capacity to praise true moral grit, even when its exemplar happens to be to the manor house born, the high born being one of history’s most persistently suspect categories.

Of course you don’t remember anything of that sort happening last week, because no such thing bearing even the slightest resemblance to what I just described took place.

The 17^th senator elected to represent the interests of the industrious citizens of the Beehive State—a state settled by religious visionaries and prophets who confessed a quintessentially American faith—did, of course, give his farewell speech last Wednesday on the Senate floor, after doggedly warning the nation, for almost a decade, against the manifest unfitness of our once and future president, and current president-elect. But we did not pause, even for a moment, to reflect on the meaning of our decision to ignore Romney’s repeated warnings. Not that this should be surprising. Romney and what he represents—equipoise, reason, country over party—has for some time now been considered old news. He’s simply not exciting enough for our currently unrefined political palates. Our fascination and obsession with the vulgarity and spectacle of Trump over the decency and reserve Romney being one more damning piece of evidence, in my opinion, that ours is a civilization in decline.

You would hope (at least I would like to think that we’d hope) that the departure from the Senate of the last Republican senator willing to speak out against the ongoing moral corruption and obsequiousness of his political party, and the instinctual derangement of his party’s truculent, distractible, prevaricator-in-chief, might have moved us to schedule a series of national interventions, beginning with covering Romney’s farewell speech, to discuss, among other matters, our national addiction to money-worship, winning, and power Mammon worship and its well-known disastrous consequences being at least a couple thousand years old.

Or that Romney’s departure, if not taken as prima facie evidence of fully manifested decline, would have been taken to be yet one more omen or auspice warning us of the wickedness our way coming, if we continue to refuse to take seriously how precarious our democratic project is.

Of course, this underestimates the all-consuming power of addiction: addiction and right reasoning, we know, are not very often found to be keeping each other company.

And we moderns, especially we modern Americans, a nation of Gatsby’s obsessed with our green lights that we are, are far too grown up and sophisticated, and future fixated to closely examine our political entrails for evidence of impending political disaster. Even less are we inclined to waste time with such ancient nonsense as believing in and interpreting auspices and omens.

(Unfortunately for us the institutionalization of augurs was not one of the political conventions our Framers were wise enough to borrow from Rome’s once formidable republic.)

Addiction and modernity’s hubris notwithstanding, there are, as they always is, other reasons why we didn’t last week pause to take a full measure of Romney, his efforts to warn his party and our country against bowing to a would-be strongman, or what his departure from our national politics tells us about how bad off we truly are. Not a few of those reasons were due to his personal biography. To wit, the business I took up above about the fact that he was to the manor house born.

The current American mood mitigates against taking full measure of any person bearing any marks of any benefits of social privilege. Willard Mitt Romney a wealthy, conservative, moderate, compromising, religiously observant and pious, pot committed-capitalist, man of European descent born into privilege, is, ipso facto, by virtue of any one or any combination of his identities, judged suspicious by most everyone, in these rigidly orthodox and unforgiving and exhaustively performative and plum silly times.

So unsparing have we become in our insistence that social identities are reliable proxies for everything we need to know about any, given individual, that the very idea that empathic scrutiny of what Romney, son of privilege, has stood up for, and against, since Trump arrived on the political scene might yield lessons for us all about the importance of moral character to private and public life is, to most of us I imagine, risible. That we have reaped in our history an American abundance of unlikely exemplary figures is of no moment. We are far too cynical of a people now to believe in the magic of unlikely allies, any more than we believe in pragmatic heterodoxy, both articles of faith we no longer confess.

And regarding Romney’s heterodoxy: I mean who one in their right political mind would trust an unrepentant capitalist, who twice voted to convict and remove Trump from office, a Republican who governed, successfully, in perhaps our bluest state and passed Romneycare, supported the Respect for Marriage Act, and marched for the cause of black lives mattering, which is to say following in the footsteps of his father, Geroge Romney, who was wise enough to spot early signs of the Republican Party’s disintegration in the candidacy of Senator Barry Goldwater. I mean what god fearing, flag waving (or despising) red-blooded American would trust a politician (or pundit, or public intellectual) who was not reflexively and rigidly pure and partisan?

Once upon a time ago, (again, I’d like to believe) the fact that revanchist Republicans, neoliberal identitarians, and Thermidorian progressives all view Senator Romney as a man incompatible with this or any season, might have been taken as evidence that what we are dealing with is the real Mccoy. A nonconformist. An independent thinker. An individual.

Or maybe the rarest of all things in politics: a politician willing to live the consequences of his convictions with dignity, grace, and a measure of courage. Exactly the type of politician who comes along very rarely. Exactly the kind always in short supply. Exactly the kind a healthy Republic should cherish given that the dirty business that politics is (and always has been through the millennia) most usually attracts spineless, self-serving, amoral, ruinous types like Senators Lindsey Graham, Ted Cruz, or the fist-pumping anarchist Josh Hawley.

Which is finally to say that even though I winced and double-took and gritted my teeth when I read Romney’s farewell speech to public life because of how it glossed over (naively or deliberately or some combination of both) the bitter contradictions and betrayals that were present from the [our] Republic’s inception, contradictions and betrayals with which we still wrestle, I was still deeply moved by how much he so obviously shares my love for our country. I was also moved by the ways he was keeping faith with his forbears in that speech, the above-mentioned religious visionaries and prophets, whose unfailingly polite, modest, straight-backed moral rectitude Mr. Romney has put to honorable use on behalf of the Nation.

My left leaning political proclivities, priors, and commitments notwithstanding, I know a good man when I see one, and Senator Romney is a good man.

Mr. Romney is leaving Washington, and with him a kind of fundamental decency of character and person that at least a few of us will sorely miss.