While the ideological and propagandistic projection of American exceptionalism as a force for good in the world has taken some lethal blows lately, this fantasy remains alive and well when US politicians are eulogised, no matter how thin the homespun platitudes get.
Republican Senator Lindsey Graham, who died this month, was generally portrayed as an avuncular figure who “got along with everybody”, as President Donald Trump put it, despite their once-acrimonious relationship. John Thune, the Senate majority leader, said Graham “believed in the might of America to achieve good in the world”.
This “regular guy” image stands far removed from Graham’s actual role as an instrumental cog in the military-industrial machine, which churns out misery and death through US imperialist campaigns of destruction and extraction around the world.
Responses across the aisle echoed the same consensus, reflecting a duopoly that drives Department of War budgets, support for US military interventions, and regime-change operations around the globe - without ever connecting those policies to their effects on actual, and much less powerful, “regular” people worldwide.
Among Democratic senators, Mark Warner posted that he was “heartbroken”; Adam Schiff lauded Graham’s “sense of humor”; Amy Klobuchar remarked on “his love for the world … and the pure joy he brought to life”; and Elizabeth Warren noted: “Even though we disagreed on much, he was always willing to negotiate, with humor and wit.”
