Obviously it’s easier to recognize courage when an opponent breaks ranks and takes your side. I admit I didn’t love it when Jeff Van Drew abandoned my own party to stand with Trump.
But it must have taken enormous courage for Mitt Romney to stand in the Senate and say what he said, knowing that he ended his political career by saying it. He will never again be nominated by the Republican Party for any office. Far too many of his fellow party members will never forgive him. Moreover, for the next five years he will likely be a pariah in his own Republican caucus: shunned by some Senators who hate what he did, and by others who know they failed when they should have done the same.
Nor will he ever be nominated by the Democratic Party for any office, because he truly is a conservative. He has voted for Kavanaugh, Gorsuch, and Trump’s other judges; for the Republican tax bill; for Republican policies on healthcare; for most of what the Republican Party supports.
He no longer has a political home. For all his money and privilege, his life will be different, and harder. Trump will seek revenge. Everyone knows that; it’s what Trump does. (Trump himself has said so.) Even Romney’s own niece, Republican party chairwoman Ronna Romney McDaniel, will likely attack him again. In this day and age, he could even find himself in physical danger. Just ask the 13 public figures who received bombs from Cesar Sayoc because Trump didn’t like them. (Or, if you prefer, the Republican congressmen victimized by a gunman while practicing softball.)
That’s an awfully hard position to put yourself in, when you could have just kept your head down and come up with a garbage excuse like Susan Collins and Lamar Alexander did, knowing your choice would not change the outcome.
Can any of us be sure we would have done what Romney did, in his exact place? I’d like to think I would. But I’d be lying if I said I was sure. What about you?
So why did Romney do it? I watched his 8 minute speech to the Senate, and I cannot help but take him at his word. He took his oath deadly seriously. He believed he had promised God to offer impartial justice as he saw it. Mitt Romney, undoubtedly a religious man, would be intimately familiar with stories of biblical figures called upon by God to do things they desperately wished to avoid. (Jonah and Moses, to name two.)
What Romney did reminds me of something so old and quaint it seems almost forgotten: the idea that an oath to God is sacred. When combined with religious faith, oaths engendered a great deal of honorable and prosocial behavior that would not otherwise have occurred. I wonder, what adequate substitute has been found?
It seems to me Romney’s case is different from that of Van Drew, who clearly improved his chances of staying in Congress by switching parties. I recognize others may disagree with me in assessing Van Drew’s action as self-interested. But he’s unquestionably made some powerful new political friends who are doing all they can to clear his path to re-election, and may well succeed. Nobody’s going to clear Mitt’s path for anything.
Years ago, when I saw the monument to John André in Westminster Abbey in London — the British spy George Washington executed for helping Benedict Arnold betray his country — I realized that one man’s traitor is often another’s martyr. Even if one supports Trump, however, one should recognize that Romney did something principled at great personal cost.
I found it the greatest act of political courage I have seen in a very long time. I am sitting here struggling to remember the last one like it.
Sure, of course, I believe history will remember him well for this. But history is an abstraction. More to the point: I did not expect Mitt Romney (of all people) to become my role model if I’m someday asked to do something that hard, simply because it’s right. But he is.
A Father and Son Converse... 