No One Mourns the Wicked

Is it wrong to celebrate the death of a political or ideological opponent? This question came up when Charlie Kirk was murdered, and is again being asked as some people celebrate the death of Lindsey Graham. It will be asked again when you-know-who finally shuffles off this mortal coil.

As someone who loves life, I am not naturally inclined to celebrate death. However, if a person properly understands the value of human life, then it would be wrong to mourn every death. Some deaths are actually a good thing. When people with advanced dementia finally pass away, a feeling of relief among the survivors makes sense. Their life as a human being drained away bit by bit over the course of many years. The death of their body, and an end to their suffering and the suffering of the family, is bound to bring a mix of feelings — but relief is likely to be one of them. And that is entirely proper.

This is assuming the person who died was a net value to your life. What about when it’s the opposite? What about people who make your life and the world a worse place? Is it wrong to celebrate the death of someone like Hitler or Stalin or Mao? Of course not! If you value human life, then the death of these monsters is very much to be celebrated. This is not a contradiction to the principle that life is a value — it is actually an instance of it.

Of course, most people —even most bad people — are nowhere near that level of evil. I wrote about how disgusting it was to celebrate the death of Charlie Kirk. I was not a fan of Kirk, but he was not a mass murderer or megalomaniacal dictator. If he’d died of natural causes, I probably wouldn’t have had strong feelings about him at all, just a vague sympathy for his wife and children. But because he was a victim of political violence, it was absolutely wrong to in any way celebrate his passing.

Lindsey Graham is a different matter. For most of his career, he was a decidedly mixed case. He was often good on foreign policy, but bad on matters of personal freedom. For most of his career, he was a standard conservative (with all the virtues and flaws that entails). If he had died ten years ago, it would have been wrong to celebrate his passing. Just because someone has different political views from me doesn’t make him a bad person. But much like the dementia patient whose mind slowly ebbs away until little of what made him the person he was remains, Graham sold his soul for power, essentially surrendering his mind to the MAGA cult.

When Trump ran for office in 2016, Graham famously called him “unfit for office,” a “jackass,” and a “race-baiting, xenophobic, religious bigot.” He tweeted, “If we nominate Trump, we will get destroyed. And we will deserve it.” But when Trump won the nomination and then the election, Graham betrayed his own judgment—his own mind—and decided that access to power was more important than principle. His sycophancy and evasion regarding the January 6th riots are legendary, prompting former DC police officer Michael Fanone (who was brutally beaten in the riots) to call Graham a “worthless scumbag” and to go on to say, “If there is a hell, I hope you’re in it.”

You could argue that the good in Graham died years ago, and so his actual death is hardly the tragedy it might have been. Also, at seventy-one, his passing was only slightly premature (76.5 is average for males in the U.S.). Unlike with Kirk, no spouse or children are left behind, so it’s not even obvious for whom you might feel empathy were you so inclined. (The joke around DC is that it’s a huge tragedy for the male escorts in town, but somehow I’m confident they will find the strength to carry on.)

So, while I’m not opening a bottle of champagne to celebrate Graham’s passing, I’m also not going to mourn or pretend to mourn. On balance, his absence from the world is probably a net positive. The same can be said of many of the politicians and intellectuals who’ve brought us to where we are today. No, none of them, thankfully, are at the level of history’s worst power-lusters. But they are bad enough. They have made my life worse. They have made my country worse. They have made the world worse.

That said, I think we need to be careful about publicly celebrating someone’s death, especially if such celebration could be construed as advocating death for others of his ilk. Graham was not a Hitler or Pol Pot. He probably had people who loved him (and not only those who did so at an hourly rate). But let’s not pretend he was a good man. And let’s not stir up false outrage about those who do celebrate his death, when the fact is that in these tribal times, the Right is as likely to display such inappropriate glee as the Left. In this, I think both sides could do better. It behooves us all to act with decorum when a public figure dies, out of respect for the institutions of a free society, if not out of respect for the particular person. But this should never extend to faking the reality of who that person was.

If you, like Lindsey Graham, live a dishonest life, grasping at power and protecting bad people from the consequences of their actions, I don’t think it’s reasonable to expect anyone to be sorry you are gone. Put succinctly by composer/lyricist Stephen Schwartz: “No one mourns the wicked.”