There Has To Be Some Representation

Jack Hunter writes:

Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) died unexpectedly on Saturday at the age of 71.

I was born and raised in South Carolina and was his constituent for most of his three decades in Congress.

Graham became a member of the U.S. House in 1995. In 1996, my own political journey began in my early 20s as a Pat Buchanan conservative who avidly supported his insurgent populist bid for the Republican presidential nomination that year.

Graham entered the Senate in January 2003, three months after Buchanan cofounded this magazine as a much-needed conservative outlet opposing any potential war with Iraq. Three months after Graham became a senator, the U.S. invaded Iraq.

For all of that time, through the Clinton, Bush-Cheney, Obama, Trump, and Biden presidencies, right up until Saturday, Graham was arguably the most vociferous advocate in Congress for the neoconservative vision of American foreign policy. More than even most other neocons, Graham thirsted for U.S. intervention anywhere, at any time, for virtually any reason, and at any cost, including lives, foreign or domestic.

In this light, I can’t help but remember now how cheap Graham considered the lives of so many others throughout his entire political career.

In the early years of the U.S.–Iraq war, Graham was less distinguishable from other Republicans, almost all of whom considered unquestioning support for the war their core party identity.

But by 2008, the country had significantly soured on the war (by then, 63 percent of Americans were calling it a mistake), the Democrats had a rock star presidential candidate in then-Senator Barack Obama of Illinois, whose primary campaign message included a resounding rejection of Bush-Cheney and particularly the Iraq boondoggle.

Campaigning for his longtime neocon-brother-in-arms and 2008 GOP presidential nominee Senator John McCain (R-AZ)—who, on the campaign trail, said he’d be fine with the U.S. spending “a hundred” years in Iraq—Graham said the following:

Calling for more troops to be sent to Iraq was one of the most unpopular things John McCain could have done. Some said it was political suicide. But you know what? It was the right thing to do… because losing in Iraq would have been a nightmare for America.

America had already lost in Iraq, and for most Americans, it had already long been a nightmare. By the end of 2008, there were over 4,000 U.S. military deaths. The Pentagon concluded that nearly 77,000 Iraqis had died in the same period.

These numbers never seemed to be a consideration for Graham when he advocated sending even more U.S. soldiers into wars most Americans were done with.

Four years after the U.S. formally declared the Iraq War over, McCain and Graham lobbied in 2015 for President Obama to send 20,000 U.S. soldiers to Iraq and Syria.

This didn’t happen, about which Graham would say in 2015, right before he launched a presidential campaign of his own, “At the end of the day, I blame President Obama for the mess in Iraq and Syria, not President Bush.”

The U.S. didn’t wage war enough in Iraq. Surely that was the problem.

Graham’s visions of war-related death and destruction had become increasingly more bizarre with age.

In 2013, Graham was pushing for U.S. military action against Syria, declaring, “I believe that if we get Syria wrong, within six months—and you can quote me on this—there will be a war between Iran and Israel over their nuclear program.”

Graham also warned of Iran-backed terrorists smuggling a nuclear bomb into America if the U.S. didn’t drop bombs on Syria soon.

“It won’t come to America on top of a missile, it’ll come in the belly of a ship in the Charleston or New York harbor,” Graham said.

As a native Charlestonian, I can report that a nuclear bomb never did detonate in my home city, then or since.

A big war with Iran, however, did come 13 years later, launched not just by Israel but also by President Donald Trump, with Graham as the lead cheerleader. The war, still ongoing, is the culmination of a long-simmering Israel–Iran conflict that intensified after Israel launched its war in Gaza.

Barely two years ago, in May 2024, Graham said of Israel’s war on Gaza and Hamas, “When we were faced with destruction as a nation after Pearl Harbor, fighting the Germans and the Japanese, we decided to end the war by the bombing [of] Hiroshima [and] Nagasaki with nuclear weapons.” He called that “the right decision.”

“Give Israel the bombs they need to end the war,” the nuke-happy senator added. “They can’t afford to lose.”

The August 1945 U.S. atomic bombings of those two Japanese cities are estimated to have killed over 200,000, overwhelmingly Japanese civilians. President Dwight Eisenhower said in 1963 of those bombings, “the Japanese were ready to surrender and it wasn’t necessary to hit them with that awful thing.”

Eisenhower, a former general and no stranger to the horrors of war, here showed some regret for what had been done. Graham’s comments, by contrast, were flippant to the point of inhumanity about possible nuclear use. Moreover, Ike had been talking about a world war in which the U.S. was a direct participant, not a regional war waged by a foreign nation in a strip of land the size of Portland, Oregon.

Graham wasn’t finished beating his chest about using nukes on Gaza.

“Why is it OK for America to drop two nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki to end their existential threat war? Why was it OK for us to do that?”

Graham said he was OK with it. “So, Israel, do whatever you have to do to survive as a Jewish state,” he added. “Whatever you have to do.”

“Whatever” you have to do. This is not remotely in the realm of just war theory, not that Graham could have been expected to care about that. His reasoning did fit comfortably within Al Qaeda terrorists’ theories of war.

In late March of this year, roughly three months before his death, Graham basically said he didn’t mind if Americans died invading Iran.

You would think that at least this line would be a no-go zone. Apparently not.

On potentially sending U.S. ground troops to Iran’s Kharg Island, Graham told Fox News, “We did Iwo Jima, we can do this.”

‘Wait, what did he say?’ was the reaction of many.

The Daily Wire’s Matt Walsh was dumbfounded by Graham’s remark.

“Today Lindsey Graham, who for some reason has been the White House’s top spokesman for this war, went on TV and invoked Iwo Jima while calling for more escalation in Iran,” Walsh wrote. “Iwo Jima of course involved 26 thousand US casualties. It's extremely troubling that Graham has so much influence with the administration and has been so empowered to speak on its behalf.”

Walsh continued, “He is not conservative, he is not America first, he has never done a single thing in his career to advance the interests of actual American citizens, and he clearly wants this war to continue indefinitely and doesn't care how many Americans die in the process.”

Walsh was not overstating his case. Graham really didn’t appear to care about prioritizing any lives that happened to conflict with his political agenda.

Maybe some of this registered with me more than it should have because of my own antiwar politics. Yet for my entire adult, politically conscious life, this is what I saw year after year in this callous man—and I’m leaving out a lot due to the practical confines of this essay.

But from a South Carolinian, American, and certainly a pro-life perspective, I strive to never be dismissive of life (though I don’t always succeed), even that of someone who was so dismissive of it throughout his own.

Humans should never strive for inhumanity. I wish Lindsey Graham had thought the same.

And:

As the establishments of both major parties remain firmly wedded to Washington’s foreign policy consensus, particularly on U.S.-Israel relations, hard ideological factions on the right and left now seem willing to work together to present new challenges to that unanimity.

Exhibit A: In late June, Tucker Carlson announced he was done with the Republican party.

“How could I or any American voter support a political party that’s not loyal to the United States, that puts the interest of a foreign country above those of its own citizens?” Carlson said on the Can’t Be Censored podcast. He noted that he has been a lifelong defender of the GOP. Carlson is also an outspoken critic of U.S.-Israel relations and both countries’ war on Iran.

“I would not support the Republican party; there’s no chance I would support the Republican party,” the popular rightwing podcaster continued. “Not going to support the Democratic party. I don’t know what I’m going to do.”

Then Carlson did something. He called for a new, antiwar party.

Carlson told the Columbia Journalism Review earlier this month, “I’m going to help build a third party. There should be a good-faith effort to figure out what benefits the country.”

He said both Republicans and Democrats are in “lockstep” with each other on matters of “war and finance.” “If you vote for Trump and you still wind up in a regime-change war… then we need options,” he said. Those options are pretty limited when, as Carlson puts it, “(Democratic Senate Minority Leader) Chuck Schumer is strongly behind Trump’s foreign policy.”

Fellow America First conservative and former Republican Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene agreed with Carlson, telling Piers Morgan recently that she was “in talks with people” and that “serious conversations” were underway about creating a new party.

“There is a group of us that have literally fought the system, and I think there’s a group of us that, if we decide to align, we could launch a true America-focused party that doesn’t fall into the traps of Democrats and Republicans, but could align some serious players from the right and the left, and move forward,” Greene said.

While still in Congress, Greene was the first Republican to call the bloodshed in Gaza a “genocide.”

The difficulties facing the launch and success of a third party of course are immense. The requirements for ballot access are different in each of the 50 states and in many cases prohibitive. Competing with the two major parties in fundraising is hard enough, much less the high bar from access to public funding. The election landscape is littered with third parties that had emerged over similar bouts of voter frustration but were unable to break through the inherent obstacles.

But the fact that Republicans Greene and Carlson are even talking about a third party is an important signal, even if a new political vehicle never materializes.

Carlson is a formidably popular voice on the right. He is despised by the most hawkish conservative figures, who are constantly trying to cast him out for alleged demagoguery and antisemitism, but it's the threat he poses to the old neoconservative foreign policy consensus they appear to fear most.

For those who might recall Rush Limbaugh’s massive influence on the Republican party and the popular culture in the 1990s, particularly during the Clinton era and the Bush-Cheney aughts, the notion that Limbaugh would ever break away from the GOP for a third party was unthinkable. 2026 is very different than that time in so many ways, but it’s not hard to make an argument that Carlson is the most Limbaugh-esque rightwing influencer today, who now threatens to completely sever ties with Republicans and go his own electoral way. (That said, the wealthiest man in the world, Elon Musk, also promised a similar “America Party” a year ago, and not much has been heard about it since).

It is also notable that there are progressives and even Democrats who say they recognize the need for eschewing old left-right labels.

Progressive Young Turks host Ana Kasparian told Carlson in a 2025 interview that critics smear Carlson (rightwing antisemite) and herself (leftwing antisemite) as a way of preventing the two sides from getting together.

“It’s meant to discredit. And yeah, you’re right. It’s meant to stop these types of conversations from happening. Now, you are very conservative. I’m not very conservative. I have some views that lean more conservative than progressives feel comfortable with and that’s okay,” she said.

She added that she appreciated there was common ground on the populist message.

“I think that some of what you’ve been talking about lately hits at the heart of what I care most about, and that’s the importance of this country representing the American people,” Kasparian said. “The importance of the United States being a sovereign country that has politicians and a government that prioritizes the American people as opposed to a foreign government.”

This is an “America First” sentiment regularly shared by Kasparian’s co-host Cenk Uygur (who has also appeared on Carlson’s show), Glenn Greenwald (a left-leaning civil libertarian), Jimmy Dore (populist), and others. Breaking Points hosts Krystal Ball and Saagar Enjeti’s have modeled their popular podcast on elevating both left and right visions of putting U.S. interests first.

Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) and Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Hawaii) are two members of Congress from the right and left who regularly join forces on matters of war and peace, including recent efforts to stop both major parties’ establishments from integrating the U.S. and Israeli militaries, giving Israel unprecedented access to Pentagon contracts and weapons manufacturing.

Of course, the House Rules Committee blocked Massie and Khanna’s amendment.

Massie just lost his Kentucky Republican primary in large part because of his opposition to AIPAC, which spent major dollars to defeat him.

“AIPAC always gets mad when I put America first,” Massie said in October 2023 about a $14 billion aid package to Israel, which he voted against along with “Squad” Democrats Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), Rep. Rashida Tlaib and (D-Mich.), Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.).

“I do believe that there are issues that populists on the right and left can collaborate on,” Khanna told Politico last year. He was speaking directly about the effort to open up the Epstein files for which he and Massie were the lead proponents in the House, but in the same interview he said, “obviously, we come from different ideological perspectives, but there are areas where we have agreement in making sure that we’re preventing wars of choice overseas and transparency.”

While there are schisms over Israel and the Iran war on the right, the Democrats are experiencing their own shake-up, with insurgent — and vocally anti-Israel — socialist Democrats defeating pro-Israel establishment Democrats in the recent New York primary. Trump’s eagerness to paint these Democrats as “communists” taking over the party seems hyperbolic given that there have been only a half dozen such primary victories to date, in New York and a few other states. But these outspoken antiwar political newcomers are making party leaders nervous.

As Politico framed it two days after the NYC elections, “Centrist Democrats are freaking out about progressives’ winning streak.”

Carlson says he has no plans to run for president, for any potential new third party or any other, but to focus on what Responsible Statecraft’s Kelley Vlahos said on her most recent podcast, that there “is a War Party in this town, and it’s not Republican or Democrat. It’s both. It draws in the energy from the left and the right for more war, for using more militarism as the first tool in the toolbox.”

“There has to be some representation it would seem for all of us, particularly on foreign policy.”

That representation exists. How weak or strengthened, or even formalized it could become in the long term, we cannot know.

But the uniparty is not impenetrable. This, we know.