Senator John McCain’s death led to a worshipful celebratory frenzy inspired by Democratic and Republican establishment figures, as well as a mainstream media yearning for a return to the “normal” way of doing political business in Washington. Much of this celebration, coming even from important figures on the broad Left like Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, sprung up as a reaction to the boorishness of Donald Trump, despised by John McCain for having broken the “normal” Washington consensus on the NATO alliance and “free” international trade.

But McCain was far from a “moderate” Republican. As Ashley Smith pointed out, McCain was a hardline imperialist who never encountered an opportunity for US military intervention that he did not support. He actively participated in military actions in Vietnam that involved indiscriminate use of napalm and Agent Orange and strategic hamlets to crush the Vietnamese resistance to US imperialism — actions that clearly fall under the category of state terrorism. He also opposed divestment and sanctions against apartheid South Africa.

On the domestic front, he voted against making Martin Luther King Day a national holiday and supported a ban on abortion. While he voted against the Republican attempt to repeal the Affordable Care Act in July 2017, just a few months earlier he supported a tax-cut provision that subverted Obamacare by eliminating the individual mandate, while also supporting the broader — and highly inequitable — tax cut itself. McCain voted with the Trump administration 83 percent of the time; the US Chamber of Commerce gave him a grade of 80 percent over the course of his Senate career while the AFL-CIO gave him 16 percent.