He acquired the sobriquet “maverick” in the mid-’90s

Beyond the religious right, the governor of Alaska was a relative unknown. Palin introduced herself at the Republican National Convention as a real American from the small town of Wasilla, population ten thousand. “We grow good people in our small towns, with honesty, sincerity, and dignity,” she said, citing “a writer.” This was remarkable not only because the writer was Westbrook Pegler — the ’30s-era John Bircher, anti-Semite, and isolationist who lives on in the far-right quotations of our era — but also because John McCain wasn’t grown in a small town or even in a state: he was born in the Panama Canal Zone when the Panama Canal Zone was a US territory. He grew up hearing his father recite Victorian poetry about empires and civilizing missions; now here he stood with a witless reactionary whose folksy-seeming family soon devolved into a reality show. He invoked Kipling; she foreshadowed Duck Dynasty.

THE END OF the American Century feels like the end of something else: a novel, maybe, that we thought would end differently. Trump’s victory struck many people as implausible, but plausibility is as much a measure of narrative as a measure of politics. What kind of story do you think is being told? Where are we along its narrative arc? What is believable in the plot and what is beyond the pale of plausibility? Which reversals or twists would be in keeping with the genre and which would break the genre’s rules? Does the story have a moral?

Obama and McCain were the American Century’s last literary statesmen, and they presided over its decline. Both catered to the desire to see America as a text, as something legible, and both assumed its futurity. Obama was the narrator whose every speech added a paragraph to the American story, moving all of us, the expansive we of “Yes we can,” ever nearer a promised land. McCain was not a narrator but a character — a hero rather than an everyman, but no less literary for being heroic. He summoned Hemingway’s foreign fighter above all, but also older archetypes: the captivity narrative of the 17th and 18th centuries, the imperial adventures of the 19th. His heroism was always twice-told, never not an old book. In every Obama story, something is transcended; in every McCain story, something is preserved.

Refusing to tip his vote in advance, elevating the suspense to a level any writer would envy, he gave the dramatic thumbs-down on the Senate floor. The Republican bill was dead; the maverick lived on. Never mind that his was not a defense of Obama-care, but simply a call to dismantle Obamacare via the Senate’s “regular order.” Such was the McCain mystique that his own recent medical needs channeled pathos rather than hypocrisy. Americans celebrated as though the center had held.

But it has been a season of such pivotal figures, one after the other. McCain was one more figure by the thread of whose personality the American future seemed to hang. Sally Yates, James Comey, Robert Mueller, Anthony Kennedy, Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Ours is an era of heroic politics, or at least we make the mistake of thinking of it as such. Liberals especially have painted themselves into that corner, when in fact the real lesson of this upside-down Great Man–ism should be that a heroic politics is a broken politics.

The maverick was most appealing, paradoxically, when he issued a hoary ode to noble traditions, to the faith of his fathers, to the Senate, to the way it used to be — as if it ever was what it used be.