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.