“When it comes to Jan 6, I don’t expect to change minds on the truth of what happened. But years from now when my son learns about this in school, I’ll be able to look him in the eye, proud of the stand I’ve taken to defend democracy no matter the cost.” — Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-IL)
You won’t find the visage of Adam Daniel Kinzinger beside the word plucky in the Cambridge Dictionary, but you should.
One of only 10 House Republicans who in January 2021 voted for Trump’s second impeachment, Kinzinger has since been censured by his party, shunned (in writing) by 11 members of his family, and held at arm’s length by Democrats rightly suspicious of his hardline GOP past.
Kinzinger’s pluck has gotten him into other scrapes with his party: Soon after the vote, he turned his scorn on other Jan. 6 enablers — all connected in some way to the permission if not incitement of a Republican party focused only on zero sum outcomes.
The conservative response has been politically and personally brutal, even by 2022 standards. Kinzinger was savvy enough to read a situation made even worse by gerrymandering fellow Illinois Republicans, and so the Air Force veteran and reservist announced last October he would not seek a seventh term.
Faced with such a list of travails, many a beleaguered pol would at least push the pause button before discerning what comes next. Book deal, speaking circuit, Axios profile, Bill Maher. Just tone down the bitter, don’t close the door on something later on.
Not so Kinzinger. With no shot at either a US Senate or gubernatorial seat in a blue state, he’s sending out vibes about something bigger.
Asked earlier this month about a possible presidential run against his party’s sure-thing favorite, Huffpost political reporter Liz Skalka’s question was initially met with the usual maybes and ifs. But with little to lose, at least at the moment, Kinzinger let down the guard and got personal: “Even if he (Trump) crushed me, like in a primary, to be able to stand up and call out the garbage is just a necessary thing, regardless of who it is. ... I think it’d be fun.”
Kinziger’s pluck when aimed Trump’s way has been manna for a Democratic party always probing for cracks in an infamously uniform GOP. With the anticipated November thrashing, Dems will gladly exploit the feud Kinzinger hopes will continue after his departure from Congress.
Yet progressives are prone to reading more into conservatives’ conversion quips than is really there. Kinzinger’s case is particularly tempting to embrace, given he’s spending his final days raining down fire on kooky conservatives from Tucker Carlson to Marjorie Taylor Greene. But when asked by Skalka about his future as a moderate in a decidedly immoderate GOP, Kinzinger once again got real: “I don’t really know, because I don’t really know what the party stands for anymore … I’m just not a Democrat.”
At the realpolitik level, even if the otherwise conservative Kinzinger’s pluck turns out to benefit his own political future, we’ll all be the better for it.
Don Rollins is a Unitarian Universalist minister living in Hendersonville, N.C. Email donaldlrollins@gmail.com.
From The Progressive Populist, May 15, 2022
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