Senator John McCain, who died Saturday of brain cancer at age 81, was a paradox. By any reasonable political measure, he was a highly conservative legislator, who voted in line with the preferences of his Republican party almost all the time. He opposed abortion and gun control. He was a deficit hawk who wanted the federal government to stop funding a long list of popular programs, including the nation’s passenger railroad system and public television. He supported the death penalty and a constitutional amendment banning flag-burning, led the drive to pour billions of dollars into defense buildups, and advocated a hawkish and interventionist foreign policy. And yet, many movement conservatives considered him an enemy, while moderate Republicans and even many Democrats viewed him as an ally. Why?

For starters, McCain earned his “maverick” label by staking out positions on certain issues that conservatives deemed heretical. He was a chief sponsor of a campaign finance law that irritated many of the Republican party’s deepest-pocketed donors. He was one of the leading Republican advocates calling for government action to address climate change, despite some conservatives’ insistence that the whole concept of global warming was a hoax. In the face of growing rightwing xenophobia, he advocated a path toward citizenship for immigrants who had entered the country illegally. He cast the deciding vote last year against the Republican attempt to repeal the Affordable Care Act.

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McCain was a conservative but wasn’t bound by conservative ideology. He was a throwback to Republicans of bygone decades who considered each issue on its merits, without worrying too much about what polls or ideological table-keepers might say. He was capable of changing his mind, as he did when he regretted having voted against the creation of a federal holiday honoring the civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr, and for having given Sarah Palin a platform – as his running mate during his 2008 presidential campaign – from which to corrupt the political process with her know-nothing populism.

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On other issues, he was brave and stubborn enough to stick to his guns, even when it would have been to his advantage to shift with changing political winds. During the Iraq war, he relentlessly denounced “enhanced interrogation techniques” such as waterboarding as torture, even though they were supported by two-thirds of Republican voters. More recently, he stood up to Donald Trump in support of free trade and international cooperation with US allies.

He was guided by his principles, his concern for the Senate’s institutional values, and his belief in bipartisanship. In an impassioned speech he delivered on the Senate floor last summer after returning from his first round of cancer treatments, he implored his colleagues to reject tribalism, embrace the obligation to work collaboratively, and accept the necessity of cooperation and compromise in order to achieve incremental progress. “Stop listening to the bombastic loudmouths on the radio and television and the internet,” he insisted. “To hell with them. They don’t want anything done for the public good. Our capacity is their livelihood. Let’s trust each other.”

McCain was one of the few politicians capable of cutting through the modern cynicism about politics and politicians

The things that McCain stood for gained added force from what he was and what he had been through. It was an inescapable part of his political biography that his plane was shot down while he was on a combat mission during the Vietnam war, that he was nearly killed by a crowd when he parachuted into Hanoi, and that he was then imprisoned, starved and tortured by the North Vietnamese regime. When the communists realized he was the son of the admiral in charge of all US naval forces in the Pacific, they offered to release him; when he refused to leave without the other PoWs, they rebroke his arm, knocked out his teeth and kept him in a closet-sized “punishment cell” for the next four years.

The late writer David Foster Wallace, in a perceptive essay about the Arizona senator’s 2000 presidential run, noticed that McCain’s personal history of having voluntarily suffered for his code of honor gave him “the moral authority both to utter lines about causes beyond self-interest and to expect us, even in this age of spin and lawyerly cunning, to believe he means them”. And his personability and independent reputation allowed him to come across as a politician “who actually seemed to talk to you like you were a person, an intelligent adult worthy of respect”. McCain was one of the few politicians capable of cutting through the modern cynicism about politics and politicians.

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Play Video 1:57 Five times Donald Trump refused to pay tribute to John McCain - video

For that reason, it was probably necessary for Trump, as a presidential candidate in 2016, to declare that McCain was “not a war hero”, on the grounds that “I like people that weren’t captured”. The logic of Trump’s candidacy required him to lay waste to nearly all American norms and institutions. McCain’s heroism, as well as his idealism about politics, constituted a standing moral reproach to Trump’s cynicism.

America will miss McCain. There is no one like him left in Congress. But his memory may serve as an inspiration for members of both parties who seek a way out of the country’s present political morass.