From Red Scare to MAGA: It’s an old story we’ve seen before
Have you no sense of decency?
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“The arc of the moral universe is long,” Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. said, “but it bends towards justice.”
I still believe in that optimistic, long-term view, but we also know that the arc of American history on the path to “a more perfect union” is a place of many detours and culdesacs that do take us backward.
It is our fate — largely our own doing — to live at a time when the arc is going backward. Backward, perhaps, to the Gilded Age of the 1890s. The president likes to invoke William McKinley, for example, as an ideal, but the 25th president is, at best, a shady role model.
The 47th and the 25th
As columnist Pascal Riche noted in Le Monde — the French know our history better than we do — “Trump adores McKinley because, he says, he was a ‘successful businessman’ — actually, not at all: he was a lawyer — and no doubt also because, after a very short war, he forced Spain to cede Cuba, Puerto Rico and the Philippines to the United States. Above all, he is thrilled because McKinley was the ‘Tariff King,’ who ‘made our country very rich through tariffs and through talent.’ ”
But the Age of McKinley, not unlike our age, was a time of vast income inequality and, while great fortunes accumulated — think John D. Rockefeller or J.P. Morgan — most Americans survived in a hand-to-mouth economy. And notably, McKinley learned that high tariffs were not great economic policy and eventually changed his mind.
A more recent backward move occurred in the late 1940s and 1950s when, as Clay Risen documents conclusively in his excellent new book Red Scare, many Americans fell in love with a bombastic demagogue who alleged a vast conspiracy — the deep state — determined to destroy the country from within. The demagogue was, at best, a minor political character from Appleton, Wis., when he captured the national imagination with a cascade of lies, innuendo, character assassination and intimidation, a movement that took his name — McCarthyism.
Before Sen. Joseph McCarthy was exposed as a fraud — primarily on national TV and importantly by some of his own Republican colleagues — he led a crusade that cost thousands of Americans their jobs simply for what they said or believed or who they associated with. Some of the victims were famous, like the celebrated Hollywood screenwriter Dalton Trumbo and the theoretical physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer. Most were secretaries, office workers, government clerks and academics. The common thread connecting all these “dangerous” Americans was a pathological fear of “communist influence.”
While there were Americans willing to embrace communist ideology, particularly during the horrible economic downturn that was the Great Depression, the existence of a vast communist conspiracy was a damaging lie. A big lie on the order of “they’re eating the cats” or the American press is “the enemy of the people” or the election was “stolen.”
“The Red Scare had inflamed a passionate core of hard-right conservatives,” Risen writes, “who were prepared to believe the worst about the government and liberals, and act on it.”
The era left a permanent scar on the left, one measured not only in lives and livelihoods lost, but the deepened and lasting divide between moderates and progressives. But it transformed the right to a much greater extent. The Republican Party had accepted the hard right into its ranks after it had refused to deploy anti-communism in the 1948 presidential election. [Dwight] Eisenhower and his allies managed to push it back out, but they had shown the possibility of capturing the party, even if doing so might take decades.
The Republican Party that McCarthy inflamed in the early 1950s never went away and now the party has been captured by a modern equivalent, an even more dangerous and unhinged “core of hard-right conservatives” determined to take a chain saw to the American economy, health and environmental science, higher education, Social Security and, perhaps most dangerous for the future, the nation’s credibility and security with both friends and foes.
To read Risen’s account of McCarthy’s wild ride to censure by his Senate colleagues feels like a page out of today’s political news, including attacks on college curriculums, public libraries, art and humanities, as well as sinister assaults on gays, people of color and virtually anyone who stood for free speech and free association.
In short: The current hard-right playbook is nothing new. We just don’t remember the history of how hurtful and entirely counterproductive the McCarthy era and all its antecedents were to millions of Americans. If anything, Donald Trump has perfected the tactics of an earlier dark time and expanded them.
We should never forget the perfect symmetry of the fact that Roy Cohn, McCarthy’s chief aide, “the chief executive of McCarthy, Inc.,” as Risen writes, would later become Trump’s personal lawyer. It was a perfect match in both cases given Cohn’s “viciousness, his vindictiveness, his willingness to lie.”
McCarthy behind the mic, Roy Cohn (right) behind the man
McCarthy had his villains — a few communists, though not even remotely close to the vast numbers he claimed, and gays. Yet, with all his blustering and damage, McCarthy could never precisely define how a handful of these “dangerous” people presented such a great massive threat to the country.
Our present demagogue has his Venezuelan gangs, his crusade against antisemitism that is more correctly a cover for attacks on higher education and his “anti-woke” agenda that largely aims to erase history rather than understand it. And, of course, Trump and his hard-right followers have updated McCarthy’s anti-gay attacks by targeting a new community of “villains,” transgender and non-binary Americans, a “dangerous” group that the Pew Research Center says comprises about 1.6% of the population.
The point has never really been about any actual “threat,” but merely the need — as every authoritarian regime demonstrates — to have groups and individuals to vilify and diminish, someone labeled “the other” that can be made the focus of scorn and hatred.
McCarthy, for a relatively short time before his disgrace and death, molded his angry, aggrieved, fearful followers into a potent voting bloc and then, as Eisenhower famously said, “It’s no longer McCarthyism, but McCarthywasm.”
Ike was wrong.
McCarthy never made it to the White House or even a serious leadership position in the Republican Party, but his influence smoldered for decades at the conservative fringe. Today his legacy is the party.