“McCarthyism at its worst!”
That’s what the commander-in-grief tweeted the other day in reference to Robert Mueller’s Russia probe. What an ironic reference and all-too-apt metaphor.
In the early 1950s “McCarthyism” was synonymous with the headline-grabbing, “Red Scare” paranoia created by Wisconsin Republican Sen. Joseph McCarthy. His loud, accusatory, down-to-earth speaking style resonated with a lot of Commie-fearing Americans for several years. And his self-serving, infiltration crusade was enabled by a media easily drawn to his Cold War predictions of America’s imminent ruin. He made the House Committee on Un-American Activities must-cringe optics.
McCarthy underscored his shameless, prophetic prose with false charges that ruined careers and lives. By the middle of 1951, “Tailgunner Joe” McCarthy was warning his fellow senators of “a conspiracy so immense and an infamy so black as to dwarf any previous such venture in the history of man.”
That will dominate more than a few pre-Twitter news cycles.
And it sounds like a perverse precursor to President Donald Trump, the fabulist-in-chief. McCarthy’s fear-mongering playbook obviously survived: Play to societal anxiety, find scapegoats, blatantly lie and make false charges to further an agenda and bully fellow members of Congress to discourage those inclined to call your bluff and call out your lies.
McCarthy kept it going for three years because he had a complicit, clamorous base: those who shared his Red Scare anxieties, liked his wise-guy rhetoric and enjoyed watching the elites squirm.
It would, in the end, all come crashing down when McCarthy was ultimately censured by the Senate that condemned his wanton witch hunt ways and removed him from any committee seats. He was then largely ignored–including by the media–for the duration.
But what an unhinged, maliciously melodramatic run it was–and a reminder of what can befall America when too much power, complemented by raw nationalism, is amassed at the people’s expense.
One other familiar aspect to the Trump-McCarthy parallels. McCarthy’s chief counsel during the height of the Red Scare ‘50s was Roy Cohn. The same “punch first and never apologize” Roy Cohn who became Trump’s mentor and lawyer in the 1970s and ‘80s.