Donald J. McCarthy

Yesterday we wrote of Trump's syntactical style.  Today we bring up a character from the way back machine- Senator Joseph McCarthy (Republican Wisconsin).  Memories of McCarthy and his associated era of paranoia regarding communist infiltration into the U.S. government and culture have now mostly receded beyond living memory.  But the dynamic and the lives ruined without cause was not a proud one for the U.S.  McCarthy and our current Potus share numerous characteristics.  As the article relates toward the article's end, a mediocre, alcoholic senator who served but a couple of terms did damage, a Potus is and can do immeasurably more harm.  Folks speak of today's environment with social media and political polarization being rife for controversary and innuendo.  The 1950s had no online technologies and a relative level of bi-partisanship vastly different than today and yet we begat a McCarthy.  Perhaps the resentments and grievances perceived to fuel today's politics really are not that new merely lying in wait for a demagogue to embrace and fan them.

Conveniently if unsurprisingly, our Potus yesterday when asked about yet another birther trope instead of disowning it, he in his inimical way (see yesterday's post) just fanned it.  He is a propagandist on the level of Joseph Goebbels.  

From New Yorker:  

“… he had a reputation as a scofflaw. He had exaggerated his war record…Questions had been raised about whether he had dodged his taxes and where his campaign funds had come from…He plainly had no ethical or ideological compass, and most of his colleagues regarded him as a troublemaker, a loudmouth…

…The other senators on McCarthy’s subcommittee stopped attending the hearings, since McCarthy dominated everything, and so it became his personal star chamber. He could subpoena anyone...and was answerable to no one…

McCarthy was a bomb-thrower—and, in a sense, that is all he was. He would make an outrageous charge, almost always with little or no evidentiary basis, and then he would surf the aftershocks. When these subsided, he threw another bomb. He knew that every time he did it reporters had two options. They could present what he said neutrally, or they could contest its veracity. He cared little which they did, nor did he care that, in his entire career as a Communist-hunter, he never sent a single “subversive” to jail. What mattered was that he was controlling the conversation.

McCarthy had the support of a media conglomerate, the Hearst papers, which amplified everything he said, and he had cheerleaders in the commentariat, such as the columnists Westbrook Pegler and Walter Winchell, both of whom reached millions of readers in a time when relatively few households (in 1952, about a third) had a television set. He tried to block a hostile newspaper, the Milwaukee Journal, from his press conferences, and he egged on the crowds at his rallies to harass the reporters.

Right from the start, McCarthy had prominent critics. But almost the entire political establishment was afraid of him. You could fight him, in which case he just made your life harder, or you could ignore him, in which case he rolled right over you. He verbally abused people who disagreed with him. He also had easy access to money, much of it from Texas oilmen, which he used to help unseat politicians who crossed him.

To his supporters, he could say and do no wrong. Tye quotes the pollster George Gallup, in 1954: “Even if it were known that McCarthy had killed five innocent children, they would probably still go along with him.” His fans liked that he was a bully, and they liked that he scandalized the genteel and the privileged.

…What distinguished McCarthy’s claims was their outlandishness. He didn’t attack people for being soft on Communism, or for pushing policies, like public housing, that were un-American or socialistic. That is what ordinary politicians like Richard Nixon did. McCarthy accused people of being agents of a Communist conspiracy. In 1951, he claimed that George Marshall, the Secretary of Defense, the former Secretary of State, and the author of the Marshall Plan, had been, throughout his career, “always and invariably serving the world policy of the Kremlin.” Marshall, he said, sat at the center of “a conspiracy on a scale so immense as to dwarf any previous such venture in the history of man. A conspiracy of infamy so black that, when it is finally exposed, its principals shall be forever deserving of the maledictions of all honest men.”

Even Republicans were aghast. Marshall was almost universally regarded as a selfless public servant and a model of personal probity. The leader of the Party’s conservative wing, Robert Taft, expressed regret that McCarthy had overstated his case. But that was about as far as most Republicans had the nerve to go. Nothing came of McCarthy’s attack. For McCarthy, though, the important thing was that he had said something that was manifestly preposterous and had got away with it. He must have realized that he could get away with anything.

McCarthy lied all the time. He lied even when he didn’t need to lie…When he didn’t have any facts to embellish, he made them up. He found that, if he just kept on repeating himself, people would figure that he must be onto something.

He was incapable of sticking to a script. He rambled and he blustered, and if things weren’t going his way he left the room. He was notoriously lazy, ignorant, and unprepared, and he had a reputation for following the advice of the last person he talked to. But he trusted his instincts. And he loved chaos. He knew that he had a much higher tolerance for it than most human beings do, and he used it to confuse, to distract, and to disrupt.

…he preferred eternal damnation to admitting that he had ever been wrong.

…Tye wisely does not propose to draw many lessons for today from the story of McCarthy’s career. Our demagogue is far more dangerous than a senator who was not very popular even in his own state. Ours is the President, and he has henchmen running the State Department and the Justice Department who are dedicated to clearing a legal path for him to eliminate whoever stands in his way. The Trump Administration has done serious damage to the entire executive branch. It will take a long time to repair it.

But what is puzzling about McCarthy is also puzzling about Trump. Once McCarthy was in a position of power, he was incapable of modifying his behavior. He could not shut it off, even when everyone around him was begging him to. He had a single explanation for everything, and the only way he knew how to do his job was by threatening and prevaricating. Trump, too, is a one-trick pony. He says the same things on every issue and in response to every crisis.

Voters get tired of one-trick ponies. Not every civil servant with progressive views can be a spy, despite McCarthy’s insistence, just as not every story Trump finds unflattering can be fake, and not every investigation he dislikes can be a hoax. Endlessly recycled charges lose their sting. That is what happened to McCarthy. It was not that the public decided that Communists were not a real danger. They just got sick of the constant snarling and browbeating. They wanted it to go away.

When Joseph Welch arrived in Washington for the famous hearings, some of the people involved in the Army’s defense were shocked that he did not seem to have studied the case. They worried that he was unprepared. But Welch knew that he could not beat McCarthy on the facts, because McCarthy would just make up new facts. He saw that the only way to destroy McCarthy was to give him the opportunity to destroy himself. He let McCarthy rant and bully and interrupt for thirty days, and then, as the clock was winding down, he closed in for the kill. It was pure rope-a-dope, and a lesson, possibly, for Joe Biden…”

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/08/03/joseph-mccarthy-and-the-force-of-political-falsehoods