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
