Here is a class assignment. Compare and contrast the demagogue of my youth, Joseph McCarthy, with the demagogue of my old age, Donald Trump, so as to illuminate both of them.
Donald Trump is an unprecedented American figure. He is the greatest threat to democracy and the Republic since Robert E. Lee was near Washington and Lee never managed to storm the Capitol. He is the worst president ever in that he regularly disregards the constitution and says vile mean things about anyone who disagrees with him and threatens to put them in jail. Maybe Andrew Jackson and Andrew Johnson were pretty bad, but even Richard Nixon pales in comparison because, after all, Nixon wanted to steal an election not overturn the system and he felt sorry for having done that. But there are a number of figures in American political life that have been demagogues, which means people who use outlandish and irresponsible remarks so as to create or take advantage of a popular frenzy so as to gain public support. That allows for comparisons to be made.
Joseph McCarthy, humorously known as “Tailguinner Joe” because he shot at coconuts, was one of those World War II veterans that soon ran for Congress. Those included John Kennedy, the hero of PT 109, and the also heroic flier George H. W. Bush, who didn’t run until he could finish his Yale education as a first string first baseman, and also Richard Nixon who did honorable duty as a logistics officer in the Pacific. Soon after coming to Senatorial office, McCarthy jumped on the bandwagon of becoming an ardent anti-Communist and in 1950 announced that there were sheaves of names of people who were Communists in the State Department and elsewhere. Flashing loads of papers as evidence to the press, the correspondents only later found that the pages were just whatever was on his desk and named no names. But reporters were naive enough to think Senators wouldn’t just lie about such matters and the American populace were engaged in a cultural amnesia where the Thirties were seen in the light of the burgeoning Cold War rather than people who were sympathetic to Communism because of the Depression and their being what they ironically called “premature anti-Fascists”.
But there was real damage done to the American polity in that traditional civil liberties like So McCarthy maligned people slightly tinted with Communism and there were indeed real Communists like Judith Copeland and Alger Hiss and the Rosenbergs. As Eisenhower predicted, the end of McCarthy would happen when McCarthy went after the Army, overreaching himself and that happened when he sent Roy Cohen and David Shine to tour Army bases to dig up dirt and found that Major Paress a dentist at Fort Dix, had been raised to the rank of Major in the normal course of promotion despite having Communist relatives. The rallying cry was “Who promoted Paress?” The Army McCarthy Hearings, viewed on television, showed McCarthy as leering, oily, and smiling in embarrassment when confronted by Joseph Welsh, the minority counsel to the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations which McCarthy headed, and the Senate censured McCarthy, who was crushed by that rather than rallying his troops as a martyr to the anti-Communist cause, dying a few years later from alcoholism and perhaps disgrace. Politics moved on and the nation more or less healed.
The characteristics that marked McCarthy as a demagogue included flagrant lies, a mean disposition and presence, and an underlying ideology, which was anti-Communism, which led the epicene William Buckley Jr. to say on his “Firing Line” television program, that McCarthy might be crude but was on to something. Don’t throw out the real danger because it came from an unattractive source.
But there were real damages done to the American polity by such shenanigans. History was made unclear in the present and not just the past. It was true that some labor unions were Communist. The International Longshoremen’s Association in Honolulu was led by Harry Bridges and clearly Communist. The Oil Chemical and Atomic Workers International Union was Communist. But the overwhelming union movement was not. Jimmy Hoffa’s Teamsters Union was corrupt but not Communist. The steel workers union and and the United Auto Workers were not Communist, nor David Dubinsky’s Ladies Clothing Worker’s Union nor the CIO unions like the Amalgamated Clothing Workers Union headed by Sidney Hillman who during the Second World War served as an aid to FDR to keep union peace during wartime. But McCarthyism tainted unionism and not just the Hollywood Ten who refused to tell their Thirties associates and so were blacklisted along with numerous television figures even if Dalton Trumbo had only to write under an assumed name because he was such a good screnwriter.More important was that the fear of Communism led to the fear and loathing characterized by totalitarianism: a attributing evil to people engaged in civil discourse and punishing people for suspicious or unpopular views. It may not be unusual for there to be a backlash when even a successful war ends. That happened with the Alien and Sedition Acts under John Adams and the permission for the South to run itself after Reconstruction failed and the Palmer Raids after the First World War. Sometimes the retrograde events last just a few years as with McCarthyism, or a hundred years with Jim Crow.
Now turn to Trump. Like McCarthy, he is a crude, unattractive figure who is endorsed by people who should know better because he is on the right side of issues even though he goes overboard. Wall Street people like lower taxes but are displeased with pushing tariffs. Middle class people like strong measures on protecting the border but are uncertain about deporting long time residents. But Congressional Republicans side with Trump not only because of the threats to be primaried. They like cutting the Federal “Deep State” in that they have maligned bureaucrats for a very long time and in their gut find transgender people to be distasteful and think Ivy League universities should be reined in. So there is a frenzy around Trump even though there is no real or just past emergency to deal with. Pumping up the border issue into a crisis is made up in that there have been cross southern border illegal immigrants for a long time and, in truth, state economies depend upon them for being hard working people. So Trump has made the border into his Reichstag fire when there is no fire in Port;and or Chicago or LA but just proclaims that to be so and amazingly that is enough. Republicans are willing to make allowances for his lies. There were no cats and dogs eaten in Springfield, Ohio. There were no Social Security checks sent to 150 year olds. Obama was born in Honolulu not in Kenya. The East Wing was razed two days after Trump said it wouldn’t be destroyed. People read Trump to mean jokes or metaphors and so judicious remarks by Presidents are put aside.
Even though the present age, the age of Trump, unlike McCarthy’s, is thought to be just a cult of personality rather than an age of ideology, in fact our present time is deeply embedded with an ideology. Trump is a racist. He dislikes Hispanics and Africans. He wants immigrants to come from Norway. This ant-iwoke agenda is a way to reverse the liberal agenda of inclusiveness which dominated from the Sixties to the present century. Just as the progressives are also racist in asserting that Jews are white colonialists who should be eliminated from the Near East and return its Israeli Jewish settlers to their “homeland”: Boca Raton.
Unlike McCarthy, who had a short time in the spotlight however much his danger, Trump is harder stuff and remains resilient, always able to figure his way out of bad fixes. He repackaged himself as a marquee attraction, the assembler of real estate investors rather than investing his own money. He managed to wiggle out of three open and shut cases: the Georgia case of voter tampering; the hiding in Mar A Lago of secret documents, and the case against his inspiration of insurrection. He seemed done for after Jan. 6th but then got reelected by the voters as President in 2024. I am wondering how Trump will wiggle out of the Epstein mess. Don’t be surprised. Trump is Houdini. He has the intestinal fortitude to withstand just about anything and so I wonder what will be his kryptonite.
Thirty years from now, historians may wonder about why Trump was appealing, how a frenzy overtook America for a while until it recovered its bearings just as McCarthyism was a thing of the past by the time John Kennedy was inaugurated. But don’t be so sure. Trumpism could be extended if J D. Vance becomes President in 2028 or if the voting system is compromised if the Democrats do not take over the House in 2026. Trump is a more formidable figure than McCarthy ever was.