From McCarthyism's demise to Trumpism's triumph
The profound change: How collective consciousness, and trust, have shattered.
Connecting dots from Donald Trump to 1950s demagogue Joseph McCarthy is a straight-line exercise. What’s less direct is why challenges that exposed and disgraced McCarthy, orchestrated by a rumpled Boston lawyer with Cape connections named Joseph Nye Welch, would not work today.
Last week we dove into the remarkable scenario that ended McCarthy’s unsavory political career: Trump's role models: Joseph McCarthy and Roy Cohn. This week it’s about similarities, differences, evolving journalism, diffracting American culture — and a perceived threat to democracy.
It starts with Trump’s and McCarthy’s common adviser:
Roy Cohn
A young Roy Cohn played a key role in Joseph McCarthy’s witch hunt for “Communists” and “subversives” in American society, following his controversial prosecution (with execution) of “spies” Ethel and Julius Rosenberg.
An older Roy Cohn played a key role in advising Donald Trump about everything from political attack tactics to fending off federal lawsuits over housing discrimination to personal and business relationships.
Trump sometimes called Cohn 15 or 20 times a day, soliciting advice, honing messages, building on the McCarthy approach; at one point Cohn referred to Trump as “his best friend.” Cohn also introduced Trump to Mob figure Tony Salerno, among others. Cohn was disbarred in New York for bribery and unprofessional conduct (coercing a deathbed signature to abscond with assets was one allegation) despite Trump appearing as a character witness.
Cohn became infamous, portrayed in Hollywood by James Woods (“Citizen Cohn”), Al Pacino (“Angels in America”) and Jeremy Strong (“The Apprentice”) among others, renowned for unscrupulous viciousness, a closeted gay man who attacked homosexuals in public while insisting he was not dying of AIDS (though he did).
It has been reported that the last person he spoke to was Trump.
And so McCarthy’s and Trump’s crucial adviser turns out to be the same man. Yet this chilling personal through-line would mean little without a changing American landscape:
How ‘news’ has evolved
ABC news, then a fledging network, decided to broadcast Congressional hearings on Joseph McCarthy’s conduct gavel to gavel, across the nation. Day after day for more than a month as many as 80 million people watched parts of this slow drama unfold; housewives, schoolkids coming home, office workers in a break room, all witnessing the same things in real time. Many talked about it over dinner or at the water cooler.
That single-source, comprehensive coverage would never happen today. A fractured, polarized media would be “spinning” and “analyzing,” grabbing selective sound bites, people turning to different outlets to reinforce their own political opinions, nothing presented unfiltered, hour after hour.
A collective consciousness, built on shared observation in real time, could not coalesce. Thirty days into the hearings, when Joe Welch demanded of Joseph McCarthy, “At long last, have you left no sense of decency, sir?”, the cumulative impact that turned his question into a breaking point would not exist.
Which leads to “credibility”
In the 1950s, a hang-dog Boston lawyer wearing a bowtie wielded credibility. When Welch produced photos proving that McCarthy and staff had doctored images, also proving a letter supposedly from J. Edgar Hoover was fabricated, no one doubted his veracity.
Today?
Who’s to say the Boston lawyer and his colleagues weren’t the real fabricators, maybe using AI? Joe Rogan could go there, Rachel Maddow elsewhere, and a whipsawed public would find no common ground. There is no Walter Cronkite, “the most trusted man in America,” as litmus test.
Who won the election? What happened on January 6? Is Harvard University anti-Semitic? “Hard proof” no longer is the deciding factor, because “evidence” is accepted based more on who offers it than facts mustered.
When Welch asked McCarthy the fulcrum question, whether at long last he had no “decency,” that would be laughable today, because the obvious answer in the public’s mind would be, “Of course not, who does?”
Then there’s President versus Senator
Joseph McCarthy became powerful for a short time, but he was a Republican Senator from Wisconsin, not President of the United States. When he was discredited and disgraced, Republicans joined to censure him. He died within a few years reportedly of liver disease (rumors of severe alcoholism seemingly affirmed).
Donald Trump, impeached twice, indicted multiple times, seems impervious to moral judgement, and as a re-elected President public opinion has ruled in his favor. Why this is so circles back to the above points, but also a President has far greater capacity than a Senator to dominate news mini-cycles, use executive orders and appointments to advance his agenda let alone bunker-busting bombs.
Richard Nixon might have argued otherwise, but Nixon did not have Roy Cohn for a mentor. And unlike now, facing clear evidence, the Republican Party still was willing to censure its own.
The takeaway?
There always are those who seek to shape public opinion in dangerous or self-serving ways, from Mad Ave to corporate headquarters, Pentagon, Congress, White House, pulpits and bully pulpits.
Then there always are those who see those attempts as unique apocalyptic threats. Always.
It might be true that this time, Chicken Little is right, the sky is falling, the Constitution is shredded, habeas corpus eliminated, press neutered, academia dominated, the judiciary will not save us, we can bomb anyone anytime, and “enemies of the state” (meaning enemies of the President) will be removed one way or another.
Then again, we can look for small solace locally, see that many of our towns are better managed, more civil, more representative than they were a few years ago.
So the hope is that the big pendulum will swing, must swing, even if we don’t see how or when — even if characters like Joseph Nye Welch no longer are in position to give it a push.
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The Joseph Welch sense of decency comment was published on the front pages of the main stream media of the time, a few newspapers and the few tv channels. Today there are thousands and thousands of online sources plus AI which makes lies seem true for an administration of unqualified loyalists led by a megalomaniac draft dodger who “feels like a warrior.” The Republican Party who told Richard Nixon he needed to resign seems dead and gone. Are there any Republicans with a sense of decency who will cross the aisle to tank the big ugly bill? Truth matters. Justice matters.
But though McCarthy died, McCarthyism never did. You and I remember when "far left" meant the likes of Stalin and Mao. To this day some "moderate" Democrats label Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Elizabeth Warren, and anyone who advocates for economic justice as "far left." Unlike the far-leftists of yesteryear, these people are firmly committed to the democratic process; they're so committed to it, they'd like to see more of it.
So what's happened over the decades? The Republican Party has moved rightward, ever rightward, starting with Nixon's "southern strategy" of welcoming all those racist white Southern Democrats into the GOP. The process accelerated with Reagan, who welcomed the racist, sexist, and generally disgruntled white voters and fed them union-busting and tax cuts for corporations and the mega-rich. Did the Democratic Party take a stand against this? It did not. It moved rightward, ever rightward too, just not as far right (or as racist) as the GOP. (Glass-Steagall was mostly repealed under Clinton.)
So obsessed were the Democrats and all too many of us with commies under the bed, in the unions, and in the civil rights movement that we (especially white people) didn't recognize what was happening right out in plain sight: J. Edgar Hoover and his FBI weren't exactly subtle, and neither was the Reagan administration. And even those of us who considered ourselves woke were shocked by the first months of Trump II.