Review of “Demagogue”
Review of “Demagogue”
“Demagogue: The life and long shadow of Senator Joe McCarthy” by Larry Tye is a particularly timely read as the nation continues in the grip of another political bully, Donald Trump. The parallels in their methods are striking and the degree to which McCarthy held the nation in thrall during the 1950s mirrors the fealty of the Trumpenproletariat today. We know how the McCarthy story ended, and it offers hope that the nation will eventually turn its back on Trump and move on. Whether it learns the lesson is unclear, since in many ways Trumpism is a reincarnation of McCarthyism.
McCarthy was raised a Midwestern farm boy and got his start in business raising chickens. He had to drop out of high school, and when he returned much older than his classmates, he finished all four grades in a single year. But he never outgrew his envy and resentment of people with more affluent and elite backgrounds. He was a war hero (though not in all the ways he later claimed), but the experience gave him a lifelong hatred of the Army brass that led to his eventual downfall at the infamous Army-McCarthy hearings.
Unlike McCarthy, Trump was born to immense and ill-gotten wealth; his father relentlessly enforced the value of winning at any cost. Both McCarthy and Trump shared the same unscrupulous tutor, Roy Cohn, who excelled at smearing opponents and contriving grand conspiracies. The American public was and is still ill-served by Cohn’s legacy.
“For all the talk about McCarthy being a political lone wolf, he was never really alone and couldn’t have achieved his peculiar success alone,” said the cartoonist Herblock. “What sustained him was not so much his gullible followers and fellow-traveling demagogues as the tacit support of ‘respectable’ people who found it advantageous to go along with him, or at least to look the other way. They were the ones who kept him going.” For Trump, those include Mitch McConnell, Kevin McCarthy, Lindsay Graham, and for nearly all his tenure as Trump’s vice president, Mike Pence.
The McCarthy-led purge of key “China Hands” and the intimidation of countless others for fear of the same fate likely contributed to the US involvement in Korea and Vietnam. Skilled diplomacy might have prevented these quagmires.
The irony of McCarthy’s red-baiting tactics doesn’t escape the author: “The publication of these hidden hearing transcripts makes clear their eerie resemblance to the revenge by investigation and trial by hearing that were trademarks of Joseph Stalin’s Russia, and against which Joseph McCarthy railed. Both Joes pressured witnesses to name names. Each repeated questions to the point of badgering. Targets in Washington, as in Moscow, were encouraged to repent of their past beliefs and split with impenitent family members. Jews in both settings were in the docket in disproportionate numbers. McCarthy never employed Stalin-like physical torture, but the senator had few qualms about what could only be seen as psychological torment.”
Just as McCarthy begat McCarthyism as pernicious, anti-American demagoguery masquerading as patriotism, so now Trump has spawned Trumpism, a pernicious cult just as anti-American it its attacks on American political, ethnic, cultural, religious and gender diversity. McCarthy did the work of international communism, the way G.W. Bush’s invasion and military occupation of Iraq did the work of al Qaida and Trump is doing the work of Putin. It is long past time for Americans to learn the lessons of history, stop following self-promoting and hypocritical demagogues and put country before party for a change.
Tye concludes that McCarthy was undone by his personal cruelty, not his crusade. I think it’s both, together with McCarthy’s alcoholism. Trump is a teetotaler, but they share the qualities of solipsism, indifference to the truth, demand for personal loyalty, and ruthless bullying as their primary tool. Both fooled a credulous public willing to look the other way in order to satisfy a sense of personal grievance, for far too long.
Trump understands a truth that McCarthy also understood and exploited: the power of controlling the news cycle. McCarthy would time the end of his hearings so as to get his side out right before the evening news while giving the other side no time to respond. The extent to which the press played along made them enablers for much of McCarthy’s Senate career, although Edward R. Murrow stands out as a noteworthy exception. William F. Buckley, Jr, whose brand was his avuncular manner, was champion of the shouter McCarthy. Barry Goldwater, whose brand was his maverick independence, was another McCarthy toady. But after he was censured by the Senate, McCarthy found himself ignored by the press, which for him was worse than vilification, hastening his political and physical demise.
Tye spares no effort to appear fair-minded; McCarthy loved children and pets, enjoyed the company of friends, was a fervent Roman Catholic. McCarthy was able to be friendly towards people in private that he attacked and humiliated in public. To Tye, much of McCarthy’s nefarious behavior wasn’t personal, he genuinely believed he was serving a higher ideal in fighting imaginary communists and wasn’t concerned about the body count. Many of the people whose lives he destroyed—some literally driven to suicide—were unknown to him, but merely collateral damage by institutions fearful of the slightest hint of a red in their ranks.
Tye is also at pains to highlight even the weakest and most indirect connections between communism and some of his targets, straining to provide some cover for McCarthy’s red baiting. Whether his goal is balance, historical accuracy or a strained sympathy with McCarthy’s zeal, I felt Tye sometimes failed to fully acknowledging exactly how barbaric McCarthy’s destructive behavior became.
It is impossible to sugar-coat the damage McCarthy did to American politics. And it impossible to sugar-coat the divisiveness in America and destruction of its institutions, up to and including a treasonous assault on the US Capitol itself, that has been and is still being promoted by Donald Trump. America needs to learn the lessons of history before it is too late.
Add another one of the “respectable” people to McCarthy’s list.
“Dwight D. Eisenhower surrendered to Joe McCarthy on a train….
Eisenhower considered a public strike against McCarthy and had asked a speechwriter to add a short riff to a major speech in Wisconsin that would defend Marshall and assail McCarthy’s attack on him.
When top Republicans on the campaign train caught wind of Ike’s intention, they became alarmed. McCarthy had millions of supporters. Many were Catholic, which gave the GOP an opportunity to break the Democrats’ hold on the Catholic vote. Plus, the party might need Wisconsin to win the election. A senior Eisenhower adviser explained this political calculus to Ike. “Are you telling me this paragraph should come out?” Eisenhower asked. Yes, the aide replied. “Take it out,” Eisenhower commanded.
That night, in his speech, Eisenhower cautioned against the “spirit of violent vigilantism” in the fight for freedom. But he decried left-wing “contamination” in “virtually every department…of our government” and called for “the right to call a Red a Red.” Rather than assail McCarthyism, he sounded as if he were defending it. The Milwaukee Journal observed, “The general went far toward surrendering ethical and moral principles in a frenzied quest for votes.”
@EM,
Yes. The cowardice of Eisenhower in the fact of McCarthyism was on display in the book, and follows the lines of your post. At least Eisenhower had the excuse of being Republican. The Kennedys, who also kowtowed to McCarthy, didn’t even have that.
“in the face of McCarthyism”
Respectfully, I think that Joe McCarthy evils are not exclusive or even particular to the Republican Party, and which evils I am seeing increasingly across the political system. Tying him to the modern Republican Party makes as much sense as tying him to the modern Democratic Party. That is not to say that understanding McCarthyism is not important as his methods are constantly and successfully used.
However, I am more worried about Mike Pence and Mitch McConnell than I am Donald Trump. Trump is more of a disorganized attention hound whereas there are a number of other disciplined, ambitious fascistically inclined politicians. I am also more worried about the FBI, CIA, and NSA along with the other baker’s dozen or so security agencies than I am about the Republicans. Maybe, this is because I am no longer a Democrat, but the party left me decades ago. Going by memory: Chris Hedges said, the Democratic Party went conservative and the Republicans insane.
One party goes increasingly right going from conservative to bananas and the other tries to split the supposed middle by going increasingly conservative.
Maybe if the Democratic Party was what I remember it being forty years ago and not the corrupt shell of a party more concerned with money and control than governing, we would not be having a nearly uncontrolled Covid pandemic and the Orange Menace would never have been in office.
I’ll give you 10-1 this guy never voted Democratic in his entire life.
10-1? Too bad for me that I can’t take the bet. I could really use the money.
More to the point, just because what I said is unpopular with some people doesn’t make me wrong. Of course, it doesn’t me right either. Is there anything besides this kinda ad hominem?
Let me know how many years in the last 40 years the Democrats actually had the power to do much.
EM:
In SCOTUS (also), very few years have Liberal thinkers, believers, etc. have had a majority. Think I was quoting Chemerinsky then.
Run
the American Constitution is basically a conservative document. that’s probably a good thing, also an inevitable thing…countries like to preserve themselves.
the mistake is thinking that the Republican Party today is conservative: they are in fact radical to the point of treason, not to say madness.
you can be liberal and support necessary changes, especially when the status quo is shown to be corrupt, cruel, or just inadequate to meet the current situation, but you might, probably must, also support caution in making the necessary changes lest you “fix” something that causes the whole structure to fail.
J.Bird
I am inclined to agree with you. But I have to admit I don’t really know any facts that would support
“Democrat corruption” much less what amounts to treason. People are not very smart, and the D’s may have become what they are today just because that’s what it takes to get votes. And it does seem to be a worldwide trend.
Joel
Thanks for reminding us about McCarthy. Unfortunately “knowing history” is not all that easy. History depends on who is telling the story. I don’t know if anybody younger than me really knows anything about McCarthy, and I only know what I read in the papers or learned from my leftish friends. That said, we should not need to know much about McCarthy to see the evil, and the danger, that Trump and Trumpism represent.
I realize you are writing a review, which may not be the place for introducing evidence in support of your, or the author’s, thesis, but it’s hard to read “McCarthy did the work of international communism, the way G.W. Bush’s invasion and military occupation of Iraq did the work of al Qaida and Trump is doing the work of Putin.” without wanting to hear more evidence if not proof.
EMichael
I would offer a comment similar to what I said above. I don’t know enough facts to support your description of bipartisan cooperation with the McCarthy program. In particular i read somewhere that Eisenhower had to consider how to defeat McCarthyism given McCarthy’s popularity. Politics being the art of lying..for good or ill…it’s hard to dismiss whatever a politician says or does as “cowardice”: you can’t affect policy if you don’t win elections.
I would be careful on ascribing a lack of intelligence and not the project to make money in the form of capitalism as the single most important thing in the universe. If money increasingly seen as not only the most important thing, but the only thing, with the worth of everything else being measured by its monetary value, then people are going to live as if it is so. When the deliberately strengthened need for money to succeed politically is added, the corruption we have is just about guaranteed. The opportunities of sixty years ago with multiple chances of success in society are gone. Today, the only (mostly) real chance is to go to the right university, say the right lies, make the right social connections, and go into finance, the security state, or politics. Preferable as a trust fund child.
I could blather on, but this is supposed to be the comments.
JBird
what you say is true, but only part of the truth. when i say people are not smart, i don’t mean they are less inteligent than i am, or some “standard” by which we sort people into smart and not smart. I mean that the human brain operates in such a way that none of us are “smart enough” to manage the sorts of situations we create for ourselves. this includes me, you, and any genius you can think of.
somebody here put it rather well “we have to do something. this is something. we have to do this.”
as for money, i agree. but i don’t see any answer. if you are interested in such things, David Graeber wrote “Debt, the first 5000 years” in which he shows how societies without money still manage to make life pretty nasty for themselves. It is interesting to me that you use the term “success” in a way that sounds to me like you mean “have money.’ Not clear if you are speaking about the present situation, or if you were thinking of success as (in) something more important than having money.