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Republicans' silence on Trump recalls the McCarthy era

2020-12-02T05:34:05.680Z


The Republicans' silence with Trump resembles the party's deferral with McCarthy during his anti-communist crusade in the 1950s.


Fact Check: Falsehoods About Voter Fraud 3:17

(CNN) -

The silence of Republican leaders in Congress on the unsubstantiated claims of election fraud by US President Donald Trump.

it becomes more wild and poisonous.

The silence increasingly resembles the GOP's deference to Senator Joe McCarthy during the worst excesses of its anti-communist crusade in the early 1950s.

In the McCarthy era, most Republican leaders found excuses to avoid challenging conspiracy theories they knew to be implausible, even as the evidence of their costs to the nation steadily mounted.

For years, despite their private doubts about his positions and methods alike, the top leaders of the Republican Party, notably the Republican leader of the Senate, Robert A. Taft - the Mitch McConnell of his day - passively or actively supported the McCarthy's scattered claims that there was betrayal and infiltration of communism.

A significant faction of Senate Republicans did not join with the Democrats in curbing McCarthy's power until the senator blew himself up with his accusations, in highly publicized hearings in 1953 and 1954, that the Army was infested with Communists during the presidency of McCarthy. also Republican Dwight Eisenhower.

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In many ways, the Republican Congressional response to Trump has paralleled the party's response to McCarthy.

Regardless of their private concerns about Trump's behavior or values, the vast majority of Republicans in Congress have supported Trump since his inauguration in 2017, in almost every way.

Republicans have brushed aside concerns about everything from openly racist language to their efforts to extort money from the Ukrainian government to fabricate lies about then-eventual Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden.

That pattern of deference has continued since the election, as Trump has made unsubstantiated claims that he lost only due to massive electoral fraud.

A number of state and federal courts have rejected those claims as lacking supporting evidence, but Trump has only increased his accusations.

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Trump expands his falsehoods and the Republican Party continues to support him

In an interview with Fox News on Sunday, Trump expanded his claims to suggest that the FBI and the Justice Department were part of a plot to defeat him.

After weeks of criticizing the Republican Georgia Secretary of State for not overriding the state's election results on his behalf, Trump this week extended his criticism to the state's governor, Brian Kemp, who is a Republican and staunchly conservative.

On Monday, Trump added a new Republican target when he launched a barrage of attacks on Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey after the state certified Biden's victory.

Regardless, as Trump's impeachments have grown increasingly free and aggressive, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell;

House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy and other senior Republican lawmakers in both houses have not raised an iota of dissent.

This is not to mention the vast majority of Republican governors in the country.

"Nothing has happened to me," Bill Kristol, a conservative strategist and Trump critic, said of the party's silence on the president's unfounded claims of fraud.

“It's like we had the Army-McCarthy hearings and everyone was calm.

Nobody is reconsidering anything.

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It took years for the Republican Party to free itself from McCarthy, and even then the split came only after such a formidable figure as Eisenhower, a sitting president and national hero, privately encouraged her.

As Kristol points out, with McConnell and other Republican leaders giving in to Trump so completely, and many in the Republican Party breathing a sigh of relief at the party's surprisingly competitive performance in the House and Senate elections, it is unclear where there is a critical mass that might develop resistance to him, despite his increasingly outspoken attacks on the basic pillars of American democracy.

"It was easier to go beyond McCarthy than it will be to go beyond Trump," predicts Kristol.

If anything, Republicans in Congress today have yielded even more abjectly to Trump's feverish claims than their predecessors to McCarthy's.

While Taft always supported McCarthy in public, a defiant minority of Republicans faced him in ways that today have been matched primarily by unelected Republicans who identify as "never Trumpists."

McCarthy and the birth of McCarthyism

Joe McCarthy was first elected to the Senate from Wisconsin in 1946, as part of a Republican boom that year, fueled by dissatisfaction with the transition back to a peacetime economy after World War II.

From that first campaign onward, McCarthy frequently branded any force that stood in his way - from the liberal Wisconsin newspapers to the Democrats running against him - as sympathizers or fully allies of the Communists.

"This communist infiltration is a vital issue in America," he insisted on a radio broadcast during that election, according to Thomas C. Reeves' full 1982 biography, "The Life and Times of Joe McCarthy."

These accusations did not make McCarthy unique at the time.

When the Cold War began in Europe and China fell to the communist forces of Mao Zedong, a wide range of Republicans and conservative Democrats raised the alarm about alleged communist infiltration through a wide range of American institutions.

The 1947 hearings of the House Committee on American Activities blacklisted the film industry of real and suspected communists in Hollywood.

McCarthy pushed himself to the head of this parade with a speech in Wheeling, West Virginia, on February 9, 1950. In which he claimed to have a list of 205 "active members of the Communist Party" in the State Department.

At other points, he changed the number of suspected communists to 57, but the speech set the pattern for the next four years of his fierce reign: radical and shifting indictments, the immediate deployment of new charges each time one was refuted, and the constant indictment. that his critics were (consciously or unconsciously) advancing the communist cause.

In this file photograph from June 9, 1954, Joseph McCarthy testifies against the United States Army during Army-McCarthy hearings in Washington.

McCarthy's rhetoric and Trump coincidences

In many respects, McCarthy's rhetorical style foreshadowed Trump's.

Like Trump today, McCarthy constantly tried to stoke resentment against supposedly soft, anti-American elites, whom he called "brilliant young men born with silver spoons in their mouths."

Just as Trump has repeatedly encouraged violence by his supporters, McCarthy presented himself as the "manly" alternative to his critics: "McCarthyism," he often declared, "is American sentiment with its sleeves rolled up."

McCarthy, like Trump, singled out journalists by name for the attacks during his speeches.

And, like Trump today, McCarthy insisted that only his supporters represented "true Americans."

(Roy Cohn, the savage attorney who was McCarthy's top aide in the Senate and decades later Trump's legal advisor, provided a living link between the two men.)

Many Republicans early on recognized the irresponsibility of McCarthy's infinitely shifting indictments.

Taft, the former Republican leader in the Senate, son of a former president (William Howard Taft) and such a revered figure in the party that he was known as "Mr.

Republican, "he privately expressed his doubts about McCarthy from the start.

As author Larry Tye recounts in

Demagogue

, his 2020 book on McCarthy, after Wheeling's speech, Taft privately said that the senator was "perfectly reckless" and complained that he had "made accusations that are impossible to prove" and "They can be embarrassing before we survive."

But in public, Taft almost always defended and encouraged McCarthy.

Although he later denied it, most historians agree that at first he told McCarthy to "keep talking and if a case doesn't work out, he should go on to something else."

When Harry Truman criticized McCarthy's mounting accusations in a speech to the US Legion, Taft called the president "hysterical."

The Republican leadership supported McCarthy

Almost from the beginning, a larger group of Congressional Republicans resisted McCarthy's wild accusations, more than those who have rejected Trump at any point in his presidency (and certainly since the 2020 election).

On June 1, 1950, Sen. Margaret Chase Smith of Maine, in her first term, in a statement joined by about half a dozen other Republican colleagues, addressed the Senate to denounce not only McCarthy but also to other party members who hoped to share "in victory through the selfish political exploitation of fear, intolerance, ignorance and intolerance."

Even Time magazine, a media mainstay of the anti-communist coalition, in the fall of 1951 put the senator on its cover with the headline "Demagogue McCarthy," according to Reeves.

However, the Republican leadership stood firm behind McCarthy in the early years of his rampage.

During an extensive Senate investigation into his initial accusations in Wheeling against the State Department, Reeves wrote, "Republicans supported McCarthy even though most understood his accusations to be fraudulent."

Whatever their private doubts about his claims, Taft and other Republican leaders concluded that McCarthyism was a political winner for the party.

That belief was reinforced by the achievements of the Republican Party in both the House and Senate in the 1950 midterm elections. And the additional victories that spread in the party to control both houses, in 1952, sparked an Eisenhower avalanche.

Gallup polls showed that about three-fifths of Republican voters viewed McCarthy favorably until early 1954.

The Republican Party suffered the consequences of McCarthy

In another parallel to Trump, Republicans in Congress were deferential not only because they viewed McCarthy as an ally, but also because they recognized him as a potential threat.

Journalist William S. White captured his skittish ambivalence when he wrote: 'In McCarthy, ashamed Republican leaders know that they have seized a red-hot bazooka, useful for destroying the enemy, but also likely to blister the hands of the forces that use it.

His private fear is that a lethal rocket could explode at any moment from the wrong end of the pipe.

Like Republicans in Congress now with Trump, Republican lawmakers found themselves following McCarthy into deepening waters of conspiracy theories.

A first hint of how far McCarthy could go came in June 1951, when he launched a 60,000-word attack on George Marshall, the brilliant World War II Secretary General of the Army and later Truman's Secretary of State.

It was in that speech that McCarthy famously (or infamously) declared that he was unraveling "a conspiracy ... so immense that it dwarfs any previous undertaking of its kind in history."

Yet even after that unhinged attack - the equivalent at this point, perhaps, of the chimerical claims of Rudy Giuliani, Sidney Powell, and other Trump attorneys at their mid-November press conference - McCarthy was honored with a space to speak at the next Republican Convention.

And even Eisenhower was intimidated enough by the senator's power to remove a passage from his speech in defense of Marshall when he campaigned in Wisconsin during the presidential race the following year.

Trump's legal future at the end of his term 2:30

McCarthy's fall

Like today's Republican Party under Trump, Republicans thought they could benefit from McCarthy's barking without feeling the bite.

But the bill expired for years to empower McCarthy after Eisenhower took office in January 1953. Congressional Republicans who had welcomed McCarthy's attacks on the Truman administration were caught in the crossfire when the senator pointed at Eisenhower.

During Eisenhower's first two years, McCarthy continued to allege communist infiltration of the Voice of America, the CIA, and eventually the cause that convicted him: the Army.

Even then, Republican opposition to McCarthy slowly coalesced.

Taft's death in 1953 eliminated a critical McCarthy defender.

But Republican leaders, like William Knowland of California, who was Taft's successor, wavered between defending McCarthy and trying to contain him.

And while Eisenhower consistently resisted a large-scale public confrontation with McCarthy, and Vice President Richard Nixon repeatedly tried to negotiate peace between the two, the rift inexorably widened.

McCarthy attacked the president more openly, and Eisenhower more quietly supported the government's moves against the senator.

As McCarthy's conduct became more indefensible, Republican Senator Ralph Flanders of Vermont, a leader in what might have been called the "Never McCarthy" of the day, publicly acknowledged what so few in his party would say: “The responsibility for this falls squarely on the heads of Republicans who have been obsessed with McCarthy's value to the party.

We are reaping what they sowed.

The parallels between McCarthy and Trump

Ultimately, McCarthy was destroyed for his overreach in the Army investigation, which responded to him when the Department of Defense presented detailed evidence that Cohn, his top aide, had systematically pressured the Pentagon to secure favored treatment for another staff member. McCarthy who had been drafted into the Army.

The national fever that McCarthy had ignited four years earlier seemed to erupt in a single cinematic moment, in June 1954, when Joseph Welch, the Army's patrician special prosecutor, defended another young man accused of communist sympathies for McCarthy with the immortal retort.

Don't you at least have a sense of decency, sir?

McCarthy's influence quickly declined after that.

That December, the Senate, which had conducted extensive investigations into McCarthy's behavior, finally voted to censor him.

(Even then, Republicans were split exactly halfway between support and opposition to the measure.)

His influence receded further when the Democrats, after winning seats in the 1954 election, regained control of the Senate, pushing McCarthy into the minority.

Embittered, isolated, and devastated by alcoholism, McCarthy died in April 1957.

McCarthy did not create the "red fear" of the early 1950s, but he magnified and intensified it.

In the same way, Trump did not create the anxiety about demographic, cultural and economic change that is at the core of his political movement, but he has sharpened those fears into a powerful political weapon.

Each man sparked enormous enthusiasm from parts of the Republican coalition, especially working-class voters without a college degree, and intimidated most Republican elected officials who feared his divisive impact on the party and the country into silencing them.

Reeves reports in his biography that while McCarthy was still at the top, in early 1954, Walter Lippmann, the most influential newspaper columnist of his time, wrote that the senator's goal was to establish himself as the "overlord" of the Republican Party.

«This is the totalitarianism of man: his cold, calculated, sustained and ruthless effort to make himself feared.

That is why he has been organizing a series of demonstrations, each designed to show that he respects no one, no position, "and no institution on earth, and that anyone he growls at will flee."

Each of those words could apply to Trump and the Republican Party today as well.

The cowering silence from McConnell and nearly every other prominent Republican as Trump extends his illusory fraud charges to a "conspiracy ... so vast" that encompasses the Justice Department, the FBI and the Republican Governor of Georgia, shows how much the outgoing president on silencing dissent across the party.

Some Republicans may fear Trump.

Others may find his fraud allegations a useful tool to weaken Biden or justify a new wave of voter suppression measures.

But whatever their motivation for allowing the baseless and corrosive claims of Trump, Mitch McConnell, Kevin McCarthy, and the vast majority of other Republican lawmakers are probably condemning themselves to the same withering verdict that history has applied to the party's predecessors they encountered. his own reasons for not objecting, as did Joe McCarthy, who for years tore the deepest values ​​of the nation.

Republican Party

Source: cnnespanol

All news articles on 2020-12-02

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