Trump, McCarthy and Fascism
Trump’s recent outburst — telling AOC and her squad to leave America — is so reminiscent of the tactics of Senator Joseph McCarthy in the 1950’s. Of course both men were schooled by the vile Roy Cohn, but what is most disconcerting is that Trump is getting support for his terror campaign in a way that McCarthy was never able to get away with. We must remember that when McCarthy went too far, his Republican colleagues turned against him. So far, they are too afraid of Trump to do that. This week Senator Lindsay Graham backed Trump, saying, “We all know that AOC and this crowd are a bunch of communists.” A little later, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy defended Trump’s racist tweets saying, “This is about socialism versus freedom.”
What this is really about is freedom versus Fascism. The British historian Eric Hobsbawm described the rise of fascism in Germany in the early 1930's.
Fascism was triumphantly anti-liberal. It also provided the proof that man can, without difficulty, combine crack-brained beliefs about the world with a confident mastery of contemporary high technology…. Nevertheless, the combination of conservative values, the techniques of mass democracy, and an innovative ideology of irrationalist savagery, essentially centered in nationalism, must be explained.
That is a perfect description of Trumpism. As The Times pointed out this morning, “ A major component of (Trump’s strategy)is to portray his opponents as not merely disliking him and his policies, but also disliking America itself.” This “L’etat, C’est Moi” stance is eerily reminiscent of earlier Fascist tactics. Rudolf Hess used to introduce Hitler at rallies saying, “The party is Hitler. Hitler is Germany, just as Germany is Hitler.”
Near the end of Joe McCarthy’s reign of terror, but before his own Republican colleagues turned on him and censured him, Edward R. Murrow ended his first expose of McCarthy’s lying fear based tactics.
We must not confuse dissent with disloyalty. We will not walk in fear, one of another. We will not be driven by fear into an age of unreason, if we dig deep in our history and our doctrine, and remember that we are not descended from fearful men — not from men who feared to write, to speak, to associate and to defend causes that were, for the moment, unpopular.
This is no time for men who oppose Senator McCarthy’s methods to keep silent, or for those who approve. We can deny our heritage and our history, but we cannot escape responsibility for the result. There is no way for a citizen of a republic to abdicate his responsibilities. As a nation we have come into our full inheritance at a tender age. We proclaim ourselves, as indeed we are, the defenders of freedom, wherever it continues to exist in the world, but we cannot defend freedom abroad by deserting it at home.
All Americans (but especially Republican legislators) should read that last paragraph and substitute “President Trump” for “Senator McCarthy”. This is no time for men and women to keep silent in fear of Trump’s wrath.
