Richard Sennett’s article in the Guardian, “McCarthyism stalked my family. Its paranoia contains a lesson for Trump’s second term” is well titled, but, as usual, the lesson is not the one the Left thinks it is.
Professor Sennett’s article treats the Second Red Scare as if it were simply an eruption of irrational hatred. This treatment of the McCarthy era was the standard one when I was young, but feels quaint now. The Venona Project established that when Senator Joe McCarthy claimed that many senior people in the American federal government were Soviet agents, he was right. The link takes you to a 2015 post by Patrick Crozier that I recommend you read. I also recommend you read Niall Kilmartin’s comment – McCarthy was right, but he was not a nice man. Professor Sennett is correct to say this about how McCarthy and Roy Cohn chose their targets:
They attacked public figures often arbitrarily, but if they met with resolute resistance, they tended to move on and find other targets. People such as the playwright Arthur Miller repelled McCarthyite charges through vociferous counterattacks, while more compromising ex-commies such as the choreographer Jerome Robbins suffered sustained persecution. My uncle, threatened by the FBI, turned the tables by conjuring up personal injury lawsuits naming the agents who menaced him; the FBI then lost interest in his case. Cohn thought of commie-hunting as a matter of profit and loss, pursued only so long as there could be a benefit to the persecutor. If not, ideology did not drive him to persist.
“They attacked public figures often arbitrarily, but if they met with resolute resistance, they tended to move on and find other targets.” Well observed mate, but you didn’t have to wait until the eve of Trump’s second term before making the parallel. Trump did nothing McCarthyite when he was president the first time, and I see no good reason to suppose he will be any different when he becomes president a second time. Professor Sennett, where were you in 2020 when your observations about how political witch-hunts work might have helped people who actually were being targeted in the same way as your parents were? What you are describing – the orgiastic yet opportunistic denunciations of individuals, with their degree of guilt a secondary consideration; the digging up of long-abandoned political flirtations; the way that apologies only excite the mob further – that is not Trumpism. That is Wokism.
These links brought back memories of many commenters who no longer grace these pages, but they were good.
Reading the observations by John Galt III back in 2015 I suspect he would not have been totally surprised by subsequent immigration and open border policies which clearly indicate, to use his own words, that the US has still not figured it out.
Imagine a Senator today claiming rightly that the US government is full of Muslims and Islam sympathizers. Well, it is but the guy would be roasted over the coals for telling the truth. Last night I listened to Shahram Hadian, an ex-Muslim who grew up in Iran. He told 300 of us that Wash DC is full of ‘useful idiots’ and ‘fellow travelers’ and much worse. He is very well connected.
In his opinion it will take thousands more dead until the US figures out that Islam is no different than the USSR or Nazi Germany. Islam wants the world to become Muslim by force. That is obvious to most people here who have read the Koran, the Hadiths and the Reliance of the Traveler. We have an existential fight on our hands. Do we to beat them is the question. If we don’t we are Muslim or dead. No different than fighting the Nazis or the USSR.
I don’t get the basis for the McCarthyism claims, but I do think there is a deep, wide spread, anger over Covid fraud, Immigration fraud,and the blatant perversion of the legal system….
Admittedly, I only speak for myself, it would be gratifying to see the greedy teacher’s unions pay a price for what they did to children.
Exasperated,
The only way to do that is to switch all future service to a money purchase pension scheme. Benefits accrued to date under the TPA scheme will be quantified and (reluctantly) funded as if they all retire immediately.
I’m not a cruel man and would agree to a future arrangement incorporating matched employers contribution of up to 10% but not a penny more.
Then apply this reasonable arrangement to the entire public sector.
On the plus side, Woke activists aren’t so much “defeated” as “in remission”, so Professor Sennett’s observations will probably have another chance to become relevant.
… Wait, that’s not a plus.
Thanks for the link, Natalie. One of my favourite posts.
It is a curious thing to me how the left constantly accuse the right of the very things they themselves are doing. Don’t get me wrong, the Gobbels of the party certainly are doing that deliberately, but guys like this journalist are not. It is just this inside out thinking that seems all to common amongst such people.
There is no evidence at all that Trump will engage in a persecution of his enemies. He did not, for example, put Hillary Clinton in jail — even though she almost certainly deserved it. But the left put thousands of their opponents in jail, both very directly in the Trump administration alumni, and jailing abortion protesters and J6 protesters.
And for him to say, as part of the woke left: “Cohn was an expert in the techniques of public humiliation, of firing people and of surveilling private lives” without irony shows a lack of self awareness that one might well expect from an amoeba.
I hope Donald Trump does go in for a bit of McCarthyism. How many people have had their careers and lives ruined by the woke mob for failure to cleave to the “correct” line on race, transgenderism, or something else. Payback can be a b**ch. Perhaps more critically, it would teach the left a lesson: leave ours alone, and we’ll leave yours alone.
For Senator Joseph McCarthy – see the late M. Stanton Evens book “Blacklisted By History” which shows that McCarthy was largely correct about pro Marxist traitors in the American government.
As for the Guardian newspaper – it (like the New York Times) covered up the deaths of millions in the Marxist Soviet Union – and dismissed any journalist (such as Malcolm Muggeridge) who tried to tell the truth.
The article by Professor Sennett is not some honest intellectual error – he knows very well about the Verona signals intercepts and the other things that Natalie points out, he knows – but he does not care.
These people are not honestly mistaken – they are evil. If they had their way we would be slaves or we would be dead.
Remember that.
The best trick the Collectivists ever pulled was to get the word “liberal” and reverse its meaning – turning the word 180 degrees from someone who wants smaller government (less government spending, lower taxes, less regulation) to someone who wants bigger government (more government spending, higher taxes, more regulation).
As far back as the 1920s people in the United States who supported the Soviet Union, the worst tyranny of the time, were calling themselves “liberals” and getting away with it.
Later on people who supported such utter monsters as Mao and Castro also got away with calling themselves “liberals” which was the opposite of what they were.
I always get the impression that the folk who complain loudest about Red Scares and McCarthyism tend to be those who don’t really think there was too much wrong about being a Red.
It’s more of an ox-goring thing than a genuine concern about unfair harassment.
And talking of Trumpery, I understand that lots of J6 defendants have launched a $50 billion civil lawsuit against the DoJ. This strikes me as excellent timing – just in time for a Trump-led DoJ to settle 🙂
If this does happen there will be vapors on the left (and in the boudoir of Miss Susan Collins.)
My understanding is that there’s an unlimited “permanent appropriation” that Congress has signed off on long ago, to fund lawsuits and judgments against the federal government. This is obviously a great way for lefties assisted by lefty judges to make an end run around a stingy Republican administration*, and pocket cash that the currrent Congress won’t vote for.
Which is a big problem for stingy Republican administrations* trying to clamp down on the lefty gorging at the public teat. So what could be more useful to the incoming Trump adminsitration than generating an immediate uproar against this unlimited lawsuit settling appropriation ? Close it down Miss Collins will say. Ok then, The Donald will say !
* “stingy Republican administration” is of course an entirely theoretical construct, hypothesised as a possibility in the early universe before the great boson crystalisation.
At least he admits they wwere communists, although he glosses over their actual fighting for it. So maybe not so arbitrarily-
https://alba-valb.org/volunteers/morris-sennett/
https://alba-valb.org/volunteers/william-sennett/
I suppose they need to maintain the fiction that centrist Trump is far right – waaaay over there! – because they’d rather not have to confront or admit that they have become far left.
McCarthyism was rooting out the Communists.
So, that’s bad?
Audie Murphy – if only they had all been rooted out, sadly, in the end, Senator McCarthy was betrayed. As for Roy Cohn – not a useful person (quite the opposite), it was Senator McCarthy’s worst mistake to choose Roy Cohn, rather than Bobby Kennedy, as his assistant. Has Robert Kennedy got the job – then Senator McCarthy would have had the protection of the powerful Kennedy family and it is possible (possible) that the pro Marxists would have rooted out of the American bureaucracy.
Lee Moore – quite so, two excellent comments Sir.
By the way, the “Red Scare” after the First World War was also correct – the Reds (even back then) were quite real, and utterly vicious.