December 7-8, 2024: McCarthy’s America: 21st Century Echoes

[70 years ago this week, the Senate voted to censure Senator Joseph McCarthy, a key final step in the downfall of that domineering and divisive demagogue. So in this series I’ve AmericanStudied a few layers to McCarthy’s America, leading up to this weekend post on his and the moment’s modern echoes.]

[NB. I’m drafting this post before the election, so y’know, as with every other damn thing in 2024, its meanings will likely vary wildly depending on how that goes.]

On throughlines, overt and overarching, and what we must learn from them.

I haven’t had a chance to see the new film The Apprentice (2024), and I’m not sure I will ever do so; spending an extra couple hours in the company of Donald Trump and Roy Cohn isn’t high on my to-do list. But I certainly believe there’s significant value in trying to highlight, in any way and through any medium, that defining figure and relationship in Trump’s life. Long before he was involved in politics in any real way, Trump seems to have learned a great deal from Cohn, who was (as I argued in Thursday’s post) one of the most hypocritical as well as one of the most vile and destructive figures in 20^th century American history. Trump has dominated the last decade of our political and national life in ways that are strikingly similar to McCarthy’s influence in the late 1940s and early 1950s [again, I’m drafting this before the election, so I don’t know how much he will dominate the next few years, but no matter what I’m frustratingly sure we are not close to through with him], and right there at the center of both moments is the odious Roy Cohn.

The more one learns about Joe McCarthy, though, the more it’s he who parallels Trump in so many ways. McCarthy lied about everything all the time, including if not especially his own past and identity and actions. He attacked almost everyone else, defining them as enemies of both himself and the entire United States, in ways that can only be read as projections of his own blatant desire to undermine the American experiment. And when he was called out on those and so many other horrors, he made himself the victim (such as in the “lynch party” response to the censure resolution that I highlighted in Friday’s post), because ultimately all of it was about his own fragile ego. (And oh yeah, he defended freaking Nazis too.) I’m not sure we can find anywhere in American history two littler men than Joseph McCarthy and Donald Trump, and that littleness is, ironically but unquestionably, at the heart of the outsized influence that the two men exercised on their respective moments.

In December 1954, McCarthy was finally and thoroughly rebuked by his colleagues (including many of his fellow Republicans), a culminating fall from grace that apparently served to push him out of the public eye (and likely contributed to his death from complications of alcoholism less than three years later, in May 1957). To say it one more time, this time not in brackets but in the main prose of this post: I’m drafting this prior to the 2024 election, and so I can only hope—and sweet sassy molassy do I hope—that those results will serve as a similar and even more truly communal and national rebuke of Donald Trump and his MAGA movement. But whatever has happened by the time this post airs, there’s no doubt that we will need to continue pushing back, in every way and every moment, on another figure who has embodied the very worst of our histories, of our identity, of our impulses.

Next series starts Monday,

Ben

PS. What do you think?