Tag: McCarthyism

What Donald Trump Shares with Joseph McCarthy

The President’s capacity to create confusion and turmoil is emerging as the mainstay of his reëlection campaign.

On January 6, 2017, at around 8:30 a.m., Donald Trump undoubtedly had serious matters on his mind. In just two weeks, he would come into possession of the nuclear codes, attempt to fill out the upper ranks of the federal government, and assume responsibility for the course of American policy at home and abroad. So he picked up his phone and began to tweet an assessment of his replacement on “The Celebrity Apprentice”:

Wow. The ratings are in and Arnold Schwarzenegger got “swamped” (or destroyed) by comparison to the ratings machine, DJT. So much for . . . being a movie star—and that was season 1 compared to season 14. Now compare him to my season 1. But who cares, he supported Kasich & Hillary.

In the years to come, Trump’s social-media goals expanded. His tweets and retweets, which can come at a fevered rate of more than a hundred a day, provide real-time talking points for right-wing media outlets, and are absorbed as doctrine by millions of faithful constituents. As President, Trump takes to Twitter to declare who is “pathetic” and who is “dopey,” who is a “total nut job” and who is a “low class slob.” He fires staff and touts the dimensions of his “Nuclear Button.” The tone is so consistently devoid of empathy, good faith, or good will that even “HAPPY MOTHER’S DAY” sounds like a threat. Continue reading.

Trump is the diabolical Mr. Hyde of our national personality

In the seven decades that have passed since the publication of The American Mind, the answers we have provided to these questions regarding education, leisure, morality, corruption, decadence, and vulgarization have been more negative than positive.

During April 2019 several pieces appeared on the HNN website dealing with the decreasing interest in the humanities, including history. One of them was entitled  “US declining interest in history presents risk to democracy.” Commenting on President Trump’s poor knowledge of history, it observed that he “is a fitting leader for such times.” Another article, abridged from The New York Times, was “Is the U.S. a Democracy? A Social Studies Battle Turns on the Nation’s Values.” These essays stirred me to ask, “What is the connection, if any, between President Trump, the decline of the humanities, and U.S. values?”

Let’s begin with American values. While any generalizations present difficulties, they can at least help us get closer to important truths. A valuable indicator of American values, first published in 1950, is historian Henry Steele Commager’s The American Mind.  Regarding “the nineteenth-century American,” he wrote, “Often romantic about business, the American was practical about politics, religion, culture, and science.” In the next several pages, Commager also generalizes that the average American’s culture “was material”; there “was a quantitative cast to his thinking”; “theories and speculations” disturbed him, and “he avoided abstruse philosophies of government or conduct”; his “attitude toward culture was at once suspicious and indulgent,” and he expected it (and religion) to “serve some useful purpose”; and “he expected education to prepare for life — by which he meant, increasingly, jobs and professions.” “Nowhere else,” the historian noted, “were intellectuals held in such contempt or relegated to so inferior a position.”

A dozen years after the publication of Commager’s book, Richard Hofstadter’s Anti-Intellectualism in American Life (1962) appeared. Over a year ago, I discussed that historian’s insights as they applied to present-day U. S. culture and President Trump.  Hofstadter noted that “the first truly powerful and widespread impulse to anti-intellectualism” arose during the Jackson era. This anti-intellectualism was common among evangelicals and it was reflected in the popularity of the Horatio Alger rags-to-riches myth, the increasing emphasis on vocational training, the popularity of self-help gurus like Norman Vincent Peale, and the strong impact in the early 1950s of McCarthyism.

View the complete June 3 article by Walter G. Moss from the History News Network on the AlterNet website here.

Today’s WorldView: The Irony of Republicans Complaining About McCarthyism

The following e-newsletter by Ishaan Tharoor of the Washington Post was sent February 28, 2017:

THE TAKEAWAYA couple of days before a host of celebrities spoke out against President Trump at the Oscars, Hollywood icon George Clooney was feted at an awards ceremony in Paris. There he warned of the shadow of McCarthyism looming over his homeland.

“We must not confuse dissent with disloyalty. We must not walk in fear of one another. We must not be driven by fear into an age of unreason,” said Clooney. He signed off with the famous tagline of late American journalist Edward R. Murrow: “Good night, and good luck.”

Murrow, of course, made his name in opposition to the anti-communist witch hunts launched by Sen. Joseph R. McCarthy (R-Wis.) in the 1950s. Liberal cognoscenti see the specter of McCarthy again haunting the country as Trump deems the mainstream media the “enemy” and scapegoats whole communities as potential terror threats. Continue reading “Today’s WorldView: The Irony of Republicans Complaining About McCarthyism”