Enemy of the People by Kalb Marvin

Author:Kalb, Marvin
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Brookings Institution Press
Published: 2018-09-24T16:00:00+00:00

Would No One Rise to Clip His Wings?

In less than a year after his Wheeling speech, McCarthy was widely seen as a major politician who placed the “danger” of “communist subversion and infiltration” near the top of the national agenda, and it was to remain there until the Republican leadership of Congress, in the fall of 1954, summoned up the courage to censure McCarthy, effectively ending his political career. What was remarkable was that so many Americans truly disliked, distrusted, and disagreed with McCarthy yet feared his fiery anticommunism so much—frightened that it could at any moment be turned on them—that they shriveled into a spineless opposition, careful about what they said, what they read, what they studied, always hoping someone else would have the courage to challenge McCarthy and denounce his unsubstantiated attacks on senior government officials and his obvious undermining of American democracy. Would no one rise to clip his wings? Even when Senator Smith and a few others did rise, it seemed to have had no effect on McCarthy’s troubling and persistent ability to intimidate a nation. Thus, for a time, McCarthyism reigned “in the land of the free and the home of the brave.”

How stunningly similar—spineless Republicans cowering before McCarthy in the early 1950s and today’s senior Republican leadership turning a blind eye and a deaf ear to Donald Trump’s unsubstantiated accusations. The parallels are powerful and disturbing.

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