It’s Hard to Fight McCarthyism When McCarthy Is President
There’s no question that the threats to free speech that have emanated from MAGA-land lately are reminiscent of the Red Scare led by the right-wing demagogue and U.S. senator Joseph McCarthy in the late 1940s and 1950s. Throughout his 2024 presidential campaign, Donald Trump vowed vengeance on a Democratic Party he regularly called “the radical left” (or, on occasion, “communists”) and accused of a treasonous conspiracy to turn over the country to criminal immigrants and America-hating globalist elites. Even as he has relentlessly pressed to expand his own powers to unprecedented levels, the 47th president has begun acting on his threats by deploying the machinery of justice against people, institutions, and ideas he dislikes. His acts of intimidation and shakedowns of academic institutions and law firms for fostering points of view he finds offensive have illustrated his underlying contempt for the First Amendment.
Trump’s hostility to free expression grew into full bloom after the assassination of his friend and ally Charlie Kirk, which he instantly blamed without evidence on “the radical left,” vowing to crush his and Kirk’s enemies definitively. His top domestic policy adviser, Stephen Miller, has suggested anyone attributing authoritarian motives to the president may be illegally inciting violence. And most ominously, Trump’s attorney general, Pam Bondi, tried to repudiate basic First Amendment doctrine by inventing a new category of “hate speech” that her Justice Department would prosecute (before ridicule from even conservative legal circles convinced her to walk it all back).
Amid all these wild threats, it’s unsurprising that the McCarthy analogy is very much in the air, with one group of high-profile free-speech advocates reviving a relic of that era, as NPR reports:
On Wednesday, over 550 celebrities relaunched a group first organized during the post-World War II Red Scare: the Committee for the First Amendment. Their intent is to stand up in what they call a “defense of our constitutional rights,” adding: “The federal government is once again engaged in a coordinated campaign to silence critics in the government, the media, the judiciary, academia, and the entertainment industry.”
The current group is headlined by actor and activist Jane Fonda — whose father, actor Henry Fonda, was one of the early members of the first Committee for the First Amendment, which was founded in the 1940s to oppose the infamous House Un-American Activities Committee, through which the federal government accused many top entertainers of being communists or communist sympathizers and derailed their careers.
The House Un-American Activities Committee was a precursor and later ally to McCarthy that focused especially on Hollywood. But the more general premise of the Committee for the First Amendment is that free-speech advocates played the principal role in defusing the Red Scare of the postwar period and can play a similar role today, as the letter announcing the relaunch suggests:
The McCarthy Era ended when Americans from across the political spectrum finally came together and stood up for the principles in the Constitution against the forces of repression.
Those forces have returned. And it is our turn to stand together in defense of our constitutional rights.
This all makes perfect sense, with one important exception. Adverse public opinion stimulated by free-speech advocates like Henry Fonda did indeed undermine McCarthy and give aid and comfort to his victims. But the real blow that took down McCarthy and led to his crucial censure by the U.S. Senate came from President Dwight D. Eisenhower. Behind the scenes, Eisenhower arranged for McCarthy’s destruction when the reckless smear artist changed his focus from the Truman administration to Ike’s beloved U.S. Army, as historian Walter Russell Mead noted in a review of David Nichols’s definitive book on the president and the senator:
In Ike and McCarthy, Nichols argues persuasively that Eisenhower was in fact deeply engaged in the fight against McCarthy and even orchestrated a series of attacks, culminating in the famous Army-McCarthy hearings of 1954, that ultimately destroyed McCarthy and his movement. The story draws attention to Ike’s darker side: deliberate perjury by government witnesses was part of the strategy that brought McCarthy down. Love of covert operations was a central feature of Eisenhower’s “hidden hand” approach to foreign policy. In suggesting that the same tendencies helped defeat McCarthy, Nichols reminds readers that Eisenhower’s legacy is more complex and shadowy than some of his more earnest defenders care to admit.
Today, we don’t have a Republican president willing to take down a demagogue who threatened free speech. We have a Republican president who is himself the demagogue who threatens free speech. Indeed, as Jonathan Chait observed in 2020, the parallels between Trump and McCarthy are vivid:
Trump was literally mentored by Roy Cohn, McCarthy’s right-hand man. Trump, like McCarthy, alleges the existence of a shadowy cabal of government bureaucrats to which he attributes near unlimited power. …
Trump and McCarthy both captured the passions of the conservative base in a way no other Republican politician of their time had managed. They channeled populist, anti-intellectual paranoia that frightened elites in both parties by threatening to tear apart the structures of republican government. The main way that the two men differ should not come as comfort: It is that McCarthy was a senator and an insurgent within his party, and Trump is the president who commands his.
Chait wrote those lines more than four years before Trump came roaring back into power full of vengeful anger, contemptuous of constitutional constraints, free of political inhibitions, and surrounded by sycophants eager to serve him. The 47th president is our Joe McCarthy, and it will take a lot more public pressure to stop his assaults on the First Amendment than any one committee can muster.