Senator Joe McCarthy began his witch hunts by accusing Asian policy experts in the State Department of being Communists, and by the end of his volatile career he had charged General George Marshall, President Dwight Eisenhower, and the United States Army with treason as well. In 1954 the double punch of Edward R. Murrow’s “See It Now” exposé and McCarthy’s televised bullying during the Army-McCarthy hearings finally brought him down. But before the double punch, in January 1954, 50 percent of Americans polled by Gallup were “highly favorable” of McCarthy.
In other words, 50 percent of Americans thought it perfectly reasonable to accuse General George Marshall, President Dwight Eisenhower, and the United States Army with treason.
And even after his dénouement, and even as the Senate and the Republican Party publicly were turning their backs on McCarthy, he remained a hero to a substantial minority of Americans. Gallup polls said 35 percent of Americans were highly favorable of McCarthy as late as November 1954, after the Army-McCarthy hearings had concluded.
I thought of McCarthy today after I saw this headline on a right-wing blog: “Question: Does Barack Obama Have Any Friends Who AREN’T Communists?” Tail-gunner Joe would be proud.
I believe — this is based on my observations, not scientific research — that Americans on the whole are harder to demagogue now than they were in 1954. But “on the whole” clearly doesn’t include everybody.
I also believe that people get suckered by demagoguery because, on some level, they want to be suckered. The demagogue is telling them something they want to believe, even if it’s nuts. For example, when people are genuinely afraid of something, many people prefer a demagogue to an honest statesman.
An honest statesman tells people that, while there’s a real threat and our options are limited, we can get through this crisis if we keep our heads and don’t let fear get the best of us. The demagogue validates and reinforces fear and promises absolute protection if people will follow him. Lots of people prefer option B. Option A is weak and, you know, French.
The problem with option B is that the demagogue is promising something — absolute protection from the bad scary thing — that he cannot deliver, especially if the bad scary thing is way bigger than he is and not under his control. So the next thing the demagogue does is identify proxy scary things, preferably small and weak ones that won’t bite back. Thus, McCarthy was much less focused on international politics than on domestic threats.
Yes, McCarthy accused the State Department of losing China and made a great show of clearing alleged Communist literature out of U.S. embassy libraries around the world. But most of his targets were domestic and about as threatening to the security of the United States as tapioca pudding. Yes, there had been Soviet espionage cells in Washington, but not one of McCarthy’s targets was ever found to be part of them.
Back to the present: The more volatile people at McCain rallies, especially the ones who booed McCain when he called Obama a “decent man,” are people who want to be demagogued. They don’t give a bleep about McCain’s policy proposals; they want him to lie to them. Apparently McCain has a couple of scruples still knocking about his psyche and isn’t really into the demagogue thing, although he’s been giving it his best shot.
Sarah Palin, on the other hand, is playing the demagogue role to the hilt. She’s got a natural talent for it. I don’t expect her to fade from the national political scene anytime soon.
And then there’s the perennial threat of intellectualism, also a target of McCarthy’s. I give you this rightie blog post, called “Intellectualism & Sarah Palin: Or How The Smarty Pants Set Are Threatened By Someone Who Knows Sense .” It’s a classic bit of anti-intellectual literature; someone should shove it into a bell jar to preserve it for posterity.
In her rantings in favor of “common sense” the blogger in truth is exposing her inner insecurities, neuroses and resentments for all the world to see. She divides the nation into “coastal elites” and everybody else. The “coastal elites” live inside their airy-fairy theories; “everybody else” is practical and makes decisions based on real-world experience. If you’ve read Hofstadter’s Anti-Intellectualism in American Life you’ll recognize all the themes.
Here we see why the coastal elite hate Sarah Palin:
Why do they dislike her so?
- Her state school education and path to power devalues the elite’s Harvard training.
- She’s homespun. Intellectuals despise homespun. They prefer the calculated indifference they’ve worked so hard to master over the years.
- Sarah doesn’t seem to care what they think. Perhaps her most grievous error is that she just doesn’t give a moose turd what David Brooks thinks. Everyone should care what David Brooks thinks. And Peggy Noonan. And the rest of the obnoxious snobs.
Speaking as a graduate of the University of Missouri with deep Ozark Mountain roots and who genuinely doesn’t give a bleep about what David Brooks or Peggy Noonan think, I suppose I should love Sarah Palin.
I, um, don’t.
Another rightie blogger links to the one above and expands some of her themes. Buried in this diatribe we see the yearning for a daddy figure who will take over and make everything better:
So if you’re Yin, you may feel anger like anybody else, but you get over it. You live in a world of IF…THEN. The Yang live in a world of protocol. “S’poseda.” You’re s’poseda cut your carbon emissions. You’re s’poseda behave humbly so the rest of the world likes us more.
The decision-making is always externalized to someone else. And that “someone else” is always some vague, non-corporeal, undefinable entity. “Them.” “The People.” “Everybody.” “Us.” “Out There.” You dare to make this distinction, after awhile you see this everywhere. I see it in this Charles Gibson interview with The Messiah — Gibson explicitly asks him “what will you do different from what the current administration is doing now” (or some such)…and here comes the reply. The People have lost confidence. It’s always someone else making the decision that matters.
People who populate this whole other world, have good reason to be jealous. Once they own a task, a task that depends on real decisions being made by an individual who’s directly responsible for how things turn out — they’re lost. And they know it. They’ve spent too much of their lives living theoretically…spooning out the right answers to please others. Ignoring cause and effect.
Government of the people, by the people and for the people be damned. This guy wants a dictator.
(Also, dude, if you are so concerned about cause and effect, you might want to consider the effects of not cutting carbon emissions. And I’m not sure you understand yin and yang. Yang is male, direct, assertive, rational, bright, clear. Yin is female, indirect, reticent, emotional, dark and murky. Obviously some male chauvinist guy came up with the yin and yang dichotomy, but that’s what it is.)
If you read these two posts, you see what I mean about absolute protection. Both writers seem to believe that the United States can absolutely protect itself and solve its problems without the cooperation of anyone else on the planet. They don’t want to believe there are big, scary things that we cannot control or bomb into oblivion.
Just as, fifty-something years ago, Americans didn’t want to believe that China was not ours to lose, or that Joe McCarthy’s threats and blustering would not protect them from the Soviet Union.
Still crazy after all these years.
Great article, Maha. One other thought-the current Republican base members are perhaps the children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren of the people who thought McCarthy was the greatest. My Irish Catholic Cincinnati grandparents thought he was great. I always thought McCarthy was evil and a political opportunist who seized on a political bandwagon until he got stopped by exposure of his obnoxious behavior. Sadly, he still has his acolytes, like Ann Coulter and his biographers Arthur Herman and M. Stanton Evans.
I don’t have time at the moment to read all that guy’s writings about yin/yang theory. I do have to respond about what it really is. True, yin/yang are opposites in nature but they are complementary and one cannot exist without the other. Yang is active and yin is receptive. Nothing is totally yang or yin. It is all relative. For example, male is yang in relation to female but an adult female is yang in relation to a male child. Even in the human body, the head is yang in relation to the torso but the torso is yang in relation to the legs.
One cannot exist without the other, just as we cannot have day without night, summer without winter. It is nature’s law. Also, the theory states that when one (yin/yang) becomes dominant and does not yield to the other naturally, it will eventually collapse into the other. I think this is what is happening in our culture across the board right now. Everyone has wanted and tried to keep yang dominant for whatever reason and it is now collapsing into the yin state.
Hmm. My mother still kinda thinks McCarthy was a good man, exposing the enemies of our country, etc. Solid Republican in the cold war period.
However, Mom now votes Democrat although she hasn’t totally given up on the republican party., so it IS possible to think and to change one’s mind.
I haven’t asked her who she will vote for, but I’m guessing it won’t be McCain, no matter what influence her conservative white background might seem to have. However, I don’t want to know if she decides, in the face of all evidence, to be stupid.
The wingnuts have successfully relabled stupid behavior evil. The N Korean all in bomb developement while their people starve is stupid not evil…Saddam’s claim that he had WMD when he didn’t was stupid not evil. “absolute protection from the bad scary thing — that he cannot deliver, especially if the bad scary thing is way bigger than he is and not under his control” the scary thing..thats the evil. These people only see or believe that there is only good and evil in the world. The only way to deal with evil is to confront it and then destroy it. They have no middle ground to work from…you don’t make deals with the devil…we don’t negotate with terrorist…Obama is a terrorist.
“Historically prosperous nations seem to inevitably drift into materialism and anti-intellectualism with almost predictable disastrous results.”
I read that and noted it. ‘Drift into materialism’ made sense but anti-intellectualism didn’t – which was the reason I wrote the statement down. If someone could figure out the connection between prosperity and anti-intellectualism perhaps it could be effectively combatted thus avoiding the ‘disastrous results?’
Moving on, I remember McCarthy. We coasties thought him deranged, first off, and secondly were mystified that it quite suddenly had become a crime to be a member of the C. Party. Of course, if some Republicans had their way today, being a member of the Democratic Party – a bunch of goddamn lefties – would be a crime.
Heavens, we even had communist friends, relatives and acquaintances. (It’s certainly a good thing that none of us is presently running for political office.)
“Historically prosperous nations seem to inevitably drift into materialism and anti-intellectualism with almost predictable disastrous results.â€
felicity, where did you get that quote? I’m not seeing it anywhere. I don’t think it’s true, anyway.
I believe — this is based on my observations, not scientific research — that Americans on the whole are harder to demagogue now than they were in 1954.
Oddly, though a) I wasn’t around in 1954 and can’t speak with any authority and b) have just like everyone else sat through over seven years of ridiculously transparent and enthusiastically-received demagoguery, I agree with you.
If it’s true that people are harder to demagogue now, I believe it’s because communication is a lot faster and less controlled these days. The ‘net has been a big help, IMO, but it’s looking like there are points beyond which even the complacent corporate press doesn’t like to go – Katrina, Schiavo, and the latest rounds of McCain/Palin Nurembergery come to mind. And sometimes even the public responds poorly to stuff the press doesn’t care about or even supports, like the privatizing of Social Security.
It gives me some hope.
Oh god, maha, I wish I knew. Could have been from an old college text (I’ll check it out) or the Atlantic Monthly or Harpers or the New Yorker or The Nation (I’ve thrown those all away.)]
(I write stuff down all the time and I neglect to note the source all the time which is really a bad show.)
It surprised me when I read it, for sure, but given that this country is prosperous and materialistic and on an anti-intellectual trajectory, it really leapt from the page (and into my notebook.)
Old college textbook, copyright 1951. Not the direct quote but chances are it was the source (some place) – given the following quote.
“The past hundred years have brought about the rise and fall of great nations, and a contemplation of their vicissitudes leads every thoughtful man to the obvious conclusion that nations have not yet learned to live with other nations, that they are on the whole eminently selfish, and that materialism and anti-intellectualism are gradually poisoning the whole of what we optimistically call civilization.”
Felicity, I can kind of see how prosperity would lead to anti-intellectualism. A society generally living in comfort and ease (that is, living too long without problems to solve), could first become intellectually lazy, and eventually antagonistic toward its dwindling number of intellectuals. I’m not a historian, so I don’t have examples to hold up. But if we change the scale, and substitute “a person” for “a society,” we certainly have examples: George W. Bush, John S. McCain III.
On the other hand, Robert F. Kennedy grew up in comfort and ease, and in fact ranked poorly in college; he even worked for Joe McCarthy’s foul HUAC as a young attorney on the make. But later in life, RFK became reflective and curious, both intellectually and socially. Maybe the difference was he included himself in a society rife with problems to be solved. Bush and McCain think that work, poverty, housing, health care, civil rights, and a liveable environment are all other people’s problems. They don’t want to summon the mental energy to imagine what life is like for a migrant farmworker, a single mom with a part-time job and no health insurance, a young family about to be foreclosed from their home, a worker about to retire whose 401(k) just tanked with the stock market.
So… how does a society develop a– what should we call it? A compassionate imagination? (I bet there’s a Buddhist term for it.) Canadians are reasonably comfortable, and yet they seem to care more about the needs of the Third World than the U.S. ever has.
I apologize for rambling– I’m just thinking out loud here, but the quote you provided is intriguing (if a bit outmoded in its language). Thanks for looking it up!
Apparently McCain has a couple of scruples still knocking about his psyche and isn’t really into the demagogue thing, although he’s been giving it his best shot.
DON’T BELIEVE IT. McCain is just trying to wash his hands of his own handiwork. There’s not an once of sincerity in him. Why didn’t McCain call that women ( He’s an Arab) out and correct her biased stupidity? Did he let that ignorance stand while he ingratiated himself with a feigned decency and moral code by defending an Arab? McCain has no scruples!
I don’t know what the term is to describe McCain’s gambit in defending Obama’s decency..but, basic he’s allowing Obama to be smeared and denigrated while he defends a concept( Obama is decent) outside of the smear ( He’s an Arab*, we’re afraid of him)…leaving the smear in place and unanswered. Many times I’ve seen McCain dodge being honest, and allow ignorance to fester when it was obviously derogatory to the political process but served McCain purposes. McCain is a shitbag..Know It!
* I personally don’t consider being an Arab a smear, but to closed minded and insecure prejudiced people it is something to be afraid of..hence the smear.
So… how does a society develop a– what should we call it? A compassionate imagination? (I bet there’s a Buddhist term for it.)
Either metta or karuna.
The U.S. had an anti-intellectual streak while we were still an untamed backwater. And I don’t know that prosperity inevitably brings about anti-intellectualism. It might depend on how strongly the culture valued the cultivated mind. I can think of some western European countries, at least, that are prosperous but not nearly as anti-intellectual as the U.S. is.
Done some more reading and remembering. Prosperity is often accompanied by imperialism – both a catalyst and a result of prosperity.
The Brits burned our Library of Congress in the War of 1812. Napolean’s troops, the French vehemently deny this, burned what was left of the ancient Library at Alexandria. Hitler’s brown shirts tore the paintings of Matisse, Van Gogh and Picasso from museum walls rehanging them on insane asylum walls. Stalin gulaged artists, writers and composers. Years ago there were groups here in America, the McCarthy era plus to be exact who campaigned to remove Huckleberry Finn from school libraries.
Bradbury’s “Fahrenheit 451” depicts a hedonistic society in which critical thought through reading is outlawed.
The conundrum remains, however, why the connection between prosperity/imperialism/materialism/anti-intellectualism. Maha, the European countries are not, however, imperialistic, at least not to the extent that we are. Maybe imperialism is a key somewhere, somehow.
Bradbury’s “Fahrenheit 451″ depicts a hedonistic society in which critical thought through reading is outlawed.
I’ve read that one, a couple of times. Also there’s Vonnegut’s Harrison Bergeron, depicting not a hedonistic society but a comfy, mediocre one, where intellectual curiosity is stigmatized and shunned. I’ve only seen the movie version, with Sean Astin. There’s a hilarious conceit in which the U.S. president is chosen by national lottery. Sooner or later everyone gets to run the country for a little while. I probably don’t need to say which female governor reminded me of Vonnegut’s wacky idea. He must be spinning.
But later in life, RFK became reflective and curious, both intellectually and socially. Maybe the difference was he included himself in a society rife with problems to be solved. Bush and McCain think that work, poverty, housing, health care, civil rights, and a liveable environment are all other people’s problems.
I think one difference is to be found in Ann Richards’ line about GHW Bush: “born on third base and thinks he hit a triple”. Both Bush and McCain think they hit a triple in life and ignore their priveleged upbringings full of perks and intros to good schools and opportunities. RFK had those too, but it seems he was taught that he was privileged, or that he knew it for some other reason. And so he acted to help others because he knew how much help he’d had growing up as he did.
Felicity, Huckleberry Finn remains on banned books list these days. as Neil Gaiman recently said on his blog, in response to the 2007 list of most challenged books, “I’m deeply, happily proud of Mark Twain, who is still raising hackles and tweaking noses 99 years after his death.” I can’t help but agree with him.
alto2 – you’ve got to be kidding. Still?
QrazyQat – It could be that RFK when he screwed up (don’t we all) was not bailed out by daddy whereas George and Johnny were always bailed out – before they experienced any adverse results from their screw-ups. It would tend to disallow the screw-ups to ever experience reality.
Felicity, not kidding. Here’s the list for last year. Mark Twain appears in the frequently challenged authors list, undoubtedly for Huckleberry Finn.
The thing about Huck Finn is that, whatever the Right may have against it (and I really don’t know, though I’d guess it has to do with its quite obviously not approving of racism), there are Nice People who consider it to have too much Bad Language to be suitable for children. You know which Naughty word I refer to. That was the reason it was removed from school reading lists in the 1950s in — wait for it — New York.
That made the news on the West Coast. And as I think I remarked somewhere recently, I sort of owe those idiots a favor. Would I have got around to reading the book in high school if they hadn’t made it an act of protest?