![]() ![]() But the true version of the one-party state in this country in all these years remains the Pentagon. Yes, on January 6, 2021, a still-president of the United States tried to turn the American political system into a one-party state featuring his own Trumpublican Party and white nationalist militias. ![]() And oddly enough, that remains the strangest and least told story around. ![]() No matter who you are or what positions you take, the one step too far in American politics isn't calling your president a "liar," it's trying to turn your guns (such as they are) on the most preeminent (and preeminently funded) political force in America: the Pentagon. That should, by the way, be a lesson for the McCarthyites of this moment, too. Trump), began holding hearings investigating supposed communist influence in the Army and, in response, the military, you might say, did him in. In 1953, with the help of his chief counsel Roy Cohn (who, I'm sure you won't be surprised to learn, would later become a guiding light for one Donald J. And then, with the all-too-hot Korean war at an end and the Cold War becoming ever more frigid, McCarthy, who had had a field day, went one step too far. He made life a living hell for a stunning range of Americans. He shot to fame in 1950 by claiming he had inside information that 205 members of the State Department - yes, 205! - were card-carrying members of the Communist Party.īefore that spring of 1954, McCarthy had the Trumpian time of his life holding endless Senate hearings to denounce public figures of every sort as communists. ![]() The star, if you want to think of him that way, and the most distinctly Trumpian figure of his moment and perhaps any other moment before The Donald, was Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy. At that time, long before anyone had even dreamed of social media, TVs - black and white ones, of course - were changing lives and habits across the country. It was April 1954 when what came to be known as the Army-McCarthy hearings hit television screens nationwide. Still, young as I then was, I do remember one of those earlier mad moments in American politics. They even banned publications they didn't like from the mail and managed to put a former presidential candidate for the then-popular Socialist Party, Eugene V. I didn't live through the era that, in his recent book, historian Adam Hochschild called American Midnight, the moment during and after World War I when President Woodrow Wilson and his associates cracked down on dissent of almost any sort. In fact, Washington has long been a stranger and more ominous place than one might imagine. Nor did I have in mind the Watergate Hearings five years later that revealed Nixon's bugging of the Democratic National Committee's headquarters, among many other crimes. And I wasn't even thinking of the time in 1968, when Richard Nixon slipped by the Joe Biden of that moment, Hubert Humphrey, winning the presidency with less than 50% of the vote, thanks to his " Southern strategy" and a third-party run by segregationist Alabama Governor George Wallace. If you're of a certain age like me, you undoubtedly have an earlier vision of just how ominously mad Washington's politics can get. When it comes to this era's McCarthyism, don't for a moment think that the debt ceiling is the only ceiling that could end up in the dust of history. And believe me, that's leaving Hunter Biden's penis aside. Still, despite watching Greene shout "Liar!" and other Republicans yell "Bullshit!" during President Biden's State of the Union Address, I suspect it could get much worse (and more dangerous) in Washington in the months to come. This piece originally appeared on TomDispatch.Ĭan there be any question that we're in a mad - and loud - new age of McCarthyism? Thank you, Kevin! And don't forget the wildly over-the-top members of the so-called Freedom Caucus and their Republican associates, including that charmer, lyin' George Santos, Jewish-space-laser-and- white-balloon-carrying Marjorie Taylor Greene, and - once again running for president - the man who never lost, Donald Trump-em-all. ![]()
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