The Line Goes Straight from Joe McCarthy to BushCo

[the48er]

Haynes Johnson just published a good one last week -- The Age of Anxiety: McCarthyism to Terrorism. While comparisons of BushCo to Tailgunner Joe are not particularly new or novel, Johnson really nails it:

McCarthy's Republican Party was far more moderate -- even liberal and progressive -- than the present Republican Party. Over the decades, a more rigidly ideological Republican Party has emerged, forged by many of the forces that McCarthy unleashed or harnessed. Out of McCarthyism came the modern conservative movement and the former liberals turned neocons who exercise their greatest intellectual and political influence today -- as seen in the major role they played in making the Bush administration's case for pre-emptive war against Iraq. McCarthyism was a major factor in the rise of the radical right and the polarization that plagues American of life, pitting group against group and region against region, sowing cynicism and distrust, and manipulating public of opinion through fear and smear. The so-called culture wars that afflict our public discourse are another of McCarthy's legacies, as is the continuing demonization of liberals, the national press, and others whose values are not of "real" and "patriotic" and church-going Americans.

Check it out if you get a chance -- you won't be disappointed.

[sandnsea]

1. Ann Coulter praised McCarthy

John Birch Society came out of that time, anti-UN, anti-liberal, anti-government programs, pro-Christian, pro-business, FDR was a communist. This is what the Republican Party is and has always been about. To a Republican, the only purpose of government is to get money and power into the hands of the corporate cronies, where it rightfully belongs, doncha know.

[the48er]

2. Well, Now Wait A Minute ...

The GOP hasn't always been the vile cesspool that it now is.

The progressive wing of the Republican Party was pretty terrific in a lot of instances. The La Follettes, for example, were in and out of the GOP. Fiorello La Guardia was a progressive Republican ... lots and lots of other fine folks, too. Matter of fact, Joe McCarthy got into the senate by beating Young Bob La Follette in the Republican primary. I'm pretty sure other progressive Republicans (and I mean real progressives -- way left of Nelson Rockefeller and Jacob Javitz, who are often called "liberal") hung on in the U.S. congress well into the 70s and maybe beyond.

That's Johnson's point: it was McCarthy who set what was then some fairly unprecedented crap in motion. He laid the groundwork necessary to keep insane hags like Coulter out of the bins and prisons in which they so obviously belong, and now it's BushCo sustaining that fine tradition.

[sandnsea]

4. yes it has

Oh occasionally you get a true progressive, like Jeanette Rankin, but by and large Republicans are imperalistic corporate whores and nothing more. That's how we always end up with idiots like Reagan and Bush in office, never looking at the truth of our history.

[pacalo]

5. While the Republican politicians are fattening corporate wallets,

they've somehow managed to cull in all those with societal grievances to vote against their own economical welfare.

Those who have created today's McCarthylike you're-with-us-or-against-us atmosphere fall into two groups: Dixiecrats who wrap themselves in the confederate flag (kick ass! take their gas!) & those who have been obediently led by morally corrupt clergymen who are playing on their fears to gain power &, I suspect, money.

I'd love to see George Clooney's film, "Good Night, and Good Luck" but I'll have to buy the DvD in order to see it. The subject matter is so relevant today that it's beyond me why it isn't being discussed more.

If Ann Coulter finds praise for McCarthyism, why has today's media failed to recognize its relevance & what is it afraid of? That people will see themselves, as well as the deterioration of the media's conscience?

Btw, Ann Coulter also believes that poverty has nothing to do with the crime rate. :dunce:

[Davis_X_Machina]

3. Read Rick Perlstein's...

...book Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus , too.

I love Haynes Johnson -- he saw the danger early and wrote about it presciently in his Sleepwalking Through History: America in the Reagan Years and Divided We Fall: Gambling with History in the Nineties. After those books, no one should have been surprised where we wound up.