Dirk Q. Allen is a former opinion page editor of the HamiltonJournal-News.
Are Communistsreally honeycombed in the Democratic Party?
That’s what President Donald Trump would have you believe as he tries to scare up another Red Scareand undermine Democrats in the run-up to the November midterm elections. It’s nonsense, of course, which Trump is masterful at spreading – “fake news” from a guy who likes to complain about supposed fake news but is, in fact, a proven purveyor of it.
The previous Red Scaresin this country were almost legitimate – though the national response was a massive overreaction to the circumstances.
Always attack
The Bolshevik Revolution in Russia that led to the ousting of the czar and the subsequent Communist takeover there, combined with
labor unrest in this country, created a period of draconian free speech restrictions and other limits here from 1917-20.
In fact, Socialist Eugene Debs– who ran for president five times – actually did so from a jail cell in 1920 after criticizing the U.S. intervention in World War I. He’d received as much as 6% of the popular vote in the 1912 presidential election, won by Democrat Woodrow Wilson with 42% when Republicans Taft and Roosevelt split their vote.
Trump, though, is taking a page out of the Red Scare of the early 1950s – likely due to his association with the lateRoy Cohn, his former take-no-prisoners attorney.
U.S. spies had helped the Soviet Union develop an atomic bomb following World War II, and the Cold War had the United States in a state of high anxiety in the early 1950s. Cohn had actually helped prosecute the now-infamous husband-and-wife couple,Julius and Ethel Rosenberg,for espionage.
They were subsequently convicted and executed −with some controversy − in 1953.
In the meantime, U.S. Sen. Joseph McCarthy,a Wisconsin Republican, had waved a paper at a luncheon in Wheeling, W.Va., in February 1950, falsely claiming it contained a list of 205 suspected Communists currently working in the State Department. (It was actually his laundry list.)
Admit nothing, deny everything
With the Hollywood Ten scandal – leading members of the film industry with purported Communist leanings were blacklisted and jailed for refusing to testify in front of theHouse Un-American Activities Committee in 1947 – still in the public eye, McCarthy had national attention for years with his anti-Communist crusade.
McCarthy running roughshod against supposed Communists led the Cincinnati Reds to adjust their nameto “Redlegs”throughout the decade. And if you watch the highly regarded 1974 film “The Way We Were” (Redford and Streisand; Academy Award-winning theme song), it has a strong strain of the Hollywood blacklist running through it.
Cohn was McCarthy’s attack dog attorney – and later became the lawyer for callow NYC developer Donald Trump. In fact, it was Cohn who taught Trump theso-called “three lessons”he lives by today: 1) Always attack; 2) Admit nothing, deny everything; 3) Claim victory, never admit defeat, no matter what.
Claim victory, never admit defeat, no matter what
People can try to interpret Trump’s actions with all sorts of psychological spin – is he still bitter that the “Old Money” on Manhattan wouldn’t let the brash developer from the outer boroughs into their “club”? − but it always goes back to the hard-core lessons from Cohn.
McCarthy’s reign of political terror against many innocents finally flamed out in June 1954 during the Army-McCarthy Senate hearings. Seeking to oust phantom Communists in the U.S. Army, McCarthy met his match when the lawyer for the Army, Joseph Welch, famously responded during one line of harsh questioning, “Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you no sense of decency?”
That helped pop the bubble on McCarthy’s crusade, and it makes you wonder – who will finally pop the bubble on Trump’s phony “Communist” crusade? He yells “Communist” – and some critics respond to his authoritarian bent by calling him a fascist or worse.
That, however, would require Trump to have some sort of ideology, which he completely lacks.
Trump is really just a garden-variety tinpot caudillo, an erratic 80-year-old man who’s great at using OPM (Other People’s Money) – ours – for his own amusements all across the board. Clearly, no sense of decency there.
Dirk Q. Allen is a former opinion page editor of the Hamilton Journal-News. A graduate of Brown University, he lives in Oxford.
This article originally appeared on The Columbus Dispatch: 'No sense of decency.' Trump learned to hunt Commies from other remarkable liars | Opinion
