Is Ted Cruz Really The Political Reincarnation Of Joe McCarthy?

Hopefully you remember Corey Robin and his amazing, penetrating book, The Reactionary Mind. Yesterday he was tweeting about a NY Times apologia by Robert "Mr. Republican" Taft's grandson, John G. Taft, The Cry of the True Republican. It starts with an admission: "I am a genetic Republican." And then veers off in an attempt to disassociate his family's heritage-- and identity-- with Ted Cruz and the sociopaths who have captured the once-respectable GOP.

Throughout my family’s more than 170-year legacy of public service, Republicans have represented the voice of fiscal conservatism. Republicans have been the adults in the room. Yet somehow the current generation of party activists has managed to do what no previous Republicans have been able to do-- position the Democratic Party as the agents of fiscal responsibility.

Speaking through the night, Senator Ted Cruz, with heavy-lidded, sleep-deprived eyes, conveyed not the libertarian element in Republican philosophy that advocates for smaller government and less intrusion into the personal lives of citizens, but a new, virulent strain of empty nihilism: “blow it up if we can’t get what we want.”

This recent display of bomb-throwing obstructionism by Republicans in Congress evokes another painful, historically embarrassing chapter in the Republican Party -- that of Senator Joseph McCarthy, chairman of the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, whose anti-Communist crusade was allowed by Republican elders to expand unchecked, unnecessarily and unfairly tarnishing the reputations of thousands of people with “Red Scare” accusations of Communist affiliation. Finally Senator McCarthy was brought up short during the questioning of the United States Army’s chief counsel, Joseph N. Welch, who at one point demanded the senator’s attention, then said: “Until this moment, Senator, I think I never really gauged your cruelty or your recklessness.” He later added: “Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?”

Watching the Republican Party use the full faith and credit of the United States to try to roll back Obamacare, watching its members threaten not to raise the debt limit-- which Warren Buffett rightly called a “political weapon of mass destruction”-- to repeal a tax on medical devices, I so wanted to ask a similar question: “Have you no sense of responsibility? At long last, have you left no sense of responsibility?”

There is more than a passing similarity between Joseph McCarthy and Ted Cruz, between McCarthyism and the Tea Party movement. The Republican Party survived McCarthyism because, ultimately, its excesses caused it to burn out. And eventually party elders in the mold of my grandfather were able to realign the party with its brand promise: The Republican Party is (or should be) the Stewardship Party. The Republican brand is (or should be) about responsible behavior. The Republican party is (or should be) at long last, about decency.

Corey called him on his historical rewrite on the touchy subject of the relationship between the Republican Party and the ugly McCarthyism it has been identified with. "Let’s turn," he writes, "to the Wayback Machine, shall we?"

First, it’s important to remember that in 1946, the year McCarthy was elected to the Senate, Taft was the leader of the conservative Senate Republicans who were eager to use redbaiting to help Republicans get elected. Taft had no compunction about claiming that the legislative agenda of Democrats in Congress “bordered on Communism.” That kind of talk helped put the entire Congress back in Republican hands for the first time since 1930. So forceful-- and out there, ideologically speaking-- was Taft’s leadership that after the election the New Republic editorialized that “Congress… now consists of the House, the Senate, and Bob Taft.”

Second, Taft was the author of the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947, one of the most infamous rollbacks in twentieth century American history. (Far from being a genteel defender or “steward” of tradition, as Taft the grandson suggests, Taft the grandfather aggressively sought to counter the New Deal. When he ran against Eisenhower for the Republican nomination in 1952, Taft was the candidate of domestic rollback, not accommodation, including rollback of such policies as the Fair Employment Practices Commission, which required companies receiving government contracts not to discriminate on the basis of race.)

Among Taft-Hartley’s many provisions was the prohibition of closed or union shops, which paved the way for states to pass “right to work” laws and other anti-union legislation of the sort that we’ve seen many right-wing state legislators pushing since 2010-- particularly in those states where both elected branches of government were suddenly in the hands of the Republicans, thanks in no small part to support from the Tea Party.

In addition, the anticommunist provision of Taft-Hartley was one of the more potent pieces of legislation contributing to the developing atmosphere of Cold War hysteria around communism. That provision mandated that all unions seeking the protections of the Wagner Act had to have their leaders take an oath affirming that they were neither members nor supporters of the Communist Party or any other organization seeking the overthrow of the United States government. That provision provoked a wave of red-baiting and red-hunting within and around the labor movement, which proved to be a kind of social corollary to what the government was doing in and around the executive branch.

Taft was not the opponent or even just the helpmate of this repression; he was a leading agent of it. More than three years before anyone outside of Wisconsin had even heard of Joseph McCarthy.

But on the question of McCarthy himself, the record is clear: Taft did not merely “allow” the man and the ism to dominate; Taft actively coddled, encouraged, and supported him and it at every turn.

As early as March 23, 1950-- four weeks after McCarthy’s famous speech in Wheeling, West Virginia-- Taft gave McCarthy his firm support, telling McCarthy, “If one case [accusing a State Department official of being a Red] doesn’t work out, bring up another.” And added, for good measure, “Keep it up, Joe.”

When Truman attacked McCarthy’s speech-- no amateur when it came to red-baiting, Truman called McCarthy “the greatest asset the Kremlin has”-- Taft responded in kind, accusing Truman of being “bitter and prejudiced” and of “libeling” McCarthy, who was “a fighting Marine.” (Asked whether he had indeed libeled McCarthy, Truman responded, “Do you think that is possible?”)

While the Tydings Committee conducted its hearings about Communists in the State Department, Taft denounced the hearings as a “farce” and a “whitewash,” and pushed for even more aggressive inquisitions into subversion of the executive branch. As late as 1952 Taft would be harping on the issue of Communists in the State Department. He claimed that Dean Acheson had welcomed the Communist takeover of China because “in the State Department there’s been a strong Communist sympathy, as far as the Chinese Communists are concerned.” Sensing a major political opportunity in the coming presidential election of 1952, Taft said, “The only way to get rid of Communists in the State Department is to change the head of the government.”

…Taft personally endorsed McCarthy’s reelection bid during the Wisconsin primary of 1952, claiming that “Senator McCarthy has dramatized the fight to exclude Communists from the State Department. I think he did a great job in undertaking that goal.” He even campaigned for McCarthy-- despite the fact that McCarthy never returned the favor by endorsing Taft… This was the man they once called “Mr. Conservative” who is now being held up as the paragon of moderation. To paraphrase Woody Allen: a moderate Republican is a right-wing reactionary plus time.

I'll just add one small point that was made very well in Predisposed by John Hibbing, Kevin Smith and John Alford, who are grappling with what makes someone a liberal or a conservative.

To get an idea of how a set of predispositions toward these bedrock dilemmas can provide a constant anchor underneath shifting issues and labels, consider contemporary attitudes on military intervention, an issue much fought over by the left and right in the United States. Generally speaking, it has been the right--Republicans-- that has been more supportive of this sort of thing, while the long hairs on the left are more opposed. Military action in Iraq, Afghanistan, Panama and Grenada was launched by Republican presidential administrations, and a big chunk of the public support for those operations was provided by rank-and-file Republicans. Vietnam was fought primarily under Democratic administrations, but the war was strongly supported by many Republicans. The domino theory that communism, if not stopped in Saigon, would spread to the rest of Southeast Asia, then Honolulu, and then Berkeley was widely advocated by the G.O.P. Republican 1964 presidential candidate Barry Goldwater criticized his Democratic opponent, Lyndon Johnson, for not doing enough to defeat the communists in Vietnam and Johnson responded by portraying Goldwater as someone who was ready to start a nuclear war over Southeast Asia. Republicans similarly supported Korean operations when Democrat Harry Truman was president, and often bashed him for not doing more-- in particular for his refusal to drop nukes on China as suggested by that sensible General MacArthur. What’s interesting is that the aggressive and interventionist streak of the Republican Party in the last half of the 20th century is in fairly strong contrast with its record during the first half of that century.

If you go back to the late 1930s, powerful Republicans-- with plenty of support from the rank and file-- were among the strongest voices arguing for an isolationist stand to keep the United States out of a spreading European conflict. One of the biggest organizations pushing the isolationist message was the American First Committee (AFC), which had international icon Charles Lindbergh as its most prominent and visible spokesman. Lindbergh gave nationally broadcast radio addresses urging American to avoid involvement in the “European War,” the basic pitch being that if the Old Countries wanted to go another round that was their business. America, on the other hand, should sit this one out. Lindbergh’s words struck a chord. At its height, the AFC attracted nearly a million members. Though it drew considerable strength from merging with the more left-leaning Keep America Out of the War Committee, the AFC was primary a product of the American right, particularly the Republican Party (it was founded by a Yale Law School student, Robert Douglas Stuart, Jr., heir to the Quaker Oats Company, who in the 1980s would be appointed by Ronald Reagan as ambassador to Norway).

This isolationist stance was not surprising-- Republicans had taken this as the party line for decades. Twenty years earlier, just after World War I, Republicans played a key role in keeping the United States out of the League of Nations. Powerful Republicans like Henry Cabot Lodge, chair of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, feared the prospect of future European entanglements and wanted no constraints on American sovereignty. Two decades on, many Republicans were singing the same isolationist tune. United States Senator Robert Taft, for example, one of the most powerful and best known Republican Party figures of the 20th century, adamantly opposed supporting the allies even as Hitler’s armies swept across Europe.

That decades-long isolationism of the Republican Party went out the window with PearlHarbor and never really came back. Senator Taft, who in 1939 favored avoiding any involvement at all in spreading a war in Europe was, in 1951, in favor of bombing China in support of a mainland invasion by Chiang Kai-shek’s Chinese nationalist forces.17 In the decades sinceWorld War II, interventionist policies consistently received higher support from Republicans-- sometimes, as we have seen, even from the same Republicans who had once been strict isolationists. Fortress America isolationists becoming Cold Warrior interventionists; where is the unifying thread in that?

I suppose it would be unkind to point out that the isolationists-- Taft and Lindberg particularly-- strongly identified with Europe's right-wing regimes and were apologists for the fascism they saw as so very kindred to the "ideal" Republican Party. So, of course they opposed U.S. involvement on behalf of the democracies they despised fighting Hitker and the Nazis they admired. And the turn around… a psychological overreaction to how wrong they had been, made far easier because their militancy was directed against the left-wing and "Commies." Some things really never do change.