At the end of their disgraced political careers Joe McCarthy, the Red baiting demagogue from Wisconsin, and Richard Nixon, the paranoid Californian, were both driven from office by the disdain fellow Republican held for each.
There was nothing pleasant during the McCarthy and Nixon eras about Republicans confronting Republicans, but the damage Tail Gunner Joe and Tricky Dick did to the party and the country eventually offended basic human decency, not to mention democratic norms. The right thing became more important than the politics of the right.
Now the party’s leader, daily employing the politics of fear, intimidation and revenge that marked those earlier careers, makes the two disgraced Republicans look like paragons of virtue.
And, yes, what is happening right now is orders of magnitude more outrageous and corrupt than anything the outrageous and corrupt McCarthy and Nixon did.
Joe McCarthy’s 1954 Senate censure, the decisive action that effectively ended his political influence, was largely the work of a few Republicans who realized the heavy drinking rabble-rouser offered up only bad news for their party.
Imagine: they said McCarthy offended the dignity of the Senate.
The Senate Republican heroes of this time – Ralph Flanders of Vermont, Arthur Watkins of Utah and Margaret Chase Smith of Maine – are mostly forgotten now.
They shouldn’t be forgotten. They stood for decency before party.
Sadly for the nation and the Republican Party, conservative politicians of moral and Constitutional conviction essentially no longer exist.
McCarthy, of course, ruined many careers with wild accusations that Communists were about to take over the government. Joe was a “deep state” conspiracist before it became party doctrine. McCarthy attacked fellow senators, the U.S. Army and even President Dwight Eisenhower. He became a loose cannon on the rolling deck of the republic.
Yet, after McCarthy went too far – “have you no sense of decency, sir” – and after his censure Republicans tried to move beyond McCarthyism, while today’s Republican Party seems to double down at each Trump depredation.
In McCarthy’s time, to cite just one example, Republican Senator Henry Dworshak of Idaho, voted against censuring McCarthy – the two had been close friends – but even the conservative Idahoan came to dismiss – or try to forget – ol’ Joe.
Asked in 1955, a few months after McCarthy’s censure, what had become of “McCarthyism,” Dworshak seemed surprised. “McCarthyism? Haven’t heard anything about that lately. I thought we had done with that at the last session,” he said.
When the Watergate going got tough Nixon was famously visited in the White House by a delegation of senior Republican lawmakers who essentially told their president his time was up, he would be impeached and convicted and he needed to resign.
Imagine such an act of political courage today. I know, impossible.
he Republican “base” certainly hadn’t turned on Nixon, even after Senate hearings helped prove he had actively participated in a vast effort to cover up the break in at the offices of the Democratic National Committee, among much else. ¹
It was the party leadership who decided Nixon had to go.
“There are only so many lies you can take,” Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater told fellow Republicans, “and now there has been one too many. Nixon should get his ass out of the White House – today!”
That is the social media post of the president of the United States instructing his attorney general to prosecute his political enemies. The posting came after Donald Trump “fired” a U.S. attorney in Virginia for, in Trump’s view, failing to prosecute the attorney general of New York, the same official who secured a guilty verdict against Trump for business fraud.
But Trump quickly found a “prosecutor” – a completely inexperienced one – willing to indict James Comey, the former FBI director fired by Trump in 2017. Trump was able to do this thanks to his utter disregard for the idea that the Justice Department isn’t his personal revenge vehicle.
And so it goes – corruption breeding more corruption.
Like Trump, Nixon had his list
Richard Nixon had a secret “enemies list” of political and media figures he hated, and that list eventually became public, contributing to the push to impeach him. Nixon had told his White House counsel, to “use the available federal machinery to screw our political enemies.”
When Nixon’s enemies list became public no less a conservative than William F. Buckley called the existence of the list “an act of proto-fascism. It is altogether ruthless in its dismissal of human rights. It is fascist in its reliance on the state as the instrument of harassment.”
Trump isn’t nearly as subtle when it comes to enemies. His mob boss corruption is in plain sight every day. From the New York Times:
In a social media post last Saturday, Mr. Trump lamented to Attorney General Pam Bondi that “Nothing is being done” in investigations of Mr. Comey; Senator Adam B. Schiff, Democrat of California; and Letitia James, New York’s attorney general. The Justice Department is also drafting plans to investigate a group funded by George Soros, the billionaire Democratic donor who Mr. Trump has demanded be thrown in jail.
“They are sick, radical left people, and they can’t get away with it,” the president said.
If Nixon’s list of opponents amounted to “proto-fascism” what do we call Trump’s public instructions to his enablers to indict, intimidate and attempt to destroy his increasingly long list of opponents?
Hint: we can’t call it democracy.
Here’s David Frum, the one-time speechwriter for George W. Bush, connecting Trump’s revenge tour to the even greater threat that he’s doing all this because he knows his own profound corruption will one day be investigated. That, of course, presupposes that we have genuinely free elections in the future:
Yes, Trump’s politicization of the Department of Justice is a backward-looking expression of hurt feelings. It’s also another step in a forward-looking plot to shred the rule of law in order to pervert the next election and protect his corruption from accountability. James Comey’s rights and liberties are not the only ones at risk today. So is your own right to participate in free and fair elections in order to render a verdict on Trump’s invasion of those rights and liberties. Trump understands the stakes—and has been astoundingly transparent about his intentions. Will you listen and understand as clearly as he speaks and threatens?
Long ago in a political galaxy far, far away Republicans gave up on two corrupt, deceitful, grievance driven politicians and, temporarily at least, corrected for the vast excesses of Joe McCarthy and Richard Nixon.
Meanwhile, the astoundingly transparent crimes of the current top Republican amount to a Watergate every day.
Will any conservative Republican listen?
This column appeared on Marc’s Substack.
