Donald Trump & “A Conspiracy So Immense”
It is deeply regrettable that American political culture chose to name a midcentury brand of rightwing, authoritarian, and conspiracist thinking in the United States after the person who wielded it most prominently on a national stage: that is, to call “McCarthyism” after the man, sparing the movement.
In reality, “McCarthyism” abated but never disappeared.
In 1962, E.B. White offered a postscript to his memorable essay “Bedfellows,” originally written in 1956, two years after McCarthy’s censure by the Senate, but before his death while in office in 1957. Using a title that would resonate in dark ways, White chose to disarm his reader with charming passages devoted to memories of his frequently rogue and sometimes obstructionist dachshund Freddy, who also served as a daytime companion to anyone convalescing in bed (a bedfellow). In paying tribute to his irrepressible dog, White was reminded of the importance of safeguarding nonconformity, even that which distresses us, to preserve the democratic character of American life. But in 1962, White tempered his original, more hopeful ending with a resigned assessment: “The McCarthy era, so lately dead, has been followed by the Birch society era,” he lamented, inviting readers to view the recently formed, rightwing John Birch Society as a successor to McCathy’s witch hunts. At the end of his postscript, White noted the delineation of eras “growing shorter and shorter in America,” yet he might well have turned this observation on its head, and remarked upon the constant presence and cyclical popularity of various brands of authoritarianism.
By personifying a set of politics, we flatter ourselves that such tendencies are aberrational — that they could disappear when the man does — and we sponsor a narrative that sweeps adherents to the margins of national life. But history is never so tidy. Senator McCarthy’s funeral, a Pontifical High Mass, drew an audience of thousands, including seventy colleagues from the U.S. Senate — pageantry on a scale that indicates many still held him in esteem. Most important, in thinking “McCarthyism” came and went with McCarthy, we miss the opportunity to understand integral forces shaping our politics.
We know of the attraction conspiracy holds during times of uncertainty. We know far less about the connection between conspiracist thinking — or, as the historian Richard Hofstadter put it, the difference between viewing conspiracies in American history, and viewing history itself as a conspiracy — and an authoritarian disposition. In fact, we know surprisingly little about the authoritarian mindset at all. Like conspiracists, the propensity for authoritarianism can be found at various points on a political spectrum usually defined by the desired relation between the actions of government and the management of economic life. It also follows, and is very much true, that devoted opponents of authoritarians can be found distributed all along the path from laissez-faire to socialist ideologues.
Nevertheless, we can easily see that the conspiracist thinking has special purchase among rightwing authoritarians organized, implicitly or explicitly, around a premise of race, including the various advocates for ethno-nationalist states. Always a malign force holds them back: a cabal of bankers; a conspiring minority population; a flood of immigrants. The midcentury fascists — for many people, the only fascists worthy of the name — were dedicated conspiracists. Not only their vilification of opponents, but their notion of community solidarity endowed race or ethnic origin with mystical powers beyond what was evident or ever known.
In banishing rightwing authoritarianism, even fascism itself, to edges of American history, we fail to see what has brought us to our current political moment. Accepting that Benito Mussolini invented the political ideology we call fascism, it remains important to acknowledge the debt the Nazis owed to American segregationists for many of the ideas and the implementation of a racial caste system. We should also take notice of the American financiers of fascist Italy, as well as the fundamentally consonant movements in the United States, such as those examined by historian Alan Brinkley in his first book, Voices of Protest — a close analysis of the appeal, including the limits, of the politics of Huey Long and Father Coughlin.
And of course, there were many supporters of fascism outright (like Father Coughlin), some of whom loudly took the stage in “America First” events. Others found less spectacular ways to let their support be known, like the midwestern men of German descent, drafted into a controversial peacetime expansion of the military, and observed by their superiors as giving the occasional rousing cheer for Hitler. (It was a surprise for me to discover in the archives that separating these men from each other was one motivation behind restructuring the United States Army into geographically diverse, rather than geographically discrete, units. Previously, the fact of being known to your peers via hometown connections was considered an asset for morale, and a deterrent against desertion or failure to fight.)
Having spent blood and treasure to defeat midcentury fascism, Americans have a right to think of it as a foreign ideology — but in truth, they also have reason to consider it closer to home.
Like me, some scholars of politics and history use the term fascism to describe aspects of our current moment; others do not. Setting aside these disputes — and, additionally setting aside the objections of many people who refuse to consider the presence of fascism based on emotion rather than knowledge — it remains most important to focus on what Christopher Vials calls the “functional equivalents of fascism”: the reemergence and, within the Republican Party, the ascendency to power of rightwing authoritarians who predicate their politics on conspiracist fantasy.
Our failure to do so sends obvious connections begging. President Donald Trump was coached into real estate by McCarthy’s former chief counsel and most trusted adviser, Roy Cohn — a man whom, according to McCarthy’s preeminent biographer, David Oshinsky, McCarthy admitted he “could not make it without.” The idea that the connection between the two men involved more than just initiating a young developer in the “dark arts” of corrupt business practice — or that, to conduct shady real estate transactions on a large scale in New York City both constituted and required a form of politics, especially media training — seems to go without due consideration. But Donald Trump is every bit a beneficiary of “McCarthyism” as he is his father’s wealth — a point that Roger Stone, another associate of Roy Cohn, makes explicitly: “Pro-Americanism,” Stone’s characterization of the politics in question, “is a common thread for McCarthy, Goldwater, Nixon, [and] Reagan. The heir to that tradition is Donald Trump.”
Institutional connections exist alongside personal ones. After his first turn as Attorney General under President George H.W. Bush, General William Barr assumed leadership of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), originally founded by Paul Weyrich, undoubtedly the most important conservative figure most Americans have never heard of. Weyrich, who also helped to found the Heritage Foundation, spent part of his early years editing the conservative Catholic weekly, The Wanderer, which advertised numerous annual club dinners to honor Senator Joe McCarthy. He forged a close alliance with segregations like Strom Thurmond (one of his several councils would meet in Thurmond’s basement), lending his political network to the anti-busing movement, as well as to support for incarceration policies crucial to binding a national Republican coalition. In no small measure, Weyrich can be credited with the empowering rightwing authoritarians within the Republican Party — and Attorney General Barr, who threw the weight of ALEC behind mass incarceration policies, one of his many political legacies.
Though the genealogy of members of the Trump administration tracks back to midcentury authoritarians, this lineage would amount to little if they did not carry themselves as progeny. Instead they conduct themselves as to the manor born, providing ample demonstration of conspiracist rightwing authoritarian power.
One identifying characteristic of such leaders is to unveil and incessantly repeat “the big lie,” a phrase coined by Adolf Hitler to describe a falsehood “so colossal” that its very articulation makes it more accepted, for no one would have “the impudence to distort the truth so infamously.” For rightwing authoritarians who traffic in conspiracy, the “big lie” is also an essential act of scapegoating some dehumanized “other.” The conspiracist leader must personally vouch for examples of the “big lie” — for instance, Donald Trump must insist that he personally saw non-existent footage of Muslims in the United States celebrating the attacks on September 11th — since doing so reassures those drawn to it that the leader will place his resources in service to this and other like-minded falsehoods. It is a form of credential, one forged at the expense of credibility.
In unapologetically brandishing the “big lie,” rightwing authoritarian conspiracists oblige mainstream news media to platform it, time and again, transforming liberal institutions into unwitting agents of propaganda. No matter how they couch the remark or contextualize their coverage, the repetition of the “big lie” exerts a normalizing force. In 1942, Sidney Freifeld could barely contain his frustration as he enumerated various instances of Nazi manipulation of the American press to readers of Public Opinion Quarterly. The “great” and “cumulative effect” of the pre-war American press reprinting the dangerous assertions of Adolf Hitler had no justification, he insisted, when in reality “the cessation of well-known Nazi propaganda themes would be more newsworthy than their repetition.” Writing in more subdued times, E.B. White joined forces with Freifeld’s critique: by virtue of his position as chair of a Senate Committee, McCarthy demanded coverage of his conspiracist accusations, turning the front page of the newspaper “into a gibbet,” White wrote, “with the help of press that sometimes seemed to me to be unnecessarily cooperative in donating its space for the celebration of those grim rites.”
Another related tactic used by rightwing authoritarian conspiracists is their use of equivocation to introduce other lies, especially self-serving ones designed to counter their exposure as opportunists perpetrating fraud. Some, like President Trump, hone the technique to the point where they feign indifference. “There are a lot of people who think,” Trump will often say, as an introduction to some audacious lie. This rhetorical sleight — an untruth sent, as if a rescue party, to resuscitate an earlier and now endangered untruth — operates something like a Trojan Horse, as the speaker affects a posture of passive adjudication, compelled by fair-mindedness to entertain the lie as credible. Sometimes the untruth itself is expedient, like Trump’s success as a businessman; other times, particularly when appearing in a mainstream media outlet, the distance from it is what’s advantageous. But always the lie has no real provenance; its true origin is the emotional comfort and psychic release it provides to those who accepted the initial, false proposition of the conspiracist.
For the conspiracist, any information contrary to the “big lie” supplies proof of a still deeper conspiracy. In this way, Trump’s denial that Russian intelligence interfered covertly in the United States election of 2016 must be sustained not by arguing the merits of the case, but by inventing a Ukrainian plot. Likewise any trappings of legitimacy, such as candidly disclosing this insupportable theory to the country’s leader in a telephone call, stakes territory for its future repetition — in effect, another rescue party sent out to revive the initial “lie.” Accordingly, every mainstream platform given to the rightwing authoritarian conspiracist paves the way for the next one, a methodical construction of an adjacent and parallel political narrative — or, in the words of some, “an alternate reality” — that intersects with, and receives implicit sanction from, traditional sources of authority.
Forced to cede the stage, reason surrenders to a rightwing authoritarian holding his audience spellbound, just as Thomas Mann described in his 1929 classic “Mario and the Magician.” What does effective rational advocacy look like to someone in thrall to an intentionally irrational understanding of the world?
The question is more complicated than it appears — not least because we are all governed, in some way and to some degree, by irrationality. Bias infects us; our perspective predisposes us. Science steadily catches up to Immanuel Kant: subjective experience, particularly sensory data, shapes our brains and how we process the world. No person among us can hector or persuade rightwing authoritarian conspiracists from a position of Newtonian objectivity, a fact that forces all of us to resort to categorical distinctions based on degree rather than difference, a challenging exercise that paradoxically demands both rationality and reasonableness. Neither is in abundant supply.
More problematic is that conspiracists tend to identify real forces in the world and tap into real anxieties about them. At the time when President Truman launched the federal government’s loyalty oath program, the Soviet Union allowed its “liberation” tanks to languish in Eastern Europe, stubbornly waiting for democratic republics — like my parents’ country, Czechoslovakia — to conform to this new power reality. They had also pulled off several noteworthy feats of espionage against the Americans. By the time McCarthy and Senator James Eastland (too often forgotten) launched their anti-communist security investigations, Mao Tse-tung emerged as victorious in China, and the Soviets exploded their own atomic bomb. As the world delivered unsettling news, Americans received it without the assurance of many customary guideposts. The United States, formerly a country of millions of devoted isolationists, emerged from World War II as the preeminent global power, and with that standing came new tasks that demanded new ways of thinking.
It is one thing to reckon with the unexpected, and another thing to do so while standing on unfamiliar ground.
If rightwing authoritarian conspiracy thinking gripped national life during a time of global ascendance, our present and more serious bout accompanies and feeds off of signs of global decline. A more charitable characterization would be one of an establishment in crisis: our governing political order launched a disastrous, costly, and unjust war in Iraq; plunged the country into recession, then accepted “recovery” on the meager basis of restoring money to the affluent and security to Wall Street; abetted corporate corruption, then failed to prosecute it on a scale commensurate with its wrongdoing, or identify its many institutional enablers. The worst corporate fraud in American history, the opioid crisis, has gone without any serious course correction from the Food and Drug Administration. Not just failure but a refusal to hold failure accountable is apparent in all corners of American life, from corporate boardrooms to religious gatherings.
Average life expectancy in the United States peaked in 2014, perhaps the apex of American power; its subsequent decline suggests that the government has ceased to work on behalf of ordinary Americans. In the face of such betrayal, a narrative with a concentrated focus on an “enemy” subverting the republic gains marked appeal.
Political failings, even grave ones, play only one part of the role in our nation’s embrace of, and one political party’s total commitment to, a conspiracist rightwing authoritarian. In her stirring 2008 book The Age of American Unreason in a Culture of Lies, Susan Jacoby denounced the “cultural insularity associated with social media” in unsparing terms that must now be regarded as prescient, even absent a specific prediction. Not just anti-intellectualism but anti-rationalism dominates our public life; just as television was key to the rise of McCarthy, so too is social media for Trump. Worse yet, the pollution of our discourse precedes, and ranges far beyond, the appearance of new media technology.
Our current struggle is not so much to obtain facts, but rather to transition a recalcitrant political culture to a framework “where facts matter,” as former Republican Evan McMullin recently put it. Meanwhile, as if to punctuate the challenge before us, Facebook has decided that as far political advertising goes, facts don’t play a role at all.
Anti-rationalism converges on all points of the political spectrum; in the Republican Party, it has vanquished all rivals. Many years after George W. Bush launched the invasion of Iraq, a slim majority of Republicans believe that weapons of mass destruction were found there. A sizable majority (72%) do not think President Barack Obama was born in the United States. Even among Republicans who demonstrate scientific knowledge, less than half profess faith in the evidence base and scientific consensus in support of climate change. Though we might guess that future generations will describe — and minimize — these troubling years as “Trumpism,” we owe them a more honest account, and a more sincere apology.
After all, does “Trumpism” fully capture the demonization and abuse of “the other,” especially one made more menacing by the terror of a dangerous gun culture? Does it comprehend the delegitimization of political opponents, including the arrantly offensive and racist proposition that Barack Obama did not serve as a lawful president? Does it hold within it the Manichean depiction of a world under siege — by any other name, a conspiracy theory — such as the one offered up recently by Attorney General Barr, condemning his political opponents to infamy without assuming the burden of evidence or reasoning that anywhere approaches, or could reasonably support, his indictment?
I think not. To call it “Trumpism” would be to trivialize those deeper currents in the same way that “McCarthyism” has come to mean the act of accusing without sufficient evidence. In truth, the phenomenon known as McCarthyism was much deeper: a witch hunt as a way of understanding the world, not merely as a method to enact a particular and otherwise legitimate set of politics. Today we can look and find similar forces everywhere in power, a revanchist global force looking to recover ground ceded to liberalism, diversity, even modernity itself.
Yet we falter to find a name.
Though some people automatically consider fascism a term of abuse, the only time I have heard its historical legacy invoked in that way was as an epithet against me and other women who marched in a demonstration in support of reproductive rights. We were “femiNazis.” For others of us who study or lived through history (or both), fascism is category of political ideology subject to discretionary judgment, and Umberto Eco’s theory of “Ur Fascists” provides a much-needed touchstone. In it he warned us that “political regimes can be overthrown, and ideologies criticized and disowned,” but “behind a regime and its ideology, there is always a way of thinking and feeling.” Eco proceed to enumerate what he regarded as common, if contradictory, tendencies of fascism; many aptly describe our current politics. Perhaps some kindred ideology is the better classification, or perhaps more gains can be made by rejecting the term on purely instrumental grounds, in favor of some awkward mouthful like “rightwing authoritarian conspiracists.”
Either way, we must refrain from using an eponymous “McCarthy” sort of label. Though not common, “Hitlerism” is a term used by specialists to refer to aspects of National Socialism as distinct from other, contemporaneous forms of fascism. But it is well worth noting that “Hitlerism” was frequently used prior to the Nazi invasion of Poland, often substituting for the word “fascism” rather than distinguishing a certain form of it. In fact, according to Google’s N-gram, use of the term peaked in 1942 — as did Nazi power.
Apparently, after the Soviets turned the Nazis back from Stalingrad, Hitler became a fascist first and foremost, and everything else secondarily.
We must now entertain the possibility the name “McCarthyism” means that its underlying politics never faced the same convincing eviction, and that we fail to identify its modern incarnations and recent expressions not because they remain obscure, but because they reign in power.
