(RoyalPatriot.com )- The New Yorker reports that In December of 1954, the United States Senate convened with the intention of censuring Joseph McCarthy, who was serving as the junior senator from Wisconsin.
McCarthy, whose anti-communist bromides had made him among the most feared and powerful men in Congress, had suffered a catastrophic drop in fortunes over the preceding months.
In the Army-McCarthy hearings, which were broadcast on national television, he had been thoroughly embarrassed and had to put up with scathing criticism from the journalist Edward R. Murrow. The senator’s rise to popularity was primarily due to the potent blend of insinuation and fearmongering that he employed, which was the primary cause for his reprimand.
The conventional telling of McCarthy’s downfall focused on the most dramatic and publicized events, but an underlying political logic made those moments possible. In 1950, when it was reported that McCarthy, a Republican, had made a false claim that he had the names of two hundred and five Communists employed by the State Department, Democrats controlled both chambers of Congress as well as the White House. McCarthy’s accusation that he had the names of these individuals was widely criticized.
When the Army-McCarthy hearings were held in 1954, Republicans controlled both the House of Representatives and the Senate, in addition to the White House, occupied by President Dwight D. Eisenhower. It was one thing to propagate falsehoods that made his party look incompetent, but it was another to spread falsehoods that made Democrats look terrible. After everything was said and done, twenty-two Republican senators supported censure.
They share demagogic similarities and mutual ties to the attorney Roy Cohn and forge a hostile symbiosis with the media outlets of their respective eras.
Since Donald Trump emerged as a presidential candidate, observers have compared him to McCarthy.
The results of the midterm elections that took place the week before last indicate an additional topic of comparison: the narratives associated with their respective political losses. However, the lackluster performance of Republicans in the midterm elections suggests that, like McCarthy did sixty-eight years ago, the former President has reached a point where his demagogy has become a liability for his party.
Meanwhile, the New Yorker fails to note that the Democrats lost the house. The Republicans lost nothing. They gained.
They can compare Trump to Joe McCarthy. The reality is that while taking a victory lap, the Democrats look like Charlie McCarthy, the famous ventriloquist dummy of the 1950s.
