TomKando
We only have a few weeks left before the country decides whether to re-instate a lunatic as our leader, or send an extremely competent woman to the White House. My sister Madeleine just posted a brilliant article about stupidity, Read it and see the options which our country is facing ( Is Trump Two Fries Short of a Happy Meal? )
Inspired by Madeleine’s piece, I began to rummage through my historical memories, wondering whether there is any sort of precedent for the current situation. The closest I came to one is the Red Scare era of 1949-1958, the McCarthy era. I was a child and a teenager at that time.
Wisconsin Republican Senator Joseph McCarthy (formerly a Democrat) launched the era of McCarthyism in 1950: This became the major element in a national anti-communist hysteria which lasted until 1957.
Joe McCarthy became highly popular after he announced that he had a list of communist spies employed by the State Department, and also of people who infiltrated the Truman and Eisenhower administrations, the Voice of America and the Army. He accused several politicians of homosexuality and other sex crimes (homosexuality was a crime at that time). He also crossed swords with President Eisenhower, insinuating that the President was soft on communists and fellow travelers. By 1953, at least half of all Americans had a favorable impression of McCarthy.
McCarthy held the highly publicized Army-McCarthy hearings in 1954. Wyoming Senator Lester Hunt committed suicide. By late 1954, McCarthy’s popularity faded. He continued to rail against communism and socialism, but he was censured by the Senate. He died in 1957 from hepatitis. He was said to have been an alcoholic.
So here is my question:
The present national folly of “trumpism” has been consuming us and the media for about ten years, if we start counting when Trump became an important national figure as a presidential candidate in 2015.
The folly of McCarthyism lasted from 1950 to 1957. It was not an isolated phenomenon. There had been an earlier Red Scare shortly after World War One. Then, the late 1940s saw the emergence of a nuclear USSR, the communization of China and the Korean War. There was much to fear and the political climate was fertile for paranoid politics such as McCarthyism. However, Joe McCarthy turned out to be a liar, a demagogue, a buffoon and probable alcoholic. By the second half of the fifties, he was no longer in the limelight. His ascendency had lasted less than ten years, whereupon the country regained its sanity.
So, how much longer can we expect Trump and Trumpism to last? How much longer can we - even those of us who loathe Donald Trump - sustain our quotidian addiction to news about this guy? When does he become BORING, when does he vanish? That other buffoon, Joe McCarthy, vanished when most Americans understood that he was just that - a mentally unstable buffoon. Should the same cycle not also apply to the current buffoon vying for the White House?
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