Senator Joseph McCarthy
It’s time to consider whether Gov. Scott Walker is intentionally employing the brazenly dishonest tactics of Sen. Joe McCarthy, who previously held the title as the most dangerous national politician to come out of Wisconsin.
Since the 1950s, right-wing Sen. McCarthy has been the worst stain on both Wisconsin politics and the Republican Party nationally. McCarthy achieved that distinction by getting an entire, shameful era in U.S. politics—the McCarthy Era—named after him.
McCarthyism turned the ’50s into a reckless, anti-Communist witch hunt as Wisconsin’s Republican senator made wildly irresponsible, untruthful accusations about Communists subverting our government (the moderate Eisenhower administration!), our military, our schools and our entertainment industry.
Victims included hundreds jailed for refusing to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) about their personal political ideals and associations. Perhaps tens of thousands more were fired or blacklisted as actors, screenwriters, playwrights, government employees, educators and military professionals, often merely for rumors they held left-of-center political beliefs.
It may seem odd to compare Walker, a sober preacher’s son who’s perfected a bland façade of earnest sincerity, to McCarthy, a drunken, extravagantly bombastic thug.
Yet there were obvious parallels that thrilled Walker’s audience at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), the nation’s largest annual gathering of its most wild-eyed, right-wing extremists.
That was the speech in which Walker hilariously compared standing up to hundreds of thousands of protesting school teachers, nurses, correctional officers and other public employees being stripped of their union rights to defeating the bloodthirsty Middle Eastern terrorists of ISIS.
“If I can take on 100,000 protesters, I can do the same across the world,” Walker boasted to wild cheers.
Walker apparently doesn’t know the difference between democracy and terrorism.
Walker is partly right that hundreds of thousands of Wisconsin workers occupied and surrounded the Capitol for weeks after Walker pulled a surprise attack with a law to destroy their union collective bargaining rights, an attack that he never mentioned during his election campaign.
Yet there wasn’t a single beheading in Capitol Square. Walker was the only one threatening people’s lives.
Any massive protest includes a few overly obnoxious jerks. Back in the ’60s, we always assumed they were agents provocateurs working for the government. Walker admitted he’d considered planting such troublemakers in the crowd during an infamous phone call recorded by an imposter pretending to be billionaire David Koch.
But overwhelmingly, Walker’s victims merely sang songs, gave sincerely impassioned speeches and chanted: “This is what democracy looks like!” The governor somehow found that threatening.
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It’s actually the most American thing citizens can do in a democracy. The First Amendment to the Constitution guarantees free speech and public assembly by citizens petitioning their government.
Some people call the recent series of ridiculous, untrue public statements by Walker “gaffes.” Stuff like he doesn’t know whether President Obama loves America, he doesn’t even know if Obama is a Christian and he thinks murderous Islamic terrorists are just like union members who object to Walker destroying their rights.
But they’re not gaffes at all. They’re deliberate, intentionally false statements Walker delivers to carefully selected audiences to attract support from hateful extremists who really do believe Obama is a foreign-born enemy of America and union members are violent terrorists.
Pretending To Be a Hero
There’s another dishonest purpose served by Walker’s McCarthyism. He pretends to be a courageous hero of the extreme right boldly vanquishing the awesomely powerful forces of leftist evil controlling America.
There was nothing particularly courageous or even difficult about destroying public employee unions in Wisconsin or supporting a right-to-work law to weaken private unions. It was easy as pie.
Since Republicans control both houses of the Legislature, they pass whatever Walker wants with as little public discussion as possible.
Republicans seized that total control after the last census by so corruptly gerrymandering legislative districts that even when Democrats win more votes than Republicans in legislative races—which they regularly do—Republicans still retain a majority in both houses of the Legislature.
Walker intentionally employs the same dishonesty in his presidential campaigning.
Comparing Wisconsin citizens who disagree with him to barbaric terrorists clearly was no slip of the tongue. Walker made exactly the same comparison a few days earlier at his meet and greet in New York where he tacitly supported former Mayor Rudy Giuliani’s vitriolic attack on President Obama’s patriotism.
Giuliani’s offensive remarks overshadowed Walker’s ISIS smear on the lawful assembly of his own citizens. So Walker tossed it out again to the angry rabble at CPAC.
It was only when the press began widely publicizing the ridiculous comparison that Walker retracted it and stopped repeating it.
McCarthyism was crude and sloppy. Walkerism is much more cunningly delivered with an innocent face and then quickly retracted after the dirty work is done.
Decent Wisconsinites fervently hope another shameless state politician doesn’t go down in history for wrecking democracy again during a Walker Era.
