'Never forgets an enemy': Expert reveals 'eerie parallel' between Trumpism and McCarthyism

28 December 2024

President-elect Donald Trump's return to the White House could result in a vengeful four years that may end up resembling a particularly dark chapter in America's recent past, according to an expert with firsthand experience.

In a Saturday essay for the Guardian, Richard Sennett — who chairs the London Centre for Humanities at the British Academy — recalled how his family was hounded by then-Sen. Joseph McCarthy's (R-Wisc.) House Un-American Activities Committee. Even though his family quit the Communist Party after Russian dictator Joseph Stalin formed a pact with Nazi leader Adolf Hitler ahead of World War II, they were still targeted by McCarthy's committee and threatened with a sedition indictment.

Sennett noted that McCarthy's chief counsel on the committee was Roy Cohn, who was also a mentor to a young Donald Trump when he was a budding New York real estate tycoon. He recalled that the "necessity of resistance" to McCarthyism fundamentally transformed his family, and that he learned the importance of remaining silent in order to protect his mother, father and uncle.

"It was an ironic threat, given that my father, who had fought with my uncle in the Spanish civil war, had by the 1950s moved from the extreme left to the extreme right, a journey many other ex-communists made. He was menaced by who he was originally rather than who he had become," Sennett recalled. "There’s an eerie parallel here with Trump’s plan to undo the citizenship of patriotic Latinos who arrived illegally in America. They, too, may be forced to pay for a former life."

Sennett described Trump's longtime mentor as a "combative but self-hating man," who was gay but denied it until he died of an AIDS-related condition in the 1980s. He argued that Cohn "seemingly sought to appease his inner demons by aggressing others," and that this was the chief motivation behind his efforts to persecute Sennett's family. Both Cohn and McCarthy, Sennett wrote, were led by a "paranoia" that "reaches deep inside the psyche, eroding our very ability to trust one another."

Just as children of adults in the crosshairs of McCarthy's committee learned the power of silence, Sennett observed that pregnant individuals in America today are also adjusting their own public speech given the threat posed by Republican-led states that have criminalized abortion. He then warned that as pervasive as McCarthyism was in its heyday, Trumpism is much darker given its vast implications for how Trump's enemies could be treated under his incoming administration.

"The president-elect never forgets an enemy, and he is obsessed with seeking revenge," Sennett wrote. "Communists and ex-communists hoped to outlast McCarthy’s hit-and-run approach to persecution. This is a hope we can’t entertain with Trumpism. I don’t think the ideology Trump stands for will fade after he passes on. His movement draws on a rich, nourishing stew of fears and grievances: racism, sexism, homophobia, nativism, climate denial. Enough to feed his followers for a long time."

Click here to read Sennett's full op-ed in the Guardian.

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