Trump\u2019s eerily familiar evocations of the \u2018enemy within\u2019 may be harder to shake off than the man who targeted my parents<\/p>\n
The rise of Donald Trump aroused in me an old fear of Senator Joseph McCarthy<\/a>. Both McCarthy and Trump rose to power as demagogues who fed on the American public\u2019s fear of \u201cenemies within\u201d. My family had cause to fear on the biggest of these counts: my parents were communists from an early age, although they had quit the party in 1939 after Hitler\u2019s pact with Stalin. In the heyday of US power, families such as mine were persecuted for a cause in which they no longer believed. We developed ways to avoid or resist persecution that worked pretty well, and I think these help to illuminate the combat that is to come<\/a> with Trumpism.<\/p>\n Some connections between McCarthy and Trump are straightforward, both having been charismatic performers with a base of willing believers, both exploiting patriotism, both making up \u201cfacts\u201d on the spur of the moment. There is a personal bridge between the two men that is a little more complicated, and perhaps more revealing. The lawyer and fixer Roy Cohn served as McCarthy\u2019s chief counsel and later as an adviser to the young Donald Trump<\/a>. Cohn was an expert in the techniques of public humiliation, of firing people and of surveilling private lives. Cohn suggested to McCarthy, for instance, to wave lists of hundreds of foreign infiltrators and communist spies in front of a gullible press \u2013 lists that proved to be blank sheets of paper. Cohn counselled Trump on how to bribe and intimidate New York politicians when the young property mogul encountered rough weather in business. The Roy Cohn who later featured in Tony Kushner\u2019s play Angels in America<\/a> was an accurate picture of the real, combative but self-hating man. Though Cohn died of an Aids-related illness in 1986, he denied to the end that he was gay and seemingly sought to appease his inner demons by aggressing others.<\/p>\n Richard Sennett chairs the London Centre for the Humanities<\/p>\n Continue reading…<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Trump\u2019s eerily familiar evocations of the \u2018enemy within\u2019 may be harder to shake off than the man who targeted my parents The rise of Donald Trump aroused in me an old fear of Senator Joseph McCarthy. Both McCarthy and Trump rose to power as demagogues who fed on the American public\u2019s fear of \u201cenemies within\u201d. … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-29252","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29252","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=29252"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29252\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=29252"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=29252"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=29252"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}