Trump and McCarthy

 

                                                          

                           Trump and McCarthy

"A recent petition, signed by hundreds of Harvard Law School students and alumni, raises the specter of the new McCarthyism coming to the law school at which I taught for half a century. The petition states that "Harvard Law School faces a choice of whether to welcome the architects and backers of the Trump administration's worse abuses back into polite society." It demands that Harvard not "hire or affiliate with" any of these sinners, and threatens that "if it does so the school will be complicit if future attacks on our democracy are even more violent – and more successful."

The petition sees this ban as part of the educational and employment mission of the school: "it would also teach ambitious students of all ages that attempting to subvert the democratic process" will deny them access to the "revolving door to success and prestige." This self-serving defense of censorship is intended to convey a crass economic threat: if you want to get a good job after law school, make sure that Harvard bans teachers and speakers who are trying to "rehabilitate their reputations and obscure the stain of their complicity in the Trump administration ...."

This is similar to the message that the original McCarthyites tried to have Harvard convey in the 1950s, when students were denied editorship of the Law Review, clerkship recommendations, and other opportunities that they had earned, solely because of their alleged affiliation with Communism and other left-wing causes."

This is from a Dershowitz article trying to defend free speech. I'm unsure how well the analogy to McCarthyism holds up, though. Communism was an international problem, and remains so. It has a vision of inherent group conflict that can be resolved only by the deracination of one group, with a worldwide aim of revolution, murder, and enslavement. Trump is hard to summarize other than a blustering philosophy-free zone with some bad nationalist trade ideas. Obnoxious but not scary. What is interesting here is the over-the-top reaction to Trump and his supporters, most of whom are benign, older citizens who want the U.S. reestablished as an economic and political example of success.