Marx once said that history repeats, first as tragedy and then as farce. Today’s tragedy masquerading as farce would have to be the surreal accusations a quintet of deranged Republican lawmakers have made of late that come straight out the 1950s. I am referring, of course, to the hideous charges made by Reps. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.), Trent Franks (R-Ariz.), Louie Gohmert (R-Texas), Thomas Rooney (R-Fla.) and Lynn Westmoreland (R-Ga.) that members of the Muslim Brotherhood are systematically infiltrating the U.S. government.
Michele Bachmann led the charge, wildly accusing her fellow Minnesota Congressman Keith Ellison, a Democrat and the only Muslim member of Congress, and State Department official and aide to Secretary Hillary Clinton, Huma Abedin, of treasonous terrorist connections. Her information comes from a right-wing think tank called the Center for Security Policy run by Frank Gaffney – a key member of the anti-Muslim political right that has grown in prominence since the Sept. 11 attacks.
Unlike McCarthy, however, who was only humiliated on national TV during the famous 1954 Army-McCarthy hearings after years of spewing hateful rhetoric, Bachmann’s condemnation was much more quick in coming. Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), Obama’s Republican opponent in 2008 and the man responsible for promoting Sarah Palin to the national stage, called her accusations an attack on the foundations of the country:
“When anyone, not least a member of Congress, launches specious and degrading attacks against fellow Americans on the basis of nothing more than fear of who they are and ignorance of what they stand for, it defames the spirit of our nation, and we all grow poorer because of it.”
Bachmann responded shiftily by asking the media and others to “read the letters” she and her partners in character assassination submitted to five federal agencies on the subject – neatly recalling McCarthy’s famous trick of brandishing papers before reporters and saying, “I have here in my hand a list of 205 communists.” A sheaf of papers no one has access to apparently makes lies, innuendo and fear-fueled hate-mongering somehow more acceptable.
Islam: the new communism?
Bachmann did not actually say she had a list of 205 communists, of course, but she might as well have, given her habit of channeling the black soul of Joe McCarthy back into the mainstream of American politics. Like a ghost from our past, McCarthyism is back with a vengeance and Rep. Bachmann, along with many others on the right, are its spiritual medium. Only now, instead of communism, the devil du jour is Islam, other non-Christians except Jews and anyone who doesn’t look like they live in a white suburb.
At least in the 1950s the threat posed by communism and the Soviet Union were discernible. Stalinist Russia and Maoist China were huge, powerful countries and a shooting war with one on the Korean Peninsula had just ended. A nuclear world war, like the conventional one that had also just ended, was a believable possibility. Communism as practiced in the Eastern Bloc clearly crushed individual liberty and operated under a cruel, lawless system of secret police, political commissars and tyrants – not unlike the system many Muslims, including the Muslim Brotherhood, have overthrown as a result of the Arab Spring. Like Hitler’s Germany, Stalin’s Soviet Union was a horror legitimate enough to be feared. Iran doesn’t even have a working nuclear bomb and is arguably more democratic than our good ally and true pit of despotism, Saudi Arabia. Not that any of this justified McCarthy’s un-American hate mongering, but it at least could be understood given the climate of the times. Today’s anti-Muslim McCarthyism is not only just as un-American, but it makes even less sense than did the old variety.
Islam is not communism, nor are the geopolitical conditions faced by the United States today, despite our problems, even remotely similar to that in the 1950s. Sept. 11 was over a decade ago and the attacks, though horrible, did not fundamentally threaten the existence of the country. A closer analogy for understanding Bachmann and company may ultimately not be the Cold War’s Red Scare, but the anti-immigrant hysteria periodically whipped up by know-nothing nativists since the early-19th century. Starting with backlashes against the “heathen Irish” in the 1840s, the United States has ever since suffered through periods of nativist resistance to newcomers to our shores.
US immigration
Every couple of decades, like clockwork, a group will arrive, be accused of being too alien, inferior and insular to assimilate, only to become so integrated into the fabric of American life that, by the time the next wave arrives, their ancestors will be among those wanting to keep the country pure of foreign elements. It would be funny, if the consequences in the here-and-now weren’t so tragic.
Consequences, for instance, like the recent massacre of members of a Sikh temple in Wisconsin – mowed down by a white supremacist as they were being called to worship. Or consequences like the plague of arsons that have burned down mosques in places like Joplin, Mo. and Nashville, Tenn. Or consequences like the ID laws in Arizona and Alabama that have forced entire families to flee for fear of arrest and deportation. The natives, it seems, are particularly restless this time around.
Fear and loathing of that which is foreign and new are rooted deep in human psychology – particularly in that of conservatives whom science shows are much more sensitive to deviations from community norms than are self-described liberals. So, when change takes place – especially economic, demographic and cultural change of the type we are seeing today – we should expect and prepare for unease from the less enlightened amongst us. But, while holding the hands of conservatives wary of change is a necessary part of the process, blind acceptance of violence-inducing rhetoric by members of Congress is not, nor ever should be. Even the disgraced shade of Joe McCarthy could tell Michele Bachmann that.