BY MICHAEL S. JOHNSON
When Harold H. Velde took the chair of the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1953, he vowed to “weed out the communists and their fellow travelers, the pinkos, as they are called” from the departments of State and Defense and promised to serve as a watchdog for “commies” infiltrating the Eisenhower Administration.
The Committee had already made a name for itself. Five years earlier, a young member of the committee from California named Richard Nixon claimed fame by subpoenaing records that led to the imprisonment of Alger Hiss, the prominent and popular wunderkind of the Roosevelt era, who was accused of turning over government secrets to the Soviet Union.
In fact, since its founding in 1938, the Committee was on the leading edge of the anti-communist movement in the United States, a movement founded on legitimate national and international concerns about the global spread of Marxist-Leninism to China and across Russia into Eastern Europe and beyond. The spread of Communism would have profound, lasting ramifications for the free world and especially for the United States, the post-war protector of democracy and policeman of the planet.
The specter of Communist infiltrators in government and the arts, however, added a whole new soap opera dimension to the seriousness and complexity of post-war global realignment. It opened up the circus ring to both serious performers and silly clowns.
It was the era of McCarthyism, marked by the excesses and extremism of Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy, who chaired a subcommittee in the Senate from which he hijacked the issue and left a path of destruction like Attila the Hun through American society, politics, the arts, and government, particularly the U.S. Army.
Not to dwell on Communism, but it was Karl Marx who said “history repeats itself, first as tragedy and then as farce.”
Today, we are not experiencing the tragedy that was McCarthyism, but we are witnessing a political farce that may well play out into tragedy, not so dissimilar to the Democrats’ political excesses of the 1960s as Bill Keller pointed out in the New York Times.
The current farce has evolved from a traditionally conservative movement born from serious and legitimate concerns with fiscal policy and government-run health care. Like the legitimate concerns over communism a half-century before, it was hijacked by the likes of Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity, Sarah Palin, Michele Bachmann, Ron Paul, and others who transformed it from conservative orthodoxy into an anarchical libertarian rampage devoid of maturity, responsibility and common sense.
Now, Senator Ted Cruz has hijacked the hijackers. He has raised the bar on his predecessors, becoming more strident, more shocking, more righteous in his indignation, more independent, more anti-Washington, and more obstructionist. He’s been poking his sword at anyone and everyone who gets in his way. He has endeared himself to interest groups, which have the cash and grassroots organization to intimidate his colleagues with the threat of primary challenges, making clear that opposing the movement has political and sometimes personal consequences. It is a familiar scenario to those with gray hair.
Cruz, like McCarthy, is running through the land burning down every barn he sees, without building another in its place, while keeping himself free from responsibility to govern. Governing is not what Cruz is about. He seems to have no interest in filling potholes and making the trains run on time.
The McCarthy era left us with painful lessons about the destructive nature of excess and extremism on both sides. It destroyed peoples’ lives, turned people against each other, negatively charged the media, wasted millions of dollars, injected fear and mistrust into the political process, and, worst of all, by bringing out the worst in us, it made governing more difficult, if not impossible. We never really fully recovered (the only good to come of it was when Harold Velde ran out of steam, he was replaced in Congress by a young war hero named Bob Michel, who went on to become one of the most effective legislators in a long time, and one of the craftsmen behind the implementation of the Reagan agenda).
Senator Cruz is not McCarthy, but what he is doing today is cut from the same cloth and producing similar results. Ted Cruz and his small but well-leveraged recalcitrant band are making governance impossible, with nothing to show for it, no benefit, for so many millions who have suffered through nearly six years of recession and punitive recovery, waiting for the government to do something, anything, to fix what the government broke in the first place.
Cruz and his cohorts are also trying to tear down the Republican Party, which is in need of reformation, but not from the front end of a bulldozer.
“Fifty years from now scholars will be writing books about the division between traditional Republican conservatism and tea-party libertarianism exemplified by Cruz,” my mentor Bill Gavin wrote recently. But, he said, “Republicans have to get it right, now.” Gavin, in rare agreement with Keller of the Times: “Domination by ideological self-righteousness by purists damaged the Democratic party for a decade or more and the same thing can happen to the Republicans.”
The Republican Party cannot for long negotiate with a faction of itself that doesn’t know what it wants, only what it doesn’t want and doesn’t have any idea how to get what it doesn’t want. Makes perfect sense.
So this movement is a de facto third party, one that will find itself more aligned with Republican conservatism than Democratic progressivism if governing ever resumes, but it is another party, just the same.
Another factor in the potency of the movement has been media. Ted Cruz is getting wall-to-wall, saturation coverage, not because he has actually done anything of substance, but because he has created that perception, made the most noise and been the most outrageous. Ted Cruz accomplished nothing with his phony filibuster. He got clobbered in the end, but he is who the media make the face of conservatism, libertarianism, the Republican Party, the leadership of the Senate and powerful people everywhere. The Kardashians are jealous. Great theater. Great television. Great headlines. No substance.
NBC News last week featured President Obama on air eloquently presenting his version of the drama, while the other side was presented not by the Speaker of the House or the Minority Leader of the Senate or the Chairman of a Committee, or any other Republican legislator, but Ted Cruz.
NBC, again on Sunday, gave him stage, not Rob Portman, John Thune, John Cornyn, Bob Corker, Lamar Alexander, John Hoeven, Dan Coats, John McCain, Lindsay Graham, Chuck Grassley or a half dozen other senators who are far more relevant. It is only through the media–social and traditional–that the extremists are given leverage and power and the capacity to raise money so they can buy more leverage and power. The show horses of American politics are glamorized and empowered, while the workhorses are left in the field, strapped to the plow.
The media, all of the media, are as dysfunctional as the government. They misinform as much as they inform. They exaggerate more than they enlighten, and they incite emotions rather than stimulate thought. They are a problem, a series problem, and they are in denial, deep denial about the destructive nature of their role.
The beneficiaries of all of this are, of course, American progressives, the Democratic Party and Democrats in the House and Senate. The Democrats control the Senate and are a minority in the House, but in both bodies they enjoy almost blanket immunity from the responsibility to govern, thanks to perceptions, created in good measure by the media, that there is no one with whom they can negotiate, nothing they can do to move the process along, no actions they can take to facilitate the governing process. Baloney. They—House Minority Leader Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Reid–have within their grasp enough votes and presidential leverage to govern, but they have to be willing to compromise as much as they insist the Republicans should. They just won ‘t, and from a partisan political perspective, why should they? There are risks in governing. Why take them? Why bother? Just ask Ted Cruz.
Editor’s Note: Mike Johnson is a former journalist, who worked on the Ford White House staff and served as press secretary and chief of staff to House Republican Leader Bob Michel, prior to entering the private sector. He is co-author of a book, Surviving Congress, a guide for congressional staff. He is currently a principal with the OB-C Group.