The New McCarthyism Was Started by Liberals
As with earlier Red Scares, Democrats laid the groundwork for the current crackdown on dissent.
The censorship of radical voices is an old story that’s become much more dire—and current—with the detention by immigration agents on March 8 of Mahmoud Khalil, a former student activist and permanent resident of the United States who has been at the forefront of protests at Columbia University against the Israeli onslaught in Gaza. In a statement to The Free Press about the case, a Trump administration official said, “The allegation here is not that he was breaking the law.” Rather, the official continued, Khalil’s activism was “mobilizing support for Hamas” in addition to being antisemitic and “hence, [is] contrary to the interests of the U.S.” This claim is both factually false and legally terrifying. There’s absolutely no evidence that Khalil is pro-Hamas or antisemitic. But it is even more disturbing that the Trump administration claims the right to deport any green-card holder it designates a terrorist supporter based on speech alone.
Khalil’s threatened deportation is only the starkest example of a much wider crackdown on free speech. Columbia University, threatened by the Trump administration with the loss of $400 million in federal funding, has chosen not to resist but rather to become an eager handmaiden of repression: Numerous other Columbia students have been suspended, expelled, or stripped of their degrees. The university is now advising its international students not to tweet about Gaza or Ukraine.
Elsewhere, the mayor of Miami Beach is trying to shut down a local movie theater for showing the Oscar-winning documentary No Other Land (a joint Israeli-Palestinian production), while Yale Law School has suspended a scholar based on an AI-drafted article that falsely accused her of supporting terrorism.
Writing in The New York Times, the columnist Michelle Goldberg argued, “The closest analogue to this squalid moment is the Red Scare of the late 1940s and 1950s, when the right exploited widespread fear of communist infiltration to purge leftists from government and cultural institutions.” Goldberg could equally have cited the first Red Scare, which ran from 1917 to 1920 and saw great radical leaders—notably the Socialist Party leader Eugene Debs and the anarchist firebrand Emma Goldman—imprisoned and, in Goldman’s case, deported.
Goldberg’s Red Scare analogy is accurate—but too narrowly ideological, blaming the political purge on right-wing troglodytes like Senator Joseph McCarthy. In truth, both Red Scares were ignited by liberal Democrats—Woodrow Wilson during World War I and Harry Truman during the Cold War—although the rise of McCarthyism in the 1940s and ’50s showed how easily anti-subversive hysteria could be hijacked by anti-liberal Republicans. In both cases, the liberal embrace of militarism opened the door to a reactionary politics of suppressing the left.
In 1971, the journalist Murray Kempton reviewed the convincing findings of the historian Athan Theoharis and concluded that “McCarthyism was only Trumanism carried to its logical conclusion.” This was also the long-held opinion of the towering dissident journalist I.F. Stone, himself blacklisted during the second Red Scare. The historian Garry Wills noted that Truman had multiple motives for inciting panic over communist subversion. In 1947, Senator Arthur Vandenberg told Truman that the only way to persuade Americans to send foreign aid to Greece was to “scare hell out of the country.” The following year, running for reelection, Truman needed to kneecap the Progressive Party candidacy of former vice president Henry Wallace, who was running on an anti-war platform. Wills listed an impressive array of anti-Red initiatives launched by Truman: “the federal-employee loyalty program, the Attorney General’s list, the establishment of the C.I.A., the State Department disloyalty firings, the alien-deportation and loyalty-passport programs, revoking of Pentagon press credentials, J. Edgar Hoover’s propaganda Freedom Train, [and] the Smith Act prosecutions.” Truman built the infrastructure of the Red Scare, which McCarthy then opportunistically and brilliantly commandeered for partisan ends.
Echoing Kempton, we can say that Trumpism is only Bidenism carried to its logical conclusion. Joe Biden was in many ways heir to the militaristic liberalism of Wilson and Truman—especially visible in his efforts to revive the military Keynesianism of the Cold War. After the Hamas attack of October 7, 2023, Biden, a lifelong fanatical Zionist, embraced a policy of nearly unconditional support for Israel’s war effort. This continued even as Israel unleashed on Gaza the most intensive slaughter of civilians in the 21st century. When mass protests broke out against his policy, Biden repeatedly condemned the activists as violent and antisemitic, responding to outlier actions that didn’t represent the movement.
Biden’s slander of pro-Palestinian activists helped splinter the Democratic coalition during the 2024 election, giving Trump a potent wedge issue. Once elected, Trump had ample grounds for attacking pro-Palestinian activists, knowing full well that Democratic Party leaders such as Senator Chuck Schumer would respond not with a full-throated defense of free speech but with mealy-mouthed equivocations.
Schumer’s statement on Khalil’s detention—issued after a considerable delay—opened with a declaration of his abhorrence for Khalil’s “policies and opinions,” revisited the canard of antisemitism, and concluded with an insipid legalistic demurral to Trump’s “wrongheaded action.” Even after Trump denied Columbia funding on the pretext of combating antisemitism, Schumer agreed that “the colleges had to do something, and a lot of them didn’t do enough.”
Unlike the two Red Scares, this current repression is not fueled by a widely shared political consensus. A recent Gallup poll showed that only 46 percent of Americans are more sympathetic to Israelis than to Palestinians. Among Democrats, only 21 percent are more sympathetic to Israelis, while 59 percent are more sympathetic to Palestinians. In other words, Democrats have ample political room to fight the latest McCarthyism. Unfortunately, the Bidens and Schumers of the party are too wedded to liberal militarism and unreservedly hawkish Zionism to be anything more than Trump’s pathetic accomplices.
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