Between the Lines Q&A

A weekly column featuring progressive viewpoints
on national and international issues
under-reported in mainstream media
for release Jan. 7, 2010

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McCarthyism Revived
in Today's Right-Wing Lies and Smears

RealAudio MP3

Interview with Peter Montgomery,
senior fellow with People for the American Way,
conducted by Scott Harris

teaparty

The term "McCarthyism" has its origins in a dark era in U.S. history, when during the 1950s, Wisconsin Republican Sen. Joseph R. McCarthy warned the nation about the enemies from within, and made broad accusations that Communists had infiltrated the highest levels of the American government. After the end of World War II, and the rise of the Soviet Union, there was much fear about the threat posed by communism -- and conservative politicians like McCarthy exploited that fear with campaigns based on red-baiting and allegations of disloyalty. McCarthy was eventually exposed as a fraud and a demagogue, but not before he succeeded in destroying many lives of innocent victims caught in his web of fear and lies.

Today there's an echo of McCarthyism in the conservative "tea party" protesters and other right-wing activists whose signs and shouts at town hall meetings and rallies label President Obama and his supporters as communists, traitors and describe health care reform legislation as a plot to launch another holocaust. Right-wing media commentators like Glen Beck, Bill O'Reilly and Rush Limbaugh serve as an echo chamber repeating these attacks and discredited conspiracy theories.

In a new report titled, "Rise of the New McCarthyism: How Right Wing Extremists Try to Paralyze Government Through Ideological Smears and Baseless Attacks," author Peter Montgomery examines the parallels between the McCarthy era and today's conservative political tactics. Between The Lines' Scott Harris spoke with Montgomery, a senior fellow with the group People for the American Way, who talks about the danger he sees in organized right-wing attacks against intellectual elites, liberal media and gays, while appealing to nativist and racist sentiment.

PETER MONTGOMERY: I do think the change during the presidential campaign of Obama and certainly since his election has just been a sea change in the kind of attacks and fearmongering that have been unleased by right-wing media personalities and religious right organizations who basically want to do anything in their power to stymie President Obama and to bring down his administration.

Even just a few years ago, anyone sort of hurling accusations of someone being like Hitler or Stalin was considered so far off the fringe, no one would take them seriously. Now we hear that all the time. I mean, people on the right accuse the Obama administration and congressional leaders of being socialists and communists and promoting fascist tyranny in the United States so often that it's kind of lost its shock value. But to me, it's one sign of how far this has gone in such a short time.

BETWEEN THE LINES: And how much of this has this to do with race, do you think? A lot of people say the United States has transcended the issue of race with the election of Barack Obama, ignoring the fact that the majority of white voters in this country voted against Obama in the November 2008 election. But how much do you think the stoking of fear and these kind of very harsh criticisms and labeling of political opponents as communists or fascists -- how much do you think that has to do with Barack Obama being the first African-American president? The first?

PETER MONTGOMERY: I think there's no question that race is a piece of this. And certainly Obama's election was an important milestone for the country, but even during the campaign, and certainly since then, you can see that racism is alive and well and since then, the use of racial resentment by people on the right, from Glenn Beck to Pat Buchanan, encouraging the Republican party to tell white voters: "Obama is a racist." You know, "Sonia Sotomayor is a racist." "These new people who've taken over are not like us." "They're trying to sell out the country and take the country away from you."

So I think there is a tremendous amount of the use of racism and fueling racial resentment in the attacks on Obama and on his allies in Congress. I think it's a peace of this larger picture of intimidation and fearmongering in an effort to really frighten a large swath of voters out there into thinking that the country is on a quick slide to tyranny.

BETWEEN THE LINES: Peter Montgomery, there are some people who minimize the threat of people with signs that compare President Obama with Stalin, and labeling him a communist or socialist, saying this really just appealing to the really hard-core rock bottom base of the Republican party and that they do more damage to themselves by marginalizing themselves at the fringes of American politics. But you have a concern that this is spreading far beyond this extreme right-wing base who loves to hear this kind of rhetoric.

PETER MONTGOMERY: Well, and I think that the question is also: Even if that base is not a majority of America -- which I think, fortunately, it is not a majority of America -- but say it's 20 percent or 25 percent -- for some significant group of the public, and a very significant and more significant group for the Republican party, for them to be told over and over again by their political leaders, by media figures who they trust, by religious figures -- whoever it is -- to be told over and over again that the president is not really our president, he's out to undermine America, that he and his allies are working behind the scenes to destroy your faith and your family, and make it illegal for your church to be a church, that's really a kind of insidious thing. It makes it impossible to have any kind of common ground approach to politics or compromise or anything. And I think it will ultimately encourage more people toward violence. One of the other figures who's out there, former Rick Santorum, who, you know seems to be considering a possible run for the presidency along with Mike Huckabee and Sarah Palin and others out there. Santorum was recently out there talking about sort of tying together this notion of socialism with criticism the Christian Right has often used against the gay rights movement, saying if you support equality for gay people, that means that you're trying to destroy religious liberty. So he said, "There's an assault on marriage because the left knows they can't have government come in and take control of everything unless they destroy the family. Unless you destroy the family and destroy the church, they cannot ultimately be successful in getting socialism to be accepted in this country, and that's what their objective is."

Here's someone who is a former U.S. senator, possibly a presidential candidate who's out there telling people that it's not just that "we disagree with someone on health care reform, it's that the Democratic approach to health care reform is an actual effort to destroy the family and destroy the church in order to impose a socialist regime in this country." That's not just some fringe person sitting there grumbling to himself in a backwoods cabin.

Peter Montgomery's report, "Rise of the New McCarthyism," can be found online at www.pfaw.org

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Scott Harris is executive producer of Between The Lines, which can be heard on more than 45 radio stations and in RealAudio and MP3 on our website at www.btlonline.org. This interview excerpt was featured on the award-winning, syndicated weekly radio newsmagazine,Between The Lines for the week ending Jan. 8, 2010. This Between The Lines Q&A was compiled by Anna Manzo.

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