McCarthyism stalked my family. Its paranoia contains a lesson for Trump’s second term | Richard Sennett

The rise of Donald Trump aroused in me an old fear of Senator Joseph McCarthy. Both McCarthy and Trump rose to power as demagogues who fed on the American public’s fear of “enemies within”. My family had cause to fear on the biggest of these counts: my parents were communists from an early age, although they had quit the party in 1939 after Hitler’s pact with Stalin. In the heyday of US power, families such as mine were persecuted for a cause in which they no longer believed. We developed ways to avoid or resist persecution that worked pretty well, and I think these help to illuminate the combat that is to come with Trumpism.

Some connections between McCarthy and Trump are straightforward, both having been charismatic performers with a base of willing believers, both exploiting patriotism, both making up “facts” on the spur of the moment. There is a personal bridge between the two men that is a little more complicated, and perhaps more revealing. The lawyer and fixer Roy Cohn served as McCarthy’s chief counsel and later as an adviser to the young Donald Trump. Cohn was an expert in the techniques of public humiliation, of firing people and of surveilling private lives. Cohn suggested to McCarthy, for instance, to wave lists of hundreds of foreign infiltrators and communist spies in front of a gullible press – lists that proved to be blank sheets of paper. Cohn counselled Trump on how to bribe and intimidate New York politicians when the young property mogul encountered rough weather in business. The Roy Cohn who later featured in Tony Kushner’s play Angels in America was an accurate picture of the real, combative but self-hating man. Though Cohn died of an Aids-related illness in 1986, he denied to the end that he was gay and seemingly sought to appease his inner demons by aggressing others.

It was Cohn who persecuted families such as mine. In our case, he fed our names to the House Un-American Activities Committee and suggested that my mother, father and uncle could be indicted for sedition, which was then a hanging offence. It was an ironic threat, given that my father, who had fought with my uncle in the Spanish civil war, had by the 1950s moved from the extreme left to the extreme right, a journey many other ex-communists made. He was menaced by who he was originally rather than who he had become. There’s an eerie parallel here with Trump’s plan to undo the citizenship of patriotic Latinos who arrived illegally in America. They, too, may be forced to pay for a former life.

The necessity of resistance transformed our family. McCarthyism enlisted schools as well as employers and religious guides in sniffing out suspected communists. The less children knew about their parents’ lives, the safer those parents were; silence at home meant that a kid would not accidentally betray parents to teachers or to other kids who might tattle to adults. But “red diaper babies”, as the children of communists were known, could intuit, as children seem always to do, that their parents were holding something back. Silence was protective. It still is today in US states where abortion is now illegal, and where careless speech by a child could put an older sister and her doctors at risk. The danger of exposure has now migrated from the dinner table to the smartphone; a careless post can alert the authorities, who are now armed with far more sophisticated surveillance tools than McCarthy or Cohn possessed.

In his 1964 book, The Paranoid Style in American Politics and Other Essays, the historian Richard Hofstadter suggested that paranoia was the province of rightwing crazies. This was always too narrow an interpretation. Our small corner of the left was both rational and paranoid about McCarthyism, as many pregnant women may now be today about Trumpism. In whatever its guise, whether imaginary or real, paranoia reaches deep inside the psyche, eroding our very ability to trust one another. McCarthy and Cohn’s paranoid style was in a way superficial. They attacked public figures often arbitrarily, but if they met with resolute resistance, they tended to move on and find other targets. People such as the playwright Arthur Miller repelled McCarthyite charges through vociferous counterattacks, while more compromising ex-commies such as the choreographer Jerome Robbins suffered sustained persecution. My uncle, threatened by the FBI, turned the tables by conjuring up personal injury lawsuits naming the agents who menaced him; the FBI then lost interest in his case. Cohn thought of commie-hunting as a matter of profit and loss, pursued only so long as there could be a benefit to the persecutor. If not, ideology did not drive him to persist.

This is not at all the case with Trump. The president-elect never forgets an enemy, and he is obsessed with seeking revenge. Or rather, I should say, this is true of Trump the politician. Trump the businessman was “transactional” in the way Cohn counselled him to become, taking up and dropping others according to whether they proved useful or not. For Trump the politician, the past is always present – not only his loss in 2020, but older slights by Barack Obama and Nancy Pelosi.

This is a key to the larger relation between McCarthyism and Trumpism. The passions McCarthy aroused were deep but relatively short-lived. By the time McCarthy went after communists in the US army in 1954, his movement was fading: fervour was strongest at its beginning four years earlier and then dissolved as everyone aside from the most diehard fanatics grew tired of the endlessly repeated message. Communists and ex-communists hoped to outlast McCarthy’s hit-and-run approach to persecution. This is a hope we can’t entertain with Trumpism. I don’t think the ideology Trump stands for will fade after he passes on. His movement draws on a rich, nourishing stew of fears and grievances: racism, sexism, homophobia, nativism, climate denial. Enough to feed his followers for a long time.

I’m now asked by younger people if the world of the old left has any message to convey about living in Trump’s America. If there is one, it concerns the positive actions people took to lead a civic life. The oppression of communist politics was countered by a turn away from national politics and toward civil-society institutions of a local and relatively informal sort – synagogues and churches, local business groups, loose face-to-face cooperatives and the like. In my mother’s case, silence at home was relieved by providing services to a housing estate – “non-ideological” and “unpolitical”, according to the lights of party ideology, but deeply meaningful to her in making a life.