Witch-hunting
I am tired of witch-hunts. By which I mean I am tired of a metaphor, not that I am tired of hunting anyone or anything in particular.
We've been hearing the phrase a lot lately. Individual-1 likes to tell the public he's been the target of witch hunts. Today, I read an article in Slate wherein the Attorney General of the United States talks about witch-hunts:
[Fox News anchor Bill] Hemmer: The president calls this a witch hunt. He calls it a hoax. Do you agree with that? …
[Attorney General Bob] Barr: If you were the president, I think you would view it as a witch hunt and a hoax. Because at the time, he was saying he was innocent and that he was being falsely accused. And if you’re falsely accused, you would think [it] was a witch hunt. … He has been hammered for allegedly conspiring with the Russians. And we now know that was simply false.
Hemmer: Are you comfortable using those words? Witch hunt, hoax?
Barr: I use what words I use. And it was an investigation. But I think if I had been falsely accused, I’d be comfortable saying it was a witch hunt.
Here's the thing that bugs me: there's two kinds of witch hunts in American History.
The first kind of witch hunt, the iconic kind, is the kind that's an infamous part of Colonial History: the Salem Witch Trials of the 17th Century in Colonial Massachusetts. Where a bunch of people were accused of things that are believed to be untrue because the accusations are absurd from a contemporary, more materialist, less superstitions perspective: people hexing their neighbors, cursing their neighbors, casting spells, meeting with the Devil, performing supernatural feats, etc. Things we take to be hoaxes or hysteria because these things don't actually occur, so far as we know.
The second kind of witch hunt is the one that's become a political metaphor: the persecution of individuals who identified with or associated with the ideology of communism in the middle of the 20th Century. An association that's largely the product of playwright Arthur Miller using the Salem trials as an allegory for McCarthyism in The Crucible.
Here's the thing, the issue I have: the problem with using the Salem Witch Trials as an allegory for the House and Senate Hearings on "Un-American" activities presided over by the likes of McCarthy and Nixon is that in the 1950s, the witches were real. So to speak.
There's an ugly, often unrecognized truth about American political history that comes into play here: from the end of Reconstruction to the end of World War II, social justice simply was not the major issue for either major American political party. Okay, that's a broad statement, because this is complicated. But the pre-WWII American political environment bears little resemblance to the modern era: the Democratic and Republican parties were less ideological movements than they were geographically-centered coalition parties. And while some Democrats and some Republicans cared about labor issues, or women's rights, or civil rights for racial or ethnic minorities, these weren't really defining issues for either party. Certainly not the way they are defining issues for the parties now. At the time, rather, the parties were concerned with geography--the Democratic strongholds in the South and some Northern urban areas like New York City and Boston, the Republican strongholds in the Western states--and the issues that were of particular regional concern--grazing and mining in the West, farming in the South, trade and banking in the North.
But the thing is, there were two parties for which these were defining issues, a party whose planks were equal rights for African-Americans, equal rights for women, fair treatment of labor.
The Communist Party of the United States of America and the Socialist Party of America.
These were not particularly powerful parties in American politics, in particular because of the 1920s Red Scare, which led to some of the most prominent leaders of the American Left (e.g. Eugene Debs) facing prosecution, incarceration, and in some cases exile. And these parties were, unfortunately, compromised by foreign agencies, specifically the efforts by the USSR to try to promote Fifth Column elements abroad. And, ultimately, much of the CPUSA and SPA labor and civil rights agenda was co-opted or absorbed by mostly-urban progressive Democrats following the Great Depression, in a watered-down way that was less suspect to American moneyed interests and nationalists.
But the thing to keep in mind about this is that if you were an American in the 1920s, the 1930s, the early 1940s whose hot-button single issue was better treatment for blacks, or was equal rights for women, or was the organization of workers into unions for better pay and better work environments, the natural home for you wasn't necessarily the Democratic or Republican parties. At the very least, the Socialists and Communists were speaking your language, speaking to you, talking about the things you cared about.
In particular, supposing you were in the entertainment industry, and you started out in New York working backbreaking labor with the stagehands before moving out onto the stage as a dancer, before going out to the new entertainment frontier in Hollywood to appear in backgrounds before moving up as a supporting actor or taking on lead roles; and throughout this time you were marveling at the Harlem Renaissance when you lived in New York, you were meeting all kinds of crazy people in Los Angeles when you went West, you were hanging out with laborers and poets, artists and intellectuals, the iconoclasts and refugees who get sucked into the arts (and often to the stage in particular); and someone says to you, "I agree it's no good the way they treat the Negro," or "A woman can do as much as a man," or "Damn shame they don't pay these carpenters and dressmakers what they're worth, we'd never have a thing without them," and then they followed any or all of these with, "You know, there's some like-minded folks who meet on such-a-such an evening to talk about these things and try to fix 'em, you ought to come out one night and sit down with us, here's the address." Would you go? Hell, yes you would go.
And even if you didn't become a card-carrying Communist, even if you decided something you heard didn't quite sound right to you, or that you didn't like that one fellow with the accent who sometimes came out just to make trouble, or you were just going to go on being a Democrat or Republican like your father was and his father, too, well you still knew communists. They were your friends, for crying out, good people you worked with and liked, and all they wanted was to fix some things any sensible person with a heart would say was a mess.
There were Communists in Hollywood. There were Communists on Broadway. There were Communists in the publishing houses of New York, and the magazine offices and writing for the papers, too. And, yes, there were Communists in Washington, Communists working for the United States Government.
That was never the problem with McCarthyism, though he overstated their numbers and influence. If McCarthy was looking for witches, he had one up on the Salem jurists: his witches existed.
The problem was there was never anything wrong with being a witch.
The problem with McCarthyism and the Red Scare of the 1950s is that Nixon and McCarthy, in hunting for "suspected communists" and jailing people who refused to testify, who refused to rat out their friends and colleagues for doing nothing wrong, is that there was nothing "Un-American" about going to meetings and reading pamphlets about how to improve things for Americans. Nothing improper about union organizing or civil liberties or desegregation or suffrage. One thing entirely different if Nixon and McCarthy had been specifically ferreting out people who sold American A-bomb secrets to anyone, or people planning to sabotage public works, or trying to overthrow the American government; but that wasn't anything especially confined to the Left, there were Nazis who had been doing that before and during the War and there were already right-wingers plotting and scheming a new American genocide by the 1950s. John Birchers were arguably a helluva lot more anti-American than anyone who went to prison for Contempt of Congress in the 1950s for not naming names.
The people prosecuted during the post-WWII Red Scare were, with the exception of a few people like the Rosenbergs and Alger Hiss, prosecuted for engaging in the most American activities, for exercising their Freedom of Speech, their Freedom of Association. That was the real evil being done by the anti-communists: they weren't taking out "fake" charges, they were criminalizing legitimate democratic behavior.
This is as good a time as any to mention one of the vilest and probably most forgotten of abominable euphemisms: "premature anti-fascism". Before WWII, American communists were opposed to Nazis before it was cool, at a time when Democrats and Republicans were largely saying that Germany was its own business, or even that "this Hitler guy has some good ideas we could bring in here." American communists admittedly broke some laws when they went to Spain to fight fascism face-to-face, but this is one of those cases where I hope we agree that the long arc of history is on the side of the Lincoln Brigade even if they were technically on the wrong side of American laws about participating in foreign military engagements.
And then Pearl Harbor happened, and Germany joined its ally, Japan, in declaring war on the United States, and the United States declared war on Germany back, and we entered a glorious era of Nazi-punching. We had what was maybe the one really good war in our history, or maybe our second after the Revolution, the war where we were unquestionably on the side of Right and Justice and Progress against an enemy that really did represent the End of Civilization as we've come to define it, a fight against book-burners, ethnic cleansers, warmongers, hysterical mystics, race warriors, intent on imposing a single, lunatic, ethno-nationalist culture upon as much of the world as they could fold up under their choking dark wings; how often do we get to be the good guys like that, really?
The commies were there first. In spirit, and in a literal sense physically to the degree the Spanish Civil War was a proxy war/windup for Nazi aggression.
Which somehow wasn't cool when World War II ended, and the alliance between the Western Powers and the Soviet Union broke down; if communism is the great enemy facing the European and American Allies, can hardly acknowledge that American (and British and French) communists ran point against the Nazis and Italian Fascists in the 1930s. And yet... couldn't deny that anti-fascism was cool, we'd just fought the good fight... and yet....
So what did we do? What we did was, we said anti-fascism is cool, but it's not cool if you do it before anyone else. Yes, kids, you can punch a Nazi, you just have to wait until the Establishment says you can punch a Nazi. Anti-fascism is good. Premature anti-fascism, that's the Devil's work. That's bad. Criminal, maybe even.
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| Arrest on sight. |
Does that make sense? Hell no. But that's part of the point of this piece. The McCarthy witch-trials were less like the superstitious nonsense of 1600s Salem and more like arresting Glinda the Good Witch of the North for her role as an Accessory After the Fact to Involuntary Manslaughter after the principle, defendant Dorothy Gale, negligently allowed her house to fall upon the victim, the poor old Wicked Witch of the East (who never did no harm to nobody never, leaving out those awful Munchkins who probably brought it all upon themselves as part of some kind of international conspiracy of Munchkinery).
So I hate the metaphor. I get why Arthur Miller used it: it makes for an easy, dramatic story; it's taking a familiar tale of American sin and setting it up in a way that a contemporary American audience can say, "Oh, I see what he did there" and feel clever and thoughtful and maybe even act clever and thoughtful in reaction to it. But it's a shit metaphor, it really is.
I think it's important to know why it's a shit metaphor, too. Because what we've done is we've kind of buried the fact that for a big chunk of American history neither of the two major American parties did a very good job of looking out for some of the most vulnerable and marginalized members of society, and even went to the trouble of making villains out of people who did try to do just that, criminalizing, arresting, and prosecuting many of them for even caring. And when one of the major American parties did start to reorient itself around the idea of looking out for the most vulnerable citizens of the United States, it triggered a realignment in American politics that has come to define our modern political environment, with the rhetoric used against those who carried the flag of the disenfranchised for much of the 20th Century being turned against the party that absorbed much of the social justice mandate and agenda. (An obligatory note: while "social justice" is now used as a pejorative by reactionary jackasses, right-wing pseudointellectual snots, and self-entitled cryptofascist white boys, I consider it a badge of honor. My biggest concern at ever being called a "social justice warrior" is that I might not be worthy, that I haven't done nearly enough to live up to a warrior's bravery and unswerving commitment. Anyway.)
Talking about "communist witch-hunts" is a way of hiding a narrative. A narrative that's important for context, for understanding modern party politics, for understanding the social and economic rifts the United States struggles with, for understanding the brief rise and spectacular flame-out of early 20th Century progressive politics. It allows, unfortunately, the two major parties to mask parts of their respective histories in ways that are dubiously self-serving, as Republicans hide the story of how they stopped being the party of Lincoln and Democrats hide the story of how they used to be the party of reactionary America; this in turn gives Republicans another way to lie about who they (and their opponents) are, and becomes an obstacle to Democrats not-quite-grappling with how the Johnsonian progressivism they embraced in the 1960s hasn't quite risen to the level of its aspirations.
So let's talk about the Idiot President and his defenders, then, and all their ranting and raving about "witch hunts". What exactly do they mean, to the extent they mean anything. (Because, in a way, it's a waste of time to respond to anything they say as if it had meaning, because it doesn't, because all they're doing is propaganda and demagoguery and distraction, and the signal to noise ration is all noise, no signal.)
If they mean a witch hunt in the 16th Century sense, I'm pretty sure that obstruction of justice, unlike magic, is a thing that exists. I don't believe in Satan, but I do believe in Russian hackers. I don't believe anybody has really met up with the Devil in the deep dark northern woods under the pale moon and signed their name in blood in his book, but I'm rather sure there are people who will sign their name to a hotel registry or lease agreement in an attempt to curry favor or access with the property owner. Putting "pins" in someone seems like an obvious violation of the laws of physics as I've been led to understand them, but I completely get the idea of money laundering.
Etc.
And if they mean a witch hunt in the 20tham
of the opinion that it ought to be illegal if it isn't already to meet with people to discuss what concessions a hypothetical future President of the United States might make regarding duly-legislated economic sanctions against a foreign power in exchange for illegally-obtained information held by foreign intelligence operatives or their agents. Not because I think the government should tell you who you can hang out with, but because the underlying conduct is at least problematic and quite possibly criminal depending on who you ask for a legal analysis.
We aren't talking about investigating Individual-1 for his unpopular opinions, we're talking about investigating him because reasonable suspicion exists--and maybe even probable cause--to believe that associates of then-candidate-now-President Trump engaged in criminal behavior, and there's reasonable suspicion (and maybe even probable cause) to think then-candidate-now-President knew about these activities, authorized these activities, and/or attempted to cover-up these activities.
The witches are real. They're all over the place. Some of them have even pleaded guilty to witchcraft-related chicanery, we ought to add. Hexes. Necromancy. Signing their names in the Devil's books, after all, or at least sending him since-deleted e-mails.
Trump and his supporters won't stop, of course. All of their sound and fury signifies nothing on purpose, like the banter of a second-rate magician trying to talk you away from seeing what he has palmed in his hand. That's okay. I just needed to tell you why I wish people would stop talking about witch-hunts unless they're talking about, you know, actual witch hunts. Thanks.
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