When I was a child in the Deep South, Joseph McCarthy’s voice floated through the dining room like smoke that wouldn’t clear. My sainted grandmother, presiding at the head of the table, swore the United Nations was a Communist front. That conviction, widely shared throughout the community, was so fierce you’d think Dag Hammarskjöld had a hammer and sickle stitched into his suit lining.
By the time I graduated from Columbia University in mid’60s, those echoes hadn’t faded. They had simply morphed. Students were denouncing the Vietnam War as imperialism; government officials were condemning dissent as treachery. Later, as a CIA officer, I marveled at how easily language bends to propaganda.
Once McCarthy-like paranoia becomes a voice in political debate, you can’t easily unhear it. Truth is warped, so is common sense — often irreparably.
The voice is back.
In recent weeks The Atlantic has reminded us just how pervasive it remains.
Michael Scherer’s “‘Make McCarthy Great Again:’ Laura Loomer Has Become the Joseph McCarthy of the Trump Era” (August 21) charts Loomer’s rise as Trump’s latest smear meister. And David Brooks’s “Why Do So Many People Think Trump Is Good?” (July 8) explores the deeper cultural reasons why Americans have grown accustomed to vilification politics.
Both pieces make the same point: Trump has built a career by turning McCarthy’s echo into surround sound. Trump 2.0 is simply a revival tour. The cast is updated, the sets glossier, but the script is familiar: loyalty tests, whispered accusations, enemies’ lists.
“Woke” is the new “Communist.” Accusations of antisemitism, wielded not to protect Jews but to muzzle critics of Israel, are the new charges of treason.
Enter the inquisitor
As Scherer details in his piece, Loomer—once best known as a far-right provocateur who chained herself to Twitter’s headquarters after being banned—has remade herself into MAGA’s mega-attack dog. She now boasts of briefing Trump directly, pressing him to fire National Security Council staffers and strip Biden’s children of Secret Service protection. When asked if her style resembled McCarthy’s, she didn’t blink: “Joseph McCarthy was right. We need to make McCarthy great again.”
Make no mistake: Her performance is a one-man lap dance. Loomer, as Scherer notes, plays for “an audience of one.”
Trump, in turn, uses her “briefings” to justify purges, much as McCarthy once flourished his lists of supposed communists.
But if Loomer is the new inquisitor, Roy Cohn remains the ghost in the machine.
Before becoming Trump’s personal lawyer, Cohn was McCarthy’s infamous congressional aide, best remembered for the Army-McCarthy hearings where his ruthless style set the template for televised demagoguery. Later, in New York, he became Trump’s first political tutor, teaching him two commandments: never admit error and always retaliate harder. Trump followed them religiously, first in the New York tabloids, later in the White House.
The lessons metastasized. Roger Stone weaponized conspiracy theories against Hillary Clinton. Trump himself fanned the “birther” lie about Barack Obama. Russian troll farms lent a hand. When Trump lost the 2020 election, he smeared the election itself, persuading millions it had been stolen and summoning them to January 6.
The pattern is Cohn’s catechism made gospel: if you cannot win the argument, destroy your opponent.
The new show trials
No institution is spared. Judges who cross Trump are vilified as hacks or traitors. Arthur Engoron, who presided over his civil fraud trial, was smeared as corrupt. Tanya Chutkan who handled the election conspiracy case was branded “biased & unfair.” Former aides like John Bolton and James Comey have become criminal “leakers” or security risks.
Reporters who press too hard are written off as “fake news” or, in Trump’s phrase, “enemies of the people.” He recently derided MSNBC’s Nicolle Wallace as a “loser” and “Typhoid Mary,” mocked her career and predicted her imminent dismissal. Beyond insults, he has dangled the prospect of federal charges against journalists who defy him. Reporters now openly brace for government retaliation.
The pattern mimics McCarthy’s crusades. In the 1950s he accused the State Department of harboring traitors, branded the CIA “soft on communism,” and browbeat the Army with fabricated charges. He smeared scholars like Owen Lattimore and bullied journalists, dismissing them as Communist dupes. Careers were wrecked in hearings that resembled political theater more than fact-finding.
Trump has revived the style if not the setting. Instead of Senate hearings, his stage is social media, campaign rallies, and friendly cable outlets, where accusations substitute for evidence and loyalty tests for justice. What McCarthy staged as televised show trials, Trump replicates as rolling purges, turning the act of accusation itself into a weapon.
Scene at Columbia
To see McCarthyism 2.0 in action, you can skip the archives and stroll across Columbia’s campus. On a sweltering afternoon this past July, administrators signed a $221 million settlement with the Trump administration. The deal forced the university to adopt the controversial IHRA definition of antisemitism, curb DEI programs, restrict protests, and submit to three years of federal supervision by a “Resolution Monitor.”
Faculty muttered about the ghost of McCarthy haunting Hamilton Hall; students joked that the monitor might soon be auditing their syllabi. Columbia’s endowment gleamed in the summer sun, but its autonomy was on loan to Washington. McCarthy once wielded subpoenas. Trump prefers frozen grants. The effect is the same.
Harvard, for now, is fighting back in court, even as it quietly negotiates a half-billion-dollar settlement. Brown has already paid $50 million; UCLA faces demands nearing $1 billion. Higher education has been recast as the national-security threat of our age.
Why Trump’s McCarthyism persists
In attempting to explain Trump’s uncanny durability to Atlantic readers, David Brooks turns to philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre, whose After Virtue (1981) remains one of the most influential critiques of modern moral theory.
MacIntyre argued that the Enlightenment dismantled traditional moral frameworks—Christian theology, Aristotelian virtue ethics, communal traditions—without leaving anything strong enough in their place. What resulted, he said, was reason without roots: moral language detached from authority, reduced to what he called “emotivism,” the idea that moral claims are little more than personal preferences.
In such a landscape, debates about right and wrong become fruitless, just clashing assertions. The public square becomes a shouting match where volume, not principle, prevails.
Into that void steps Trump. He doesn’t persuade so much as divide. He offers the binary clarity of loyalty and treason, patriot and enemy, which feels to many people more real than abstract appeals to principle.
Brooks extends this to language itself. Once moral claims are untethered from shared standards, words begin to lose their precision. Political discourse slides into slogans and emotional markers.
Trump excels here, deploying the blunt lexicon of grievance: “witch hunt,” “enemy of the people,” “America First.”
These phrases aren’t meant to persuade; they demand allegiance.
The same goes for identity. Without shared standards of morality, people cling to tribal belonging. Politics becomes about who you are with rather than what you believe. McCarthy once defined the binary as “American” or “Communist.” Trump defines it as “MAGA” or enemy. The form hasn’t changed. Only the slogans have.
Brooks’s deeper point is sobering: Trump isn’t strong because he’s brilliant. He’s strong because society is weak. Our institutions no longer command confidence. Our moral language no longer commands assent. And in that vacuum, his authoritarian style doesn’t repel. It attracts.
Trump as mirror and myth
The online responses to Brooks’s essay push his arguments further, and sometimes sideways.
Many readers cast Trump as a mirror. Thomas Bailey wrote: “He gives them permission to be their basest selves. If the President can do this, why can’t we?” A reader named Toni Borowsky sharpened the point: “The good part is that he IS NOT good. That’s what they identify with.” Damien Sturgeon added a cynical twist: Trump tells his followers what they want to hear, then does as he pleases.
Cultural explanations abounded. Reader Tracy Lee blamed Hollywood for glorifying toughness over cooperation, celebrating the cowboy’s “true grit” while erasing quieter forms of achievement. Jennifer Littlechild pointed to the frontier ethos itself: “Arm yourself, gather as much property and wealth as you can, all in God’s name.” Samuel Hague reached further still, invoking Arthur Miller on Puritan morality: Americans cannot imagine morality without sin, or society without prohibition. Trump, in this reading, is simply the latest preacher of sin and vengeance.
Some argued the real break wasn’t the Enlightenment but the Cold War’s end. Flic Hopkinson noted that freedom once meant sacrifice for the collective; after 1989 it came to mean “an individual’s right to do what they please.” In that sense, Trump’s selfishness is not an aberration but the culmination of America’s idea of liberty.
Others stressed structural flaws. Amanda Richdale reminded readers that “less than a third of Americans actually voted for Mr. Trump.” Derek Elwell pointed to Australia’s compulsory voting system as an antidote to minority rule. Marc Murray returned to inequality, warning that no society survives the “unbridgeable gap between the very rich and the very poor.”
Religion and ignorance also came under scrutiny. Paul Rainbird argued that religion trains believers to ignore evidence that contradicts the accepted narrative. Edward Toal quoted Isaac Asimov on America’s “cult of ignorance,” and cited Gore Vidal’s bleak judgment that advertising is our only native art form. Toal seems to believe these forces produced a populace primed for Trumpism.
Others cast the net wider still. Jon Bassett likened Trump’s dismantling of institutions to Henry VIII and Cromwell dissolving monasteries; Geof Evans compared Americans’ passive acceptance to ordinary Germans who “went along for the ride.”
Taken together, these responses broaden Brooks’s frame. They show Trumpism as more than an Enlightenment aftershock. It is also the product of myths (movie cowboys, Puritans, the frontier), of structures (inequality, voter suppression, minority rule), and of human impulses (selfishness, tribalism, fear).
Can paranoia be overcome?
If Trumpism is governance by paranoia — suspicion as creed, vilification as policy– can it be undone? The responses to Brooks suggest that it can, but not without work.
Some cracks are indeed structural. Richdale and Elwell are right: voting systems matter. A healthier democracy, with broader access and higher participation, would leave less room for paranoia to rule by minority. Inequality is another crack: Murray’s warning about it echoes history, but he also reminds us that inequality is a political choice, not a natural law. Close the gap, and the soil for demagoguery dries out.
Some cracks are cultural. Hopkinson’s point about freedom being redefined as selfishness cuts deep, but it also points toward a remedy. Freedom can be redefined again, this time back toward civic duty and collective good. That requires better education, cultural renewal, and civic institutions that reward cooperation.
But history offers perhaps the most important reminder: demagogues don’t collapse on their own. McCarthy was not felled by gradual institutional correction. He was brought down by individuals who stood up. Edward R. Murrow risked his career to expose him. Joseph Welch punctured him with one unforgettable question: “Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last?” Even Owen Lattimore, falsely accused of being a Soviet agent, refused to confess.
And here’s the irony: the same rugged individualism, the cowboy myth that helped produce Trump, may also provide the tools to defeat him. The High Noon fantasy is not only about gunslingers who embody toughness; it is also about the lone citizen who steps into the street when no one else will.
The lesson of McCarthy’s fall
David Brooks is right that our society lacks a shared moral compass. His readers are right that Trumpism draws strength from our myths, our imperfect structures, our weaknesses. But McCarthy’s fall shows that paranoia can be punctured, not by institutions acting slowly, but by individuals deciding not to be silent.
The task ahead is not simply to rebuild institutions, though that is necessary, nor simply to correct economic inequality, though that too is urgent. It is to cultivate the bravery to call indecency what it is, and to reject complicity. Above all, we must keep reminding ourselves that paranoia governs only as long as we let it.
Trump has shown us the cost of indulging our worst instincts. The hope, the slim but real hope, is that his example forces us to revive our better ones.