The Four Horsemen of Calumny
I’d just posted Conservatives Need An Intervention about them protesting too much about their own Americanness before I read Heather Cox Richardson’s offering this morning. She brings her historian’s perspective to the same topic.
On June 1, 1950, Maine Sen. Margaret Chase Smith spoke out against the damage her colleague Joe McCarthy of Wisconsin was doing to her beloved country with his communist witch hunt.
HCR writes:
“Those of us who shout the loudest about Americanism in making character assassinations are all too frequently those who, by our own words and acts, ignore some of the basic principles of Americanism,” she pointed out. Americans have the right to criticize, to hold unpopular beliefs, to protest, and to think for themselves. But attacks that cost people their reputations and jobs were stifling these basic American principles, and the ones making those attacks were in her own party.
People were becoming afraid to exercise the freedoms that over 400,000 Americans had recently died to protect.
Senator Smith wanted a Republican administration, she explained, but to replace President Harry Truman’s Democratic administration—for which she had plenty of harsh words—with a Republican regime “that lacks political integrity or intellectual honesty would prove equally disastrous to this nation.”
“I do not want to see the Republican party ride to political victory on the Four Horsemen of Calumny—Fear, Ignorance, Bigotry, and Smear.”
“I doubt if the Republican party could do so,” she added, “simply because I do not believe the American people will uphold any political party that puts political exploitation above national interest. Surely we Republicans are not that desperate for victory.”
That was during the Red Scare. Now democracy itself is disposable in Republicans’ pursuit of the power to dominate and punish neighbors with different political beliefs. A different kind of madness has gripped enough Americans to hand the presidency to a madman.
“I do not want to see the Republican party win that way,” she said. “While it might be a fleeting victory for the Republican party, it would be a more lasting defeat for the American people. Surely it would ultimately be suicide for the Republican party and the two-party system that has protected our American liberties from the dictatorship of a one-party system.”
“As an American, I condemn a Republican Fascist just as much as I condemn a Democrat Communist,” she said. “They are equally dangerous to you and me and to our country. As an American, I want to see our nation recapture the strength and unity it once had when we fought the enemy instead of ourselves.”
Pray that it doesn’t take another world war to do it.
Sen. Angus King (I) of Maine recalled Smith’s “Declaration of Conscience” in a recent floor speech condemning the dangerous acculumation of power in the White House. He called out Congress’ abdication of its responsibility to check Donald Trump’s attempt “to govern as a monarch, unbound by law or Constitutional restraint, not as a President subject to the constraints of the Constitution and the rule of law.”
King implored his colleagues to “reclaim our power…. You know, do our job.” He reminded them: “Each of us swore—swore, mind you—to ‘support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic’; [and that we would] ‘bear true faith and allegiance to [the Constitution].’ Clearly,” he said, “the Framers knew there might someday be ‘domestic’ enemies of the Constitution and made it our sacred obligation to defend the Constitution from them,” and he called for his colleagues to stand alongside him to do so.
While they sit on their hands, Trump is a domestic enemy who’s pardoning other domestic enemies. This, at the same time he’s calling for harsher punishments for drug users and criminals, just so long as they are not his supplicants. He doesn’t have friends. And he wipes his ass with the Constitution.
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