Image by Getty and Unsplash+.
Expanded from remarks at the National Lawyers Guild Chicago Chapter upon receiving the organization’s Arthur Kinoy Award, 5/29/2025
Today the National Lawyers Guild and all organizations of the Left are facing perhaps our greatest challenges since last century’s McCarthy Era. So there’s a certain timeliness to celebrating the great attorney Arthur Kinoy, a stalwart opponent of McCarthyism.
In Kinoy’s time, the NLG was the only national civil liberties group or bar association that refused to require “loyalty oaths” of its members. He cut his teeth representing the black-listed United Electrical workers, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, and people dragged before the infamous House Un-American Activities Committee. These struggles steeled him for his later defense of Civil Rights Movement activists, Students for a Democratic Society, the ACLU, and his challenge to President Nixon’s wiretapping.
There are many parallels between the old and the new McCarthy eras, but there’s one critical difference which I’ll discuss towards the end. Activists and attorneys today would do well to study the first McCarthy period to prepare ourselves for what’s coming.
The new McCarthy Era, like the old, has seen brazenly illegal jailings and deportations, false accusations with no evidence, and the destruction of professional careers — this time magnified many times over by corporate controlled social media. People are facing thought-crimes for denouncing Israel’s slaughter of Palestinians, supporting DEI, or simply opposing Trump. Supposedly impermeable constitutional norms like habeas corpus are openly flouted.
Among the parallels between the two eras are that they are both misnamed. Today’s “McCarthy Era” is often dubbed “The Trump Agenda.” These mis-namings are no accident. They both serve the same political purpose — to help pave the way back to power of the same people who paved McCarthy’s and Trump’s roads to power! So semantics here mean a great deal.
In the old “McCarthy Era,” most of the awful measures that gave the era its name preceded the emergence of the previously obscure Wisconsin Senator onto the national scene. Moreover, most of the measures for which he was a symbol lasted into the late 1960s and early 1970s, long after he was deposed. The public figurehead of the era was gone, but J. Edgar Hoover and local police forces continued illegally targeting their enemies with COINTELPRO, the program of illegal surveillance, infiltration and disruption of 1st Amendment activities. The end result was the police murdera of Black Panther leaders, both here in Chicago and several other cities.
Truman’s 1947 loyalty oath came well before Joe McCarthy ever uttered the words, “Are you now or have you ever been….” The mass incarceration of Japanese Americans was the result of a February 1942 executive order by liberal icon Franklin D. Roosevelt. The Smith Act, making membership in the Communist Party and Socialist Workers Party a crime, was a 1940 product of FDR. The McCarran Act authorizing, among other things, the registration and fingerprinting of all “subversives” in the United States, came in 1950 in the middle of Truman’s administration.
The so-called “McCarthy Era” was born in the FDR and Truman years and extended well after the Senator was dead and buried. By labeling the era for the short-lived national prominence of one vicious politician, we let all the creeps who preceded and succeeded him off the hook. What went by “McCarthyism” was not just one man or one party, it was the bipartisan consensus of our rulers.
Again, this is not just a matter of semantics. It has a direct effect on how we counter repression and build a substantially changed world after it.
More recently, consider how liberals eagerly labeled the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq as “Bush’s War,” even though liberal politicians and media, from the New York Times on down, fabricated evidence, told half-truths and blatant lies, and voted for the invasion. Once the Iraq War became unpopular, calling it “Bush’s War” paved the way for the equally culpable Democratic Party to take power. The Democrats then expanded many of the same “Bush” policies, the Iraq and Afghanistan war “surges,” the dramatically accelerated drone bombings, the illegal “Tuesday kill lists,” the excusing of the CIA kidnappers and torturers, not to mention the failure to prosecute Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld as war criminals for their invasions traumatizing whole nations.
Another parallel between the two “McCarthy Eras” was that some of the biggest proponents of what came to be called “McCarthyism” were liberals who claimed to be our “friends.”
I’ve already mentioned FDR’s role. Here are additional notable “friends”:
+Bobby Kennedy, future Attorney General and liberal darling for being an alleged anti-war Presidential candidate in 1968. Bobby Kennedy cut his teeth as a staffer for Joe McCarthy, and of course continued McCarthyite tactics later on as Attorney General by illegally spying on Martin Luther King, Jr. and other civil rights leaders.
+Liberal hero John F. Kennedy. JFK was one of two co-sponsors of an amendment to the 1950 McCarran Act authorizing the construction of concentration camps for those deemed insufficiently loyal. Later, he augmented the era’s anti-Communist panic by campaigning to the right of the Eisenhower/Nixon administration on a platform of falsely alleging a U.S. “missile gap” with the Soviet Union.
+Democratic Senator Hubert Humphrey, future Vice President under Johnson and 1968 presidential candidate. Humphrey authored the 1954 “Communist Control Act.” This Act outlawed the Communist Party, making membership in it, or in any other alleged “communist” organization, punishable by up to five years in prison. Humphrey’s bill unanimously passed the Senate.
Today we witness the same hypocrisy from liberal leaders who claim to oppose “The Trump Agenda”:
+Allied with far-right Republicans, last spring all leading DC Democrats crafted the most vicious, anti-immigrant bill in decades.
+In each of their terms, Presidents Obama and Biden deported far more people than Trump did in his one full term.
+Today’s purges of inspector generals were preceded by Obama’s relentless attacks on more whistleblowers than all previous presidents combined.
+The U.S. funding of Palestine’s genocide, the blank check for Israeli land thefts, and support for the kidnapping of thousands of Palestinians imprisoned without charges – i.e., “hostages” – have been totally bipartisan. Liberals love to use the acronym TACO (Trump Always Chickens Out), but in the face of Israel’s brutality, they themselves always chicken out in administration after administration.
+Liberals’ impotence was starkly on display during the recent Presidential campaign. In response to Trump’s and Vance‘s constant slandering of immigrants and Trans people, did the Harris campaign even once speak out for our humanity, let alone counter any of the innumerable lies these creeps told about us? Then, after their loss, they had the chutzpah to blame us for their failure to retain the White House!
Bottom line, if the old “McCarthy Era” is any guide, most of today’s leading politicians who complain about “The Trump Agenda” are not against its particulars out of principle. They’re accessories to his crimes. They just find his promotion of policies they’ve supported over the years a little too crude. If returned to power with our support, they will use that support to neuter and diminish the rollback of this era’s McCarthyism just as their predecessors did following Senator McCarthy’s eclipse.
There are stark lessons of the continuing Gaza genocide that all activists, regardless of what spheres we work in, must learn:
1. Both major parties are not above abetting murder against those who jeopardize their power and wealth. If they feel the need to, they will throw any or all of us under the bus – Black and Brown people, queer people, immigrants, labor, people with disabilities, working class people of all backgrounds. Given their support for Gaza’s genocide, do you think they’d have any conscience about committing far lesser crimes?
2. The Democrats will use “honeyed words” while they screw us with record deportations, cutbacks in services, and escalated wars, so we need to judge them by what they do and not by what they say. They’re big on performative politics – renaming streets and other token gestures, while leaving real inequalities untouched.
3. Politicians of both parties are the last people we should trust to make the sweeping changes we urgently need, especially in a world where time is running out to combat an increasingly irreversible climate crisis.
4. We need to fight the Trump administration, its yes-men, and also consciously fight against all attempts to rehabilitate their Democratic Party enablers. There is no shortcut of getting politicians to make the changes we need. We need to do the work ourselves.
How was the last “McCarthy Era” ended and what does that tell us about what we need to do today?
Despite operating at a horrible disadvantage, the Civil Rights Movement in the deep South put the first kinks in its armor. The 1954 Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka decision remained a dead letter until a movement from the bottom up of Black people and their white allies began forcing change.
Even the most modest moves by Black people in that era were instantly denounced as “communist,” or “communist-inspired.” Nevertheless, the movement continued to grow. Racism was always a pivotal part of “McCarthyism” and it took a grassroots movement — not the courts or politicians — to begin successfully challenging it.
Just as back then every pro-Black initiative was denounced as “communist,” every pro-Palestinian free speech utterance today is denounced as “anti-Semitic” — this from a White house that pals around with sieg-heilers and Holocaust deniers. Where are the ADL denunciations of these crypto-Nazis whose lies dangerously numb people to instances of real anti-Semitism?
Despite the courageous efforts of the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and early 1960s, the old “McCarthy Era” kept rolling into the late 1960s and early 1970s. It was then up to the Black Power and anti-war movements — allied with courageous attorneys — to finally expose the surveillance crimes of J. Edgar Hoover, et al. abetting the violence of police departments across the nation. It was none other than Richard Nixon who repealed the McCarren Act’s concentration camps provision in 1971!
I will end by outlining the one crucial difference between the last “McCarthy Era” and the present one. Fortunately it’s a tremendous advantage we have over our predecessors.
While the “Washington consensus” is as rancid today as ever, working-class people are not as massively aligned against the Left as they were from the late 1940s through the early ‘60s. During that period, the Communist Party (CP) was by far the dominant organization on the American Left. But it had burned potential allies by repeatedly and slavishly following every twist and turn of Joseph Stalin’s foreign policy (for details see here).
While the CP could still mobilize thousands for protests in the late ‘40s, their sectarianism and betrayals of working class solidarity isolated them from other sections of the Left. This helped make them easy targets for McCarthyite purges from the unions, universities and popular organizations of all kinds.
During the height of McCarthyism, the CP quite rightly denounced the McCarthyite show trials and U.S. imperial actions in Latin America, the Middle East and Southeast Asia. But, viewed against the CP’s approval of Stalin’s show trials, his frequent and brutal violence against Eastern European nations and non-Russian nations within the Soviet Union, it was understandable that the US CP’s opposition to US thuggery at home and abroad appeared hypocritical.
In contrast to the wide anti-CP Cold War consensus of the late ‘40s and ‘50s, the Left today is much more connected to people outside its immediate orbit than the CP was. On a host of issues, from reproductive rights to affordable housing to wealth inequality, the Left finds common ground with millions of people.
Trump and the Republican and Democratic Parties are nowhere near as hegemonic as the two major parties were during the old McCarthy Era.
A careful look at the recent election shows that while Trump won the popular vote, he was light years away from winning a mandate from a majority of adult Americans. Only 24% of adult Americans voted for him. Harris garnered 23%, and a whopping 53% essentially supported “none of the above.” They either thought that the major party choices were not worth showing up at the polls for, or they voted for a third party. Trump has since slid in the polls, becoming the most hated President at the 100-day mark of any president in modern history. Yet the “do-nothing” Democrats remain even more unpopular than Trump. As Trump’s popularity plummets, they have made any gains.
Politicians’ overwhelming support for the Gaza genocide has played a major part in this. As early as March of last year, a majority of Americans opposed Israel’s assault on Gaza. By last May, young people in the US supported Palestine over Israel by a nearly 3 to 1 margin.
So what can we do?
First, as many of you lawyers here have a say in hiring at your firms, first and foremost BREAK THE BLACKLIST! Hire the young people who recently stood up for Palestine and whom most corporate firms will refuse to hire, either because they’re cowering before the Trump administration’s threats or because they proactively support censorship and marginalization of pro-Palestine voices.
Second, support the movements and the street protesters in your pro bono work, especially those not connected to corporate-style NGOs who often are funded by the same businesses that dumped DEI in a heartbeat.
Third, in your professional and your personal lives, favor those activist groups that aren’t under the wing of a Democratic Party desperately trying to revive itself through top-down astroturf “activism.”
Finally, the severe crises we face — the growing global climate catastrophe and attendant mass migrations, the ever-widening chasm between rich & poor, the resurgence of racism, sexism & anti-LGBTQ bigotry — demand that we don’t repeat the mistakes of the past.
We cannot once again oppose one awful political party only to support the other awful one so that it can take the other’s place. If the genocide in Gaza has proven anything, it’s that they’re both broken, both beyond reform, and we must act accordingly.
