Name: The Heir to Joe McCarthy
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The Heir to Joe McCarthy

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I grew up among the Wisconsinites who fought Joseph McCarthy’s dishonest and destructive politics. During the American inquisition of the 1950s, those who to the red-baiting Senator took enormous political, economic, and personal risks.Years later, as a child hanging out in the Racine County courthouse, where my dad worked, I heard stories from aging judges and lawyers who recalled signing “” petitions. And as a young political reporter collecting stories of veterans of the fight against “Tailgunner Joe,” like former Senator Gaylord Nelson and journalist John Patrick Hunter, I recognized how those fights defined their politics.Johnson is fronting for a political project that seeks to create enough confusion, uncertainty, mistrust, and division that the idea of truth itself is called into question.The Wisconsinites who battled McCarthy took seriously the damage the Senator had done. They taught me to avoid fickle comparisons between contemporary politicians and the Republican whose conspiracy theories destabilized the nation.So, trust me, I am not going to casually suggest that Wisconsin Senator Ron Johnson is the Joe McCarthy of our time. I am going to say it flat out. Johnson is a reactionary, a demagogue, and a conspiracist who is every bit as dangerous as the man whose lies and innuendos left a legacy of ruined lives and cutthroat politics that still haunts the United States.Over the past year, as the modern Republican Party has veered further off the rails than it ever did in McCarthy’s day, Johnson has emerged as the most delusional defender of former President Donald Trump’s lies about nonexistent voter fraud. He has “false flag” theories about the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol by QAnon mobs. And he has amplified the quackery and denial in response to the coronavirus pandemic.A regular on rightwing talk radio and with increasing frequency on cable television, Johnson feeds the fever dreams of the insurrectionists with a frenzied passion that exceeds that of Donald Trump and the Senate’s “Sedition Caucus,” led by Texan Ted Cruz and Missourian Josh Hawley.Johnson has gone to such extremes that Republican U.S. Representative Adam Kinzinger, a conservative who has started calling out his party’s worst excesses, of the Wisconsinite: “It’s disgraceful for a sitting Senator to spread disinformation so blatantly. It’s a disservice to the people he serves to continue lying to them like this. It’s dangerous, and it must stop.”But Johnson won’t stop. Like McCarthy before him, this Senator from Wisconsin has become addicted to the limelight, and he knows that he will only remain a Republican “star” if he keeps peddling the “Big Lies” that the party’s Trump-addled base wants to hear.“He didn’t really have a brand, except for being a businessman who went into politics,” Wisconsin Lieutenant Governor Mandela Barnes, a Democrat who has been among Johnson’s most outspoken critics, tells The Progressive. “But, now, his brand seems to be all these conspiracies.”Johnson turned the crazy up to full volume during the first public Senate hearing on the January 6 attack that left five people dead. He a rightwing treatise that suggested the violence of the day was caused not by “jovial” Trump backers but by “agent provocateurs” and “fake Trump protesters.” He the violent rioting on January 6—when protesters brandished guns, clubs, bear spray, and other weapons—“didn’t seem like an armed insurrection to me.” He later that he was not afraid of the mob that stormed the Capitol, injuring 140 police officers and killing one, because its members “were people who love this country, that truly respect law enforcement, would never do anything to break the law.” Johnson said he would have been “concerned,” however, if it had been a crowd of “Black Lives Matter and antifa” protesters.After Johnson highlighted a false claim that the rioters “were antifa or something similar,” Senator Amy Klobuchar, the Minnesota Democrat who chaired the session, : “As our hearing concludes, I want to make one thing clear: ‘provocateurs’ did not storm the Capitol. They were not ‘fake Trump protesters.’ The mood on January 6 was not ‘festive.’ That is disinformation.”Johnson went so far off the conspiracy cliff that he inspired Representative Mark Pocan, a Wisconsin Democrat, to that the Senator was “a small step away from blaming Bigfoot, the Loch Ness Monster, and Hodags [fictional creatures created to promote tourism in remote northern stretches of Wisconsin] for the act of sedition on January 6.”But Johnson’s antics aren’t just embarrassing. They’re destructive and mean. As Democrats in Congress worked to provide emergency assistance to millions of Americans hit hard by the COVID-19 pandemic, Johnson his intention to “lead the effort to resist it,” calling the $1.9 trillion relief package “a boondog[gle] for Democrats.” This he did by pointlessly requiring Senate clerks to read the entire 600-plus-page bill aloud, and by proposing amendments meant to delay passage.Johnson, who turns sixty-six on April 8, is a millionaire finishing his second term in the Senate after a long career with a family manufacturing firm. He has often, and for good reason, been dismissed as a kook. His foibles are highlighted on social media with the Wisconsin hashtag , and his dogged pursuit of unfounded claims about presidential son Hunter Biden in 2020 former Democratic Missouri Senator Claire McCaskill to declare on MSNBC’s Morning Joe: “Allow me to pop off on Ron Johnson here. What a joke! What an embarrassing tool!”But that talk about Johnson’s lunacy took on a more serious tone after Trump and his allies contested the 2020 election with false claims that culminated in an attempt to block the counting of electoral votes for Democrat Joe Biden. It was then that Johnson, in the of CNN political observer Chris Cillizza, “carved out quite a niche for himself” as “the guy willing to push wild conspiracy theories about what happened before, during, and after the January 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol.”Johnson may be laughable. But he shouldn’t be laughed off. Pocan says the Senator has become adept at peddling “lies and misinformation in a way that is dangerous to our country.”That was clear in the first months of 2021, as Johnson’s false narratives were being eaten up by a Republican base that refuses to recognize what Representative Jamie Raskin, the Maryland Democrat who served as lead manager for Trump’s second impeachment trial, as “decisive evidence of [Trump’s] intent to incite the insurrection” on January 6.Now Johnson is emerging as a pivotal player in a Republican project of rewriting the history of the closing days of Trump’s presidency.Wyoming Representative Liz Cheney, one of the handful of Republicans to break ranks with the former President, of Trump’s seditious words and deeds: “There has never been a greater betrayal by a President of the United States of his office and his oath to the Constitution.”But Johnson—who at one point House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, a target of the January 6 insurrectionists, for the violence—insists otherwise. His assault on reality is gaining traction in a party where, according to a Suffolk University/USA Today conducted in late February, 58 percent of Republicans now believe that the attack on the Capitol was “mostly an antifa-inspired attack that only involved a few Trump supporters.”Johnson is not just promoting lies and conspiracy theories. He is fronting for a political project that seeks to create enough confusion, uncertainty, mistrust, and division that the idea of truth itself is called into question.This is precisely what Joe McCarthy did in 1950 when, as an unimpressive first-term Senator who was fretting about his 1952 re-election prospects, he that he had a list of Communists who had “thoroughly infested” the U.S. State Department. There never was a credible list. McCarthy couldn’t even keep the number of supposed Communists straight. But he could get headlines, and enthusiastic crowds of Republicans who wanted to imagine that the administration of Democratic President Harry Truman was a hotbed of radical intrigue.In no time, McCarthy was chairing Senate hearings that fostered the fantasy that the challenges facing the nation in the post-World War II era were, as he , “the product of a great conspiracy, a conspiracy on a scale so immense as to dwarf any previous such venture in the history of man.”Long before the QAnon crowd hit on the strategy of using outrageous conspiracy theories to remake the contemporary Republican Party in their image, McCarthy employed equally outrageous conspiracy theories to remake the Republican Party of the 1950s. Now as a buffoonish drunk, McCarthy was briefly the dominant figure in a party desperate to reassert itself after losing five consecutive presidential elections, and most of the midterms between them.So it was that, in a moment of postwar uncertainty, global instability, and domestic drift, Americans were told that they had been lied to—by Democrats, up to and including Truman.“The President? He is their captive,” McCarthy. “Truman is a satisfactory front” for a “great conspiracy . . . being conducted in his name.”That was crazy talk. Lunacy. Yet McCarthy was afforded a forum in the Senate, and in the mainstream media of his day, to make such unfounded claims. Proponents of economic, social, and racial justice, of diplomacy and international cooperation, were red-baited, blacklisted, and marginalized. McCarthy was re-elected with ease in 1952, and Republicans who winked-and-nodded along with his claims were .Johnson, like McCarthy before him, is using a slurry of lies and innuendos from the periphery in Wisconsin to shake up governing in Washington, D.C., and to excite Republicans across the country. As historian Michael Beschloss , “Ron Johnson is not exactly the first U.S. Senator from Wisconsin trying to gain personal political advantage from peddling false conspiracy theories.”Though dismissed by some as a charlatan and fool, McCarthy for a time successfully used his U.S. Senate seat as a bully pulpit for promoting himself and his wing of the Republican Party.Sound familiar? It does to Mandela Barnes, who says, “The generations-long boomerang from Joe McCarthy to Ron Johnson is truly something to behold.”Barnes has been encouraged to challenge Johnson in 2022. If he does, the lieutenant governor will join a crowded Democratic field. One Democrat already in the running is Outagamie County Executive Tom Nelson, who agrees with the McCarthy comparison—while adding an ominous twist. Might McCarthy, who was eventually censured by the Senate in 1954 and marginalized politically, have gotten even further in the modern era of Twitter, Facebook, and “fake news”?“Of course, McCarthy would have been more successful if he had all the tools of modern media. Social media is the difference between Joe McCarthy and Ron Johnson,” Nelson, the highest ranking official in what was McCarthy’s home county, tells The Progressive. “Their politics are identical. The effects of their politics are identical. The difference is the time period and the change in media. That’s what makes Johnson so dangerous. Social media has amplified him.”As Johnson’s profile has increased nationally, so has speculation about the 2022 race. The Senator in 2016 that he would not seek a third term but he has since whether he will keep that promise. If he does run, Johnson will surely be the Republican nominee. And the November contest in the battleground state of Wisconsin will very probably be the most intense Senate race in the country.In addition to Nelson, wealthy Milwaukee businessman Alex Lasry has already said he’ll be the Democratic nod. Barnes, state Treasurer Sarah Godlewski, state Senator Chris Larson, union activist and 2018 Congressional candidate Randy Bryce, and Millennial Action Project founder Steven Olikara are also talked about as prospective contenders.Whoever emerges as the Democratic nominee will have plenty of ammunition in a race with Johnson, who former Wisconsin Senator Russ Feingold in 2010 and won a rematch with Feingold in 2016. Both those election cycles were good ones for Republicans in Wisconsin, so it’s fair to say Johnson’s been lucky. But he’s an aggressive campaigner who doesn’t hesitate to go negative, has lots of money of his own, and has an ability to raise more. He would undoubtedly run with enthusiastic support from Trump in a state that the former President won narrowly in 2016 and lost even more narrowly in 2020.Pocan says that Johnson has become such an embarrassment to the state that comparing him to McCarthy “is an unfair insult to Joe McCarthy.” But it should be remembered that McCarthy won Wisconsin on a platform of lies and conspiracy theories, as did Trump in 2016. The question is whether Johnson has damaged his reputation enough to be unelectable.Wisconsin progressives say yes, and not just because of the incumbent’s delusional remarks about the 2020 election and the deadly rioting on January 6. Godlewski points to a hearing Johnson conducted in December, where the then-chairman of the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs invited testimony from proponents of “alternative” treatments for COVID-19 who were broadly dismissed as quacks.“Ron Johnson had a chance to use his leadership role to address the pandemic, to talk about getting treatment to people who are suffering from the virus, to focus on how we’re going to get vaccines to his constituents in Wisconsin,” says Godlewski in an interview. “What did he do? He literally gave an audience to doctors who were peddling discredited medical theories. Wisconsin has experienced thousands of COVID-19 deaths, and he’s promoting junk science.”Godlewski ticks off a long list of other moments when Johnson has infused Senate deliberations with lies and conspiracy theories. “Eventually,” she predicts, “Wisconsin is going to say, ‘Enough is enough!’ ”Start a new petitionSign-up for our free weekly e-mail newsletter.Sign up for our free email newsletter!The Progressive Inc. publishes The Progressive magazine plus Progressive.org and Public Schools Advocate.© 2022 • The Progressive Inc. • 931 E. Main Street, Suite 10 • Madison, Wisconsin 53703 • (608) 257-4626Built with

I grew up among the Wisconsinites who fought Joseph McCarthy’s dishonest and destructive politics. During the American inquisition of the 1950s, those who to the red-baiting Senator took enormous political, economic, and personal risks.Years later, as a child hanging out in the Racine County courthouse, where my dad worked, I heard stories from aging judges and lawyers who recalled signing “” petitions. And as a young political reporter collecting stories of veterans of the fight against “Tailgunner Joe,” like former Senator Gaylord Nelson and journalist John Patrick Hunter, I recognized...

The Heir to Joe McCarthy

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