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By Kathe Pollitt
In a recent Nation piece, Victor Navasky argued that the charges that
Russia meddled in the 2016 election resemble the wild accusations and
poisonous atmosphere of the McCarthy era. Stephen F. Cohen and several
other writers here also use the word “McCarthyism” a lot. Victor
probably knows more about the subject than anyone on earth—his book
Naming Names is a classic—so I hesitate to disagree with him. But here’s
what he overlooks: McCarthyism involved the use of immense state power
against a large, shape-shifting mass of fairly powerless ordinary people
who, with rare exceptions, had done nothing more than exercise their
right to freedom of speech and association. That’s quite different from
the calls by Democrats to investigate whether Russian agents hacked the
Democratic National Committee at the behest of Vladimir Putin, or
whether Trump’s financial interests are tied up with Russia, or whether
people like former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort, former campaign
foreign-policy adviser Carter Page, and former national-security adviser
Michael Flynn were up to no good. McCarthyism was a miasma of innuendo,
divorced from facts. In the matter of Russia and Trump, a small number
of individuals are suspected of serious and specific crimes. Moreover,
this time around, the state is firmly in the grip of the supposed
victims of the witch hunt. Donald Trump isn’t a high-school teacher who
once subscribed to The Daily Worker; he is president of the United States.
full:
https://www.thenation.com/article/its-not-mccarthyism-to-demand-answers-on-trump-russia-and-the-election/
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