Guess which famous Republican said the following about a demagogue hijacking the Republican Party: "The nation sorely needs a Republican victory. But I don’t want to see the Republican Party ride to political victory on the Four Horsemen of Calumny—Fear, Ignorance, Bigotry, and Smear. . .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 [as well].”
Was it Mitt Romney? Ben Sasse? Olympia Snowe? Duke's very own Peter Feaver?
Try Margaret Chase Smith. She was a trailblazing Republican senator from Maine who in 1964 became the first woman ever to earn votes toward the presidential nomination at a major party convention. But Smith is best known for the stirring words quoted above, a selection from her 1950 Declaration of Conscience speech.
Then, as now, an enterprising demagogue had captured the nation's attention. Senator Joseph McCarthy was on the ascent after his February 9, 1950 remarks to the Republican Women’s Club of Wheeling, West Virginia, in which he famously railed against “enemies from within,” and brandished a list of 205 State Department employees he alleged to have Communist loyalties.
Instantly a little-known and unimpressive junior senator from Wisconsin was the talk of Washington. Many feared him, some loathed him, but no Republican was brave enough to stand against him—until three months into McCarthy’s meteoric rise, Margaret Chase Smith rose to speak on the Senate floor.
Republicans, Smith argued, could either plunge with McCarthy into the abyss of anti-Communist witch-hunting and abandon American values along the way—or they could stand with the Constitution, and defend the principles of free speech and due process that had made America what it was in the first place. But Smith’s Declaration of Conscience was not enough to thwart McCarthy’s rise; his popularity would only grow from 1950 to 1954. Had more leaders followed Smith’s example, the grave toll of the McCarthy years—measured in nationwide hysteria, book burnings, ruined careers and suicides—might have been avoided.
Demagogues like McCarthy arise from time to time in American politics. Our history textbooks are replete with accounts of these colorful and dangerous characters: Huey Long, Charles Coughlin, George Wallace. No political party has a monopoly on demagogues—they come from the left and right and populist center. They command vast audiences. They live for the applause of the crowd and the flash of the camera. Radio and television are a demagogue’s best friends, for he has no real ones.
But the same could be said of garden-variety politicians. We are used to their pandering, their distortions and half-truths and outright lies—and we are sick of them. What, then, distinguishes demagogues from ordinary politicians?
Dishonest politicians are common to every era in American history, but only a time of acute anxiety can propel a demagogue to national prominence. Demagogues have an intuitive sense of public opinion; they sniff out fears that ordinary politicians have failed to notice. They don’t imitate the poll-tested rhetoric of the professional political class; instead, demagogues push the boundaries of what is acceptable. They define an internal enemy: Jews, for Coughlin; the rich, for Long; Communist sympathizers, for McCarthy; civil rights activists, for Wallace. Demagogues are much more likely than ordinary politicians to justify violence. While they can address legitimate fears—such as the worry that the New Deal wasn’t working or that Communists spies had infiltrated the government—the solutions demagogues propose are never constructive. Demagogues don’t promise meaningful reforms they can achieve by working with Congress or the states; instead, they speak of sweeping changes only they can deliver.
It is now time to state the obvious: Donald Trump is a demagogue. Like Long, Trump has sensed the anxieties of a working class still hurting in the wake of a major economic crisis. Like Coughlin, Trump is a master of the media—Twitter and television are to Trump what radio was for the anti-Semitic priest from Michigan. Like McCarthy, Trump has targeted an enemy within—American Muslims—whose questionable loyalty, Trump alleges, poses a threat to national security. Like Wallace, Trump caters to the emotions of white supremacists and winks approvingly at the violence they might unleash. In his address to the Republican Convention this summer, Trump echoed the argument demagogues have made throughout American history: with regard to a broken system, “I alone can fix it.” It is an argument totally incompatible with limited government.
This summer, we all witnessed a watershed moment in American history. A demagogue secured what McCarthy, Long, and Wallace all dreamt of, but never grasped: a major party’s nomination for the presidency.
What are patriotic Republicans to do as our party bows before a demagogue?
History offers only one response: free ourselves. Fellow Republicans, today we face the Trump test, and we must answer it as convincingly as Margaret Chase Smith answered the challenge McCarthy posed back in her day. We need a Declaration of Conscience for 2016. I submit the following as a rough draft:
If Donald Trump is elected President, on January 20, 2017 he will place his left hand on a Bible he has never read and raise his right hand for a Constitution he has dishonored at every step of his campaign. He will swear to preserve, protect and defend a document expressly designed to prevent men like him from ever gaining power.
We are Americans first and Republicans second; love of country trumps loyalty to party. And while our party may have surrendered to a demagogue, we will not. Today, we raise our voices against Trump. On Election Day, we will vote against him. We know our own power and the gravity of the choice before us: Deny Trump the presidency and make him a footnote in history, or give Trump the presidency and let him write history. Let us make history instead.
Matthew King is a Trinity junior. His column, “at the water's edge” runs on alternate Mondays.
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