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THE NEW MCCARTHYISM WAS STARTED BY LIBERALS  
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Jeet Heer
April 9, 2025
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_ Trumpism is only Bidenism carried to its logical conclusion. Joe
Biden was in many ways heir to the militaristic liberalism of Wilson
and Truman—especially visible in his efforts to revive the military
Keynesianism of the Cold War. _

A poster protests the arrest of pro-Palestinian activist and Columbia
graduate Mahmoud Khalil for leading demonstrations at Columbia
University on March 13, 2025, in New York City., Photo: Robert
Nickelsberg // The Nation

 

The censorship of radical voices is an old story that’s become much
more dire—and current—with the detention by immigration agents on
March 8 of Mahmoud Khalil
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a former student activist and permanent resident of the United States
who has been at the forefront of protests at Columbia University
against the Israeli onslaught in Gaza. In a statement to _The Free
Press_
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the case, a Trump administration official said, “The allegation here
is not that he was breaking the law.” Rather, the official
continued, Khalil’s activism was “mobilizing support for Hamas”
in addition to being antisemitic and “hence, contrary to the
interests of the U.S.” This claim is both factually false and
legally terrifying. There’s absolutely no evidence that Khalil is
pro-Hamas or antisemitic. But it is even more disturbing that the
Trump administration claims the right to deport any green-card holder
it designates a terrorist supporter based on speech alone.

Khalil’s threatened deportation is only the starkest example of a
much wider crackdown on free speech. Columbia University, threatened
by the Trump administration with the loss of $400 million in federal
funding, has chosen not to resist but rather to become an eager
handmaiden of repression: Numerous other Columbia students have
been suspended, expelled, or stripped of their degrees.
[[link removed]] The
university is now advising its international students not to tweet
about Gaza or Ukraine
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Elsewhere, the mayor of Miami Beach is trying to shut down a local
movie theater
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showing the Oscar-winning documentary _No Other Land_ (a joint
Israeli-Palestinian production), while Yale Law School has suspended
a scholar
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on an AI-drafted article that falsely accused her of supporting
terrorism.

Writing in _The New York Times_, the columnist Michelle Goldberg
argued
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“The closest analogue to this squalid moment is the Red Scare of the
late 1940s and 1950s, when the right exploited widespread fear of
communist infiltration to purge leftists from government and cultural
institutions.” Goldberg could equally have cited the first Red
Scare, which ran from 1917 to 1920 and saw great radical
leaders—notably the Socialist Party leader Eugene Debs and the
anarchist firebrand Emma Goldman—imprisoned 
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Goldman’s case, deported.
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Goldberg’s Red Scare analogy is accurate—but too narrowly
ideological, blaming the political purge on right-wing troglodytes
like Senator Joseph McCarthy. In truth, both Red Scares were ignited
by liberal Democrats—Woodrow Wilson during World War I and Harry
Truman during the Cold War—although the rise of McCarthyism in the
1940s and ’50s showed how easily anti-subversive hysteria could be
hijacked by anti-liberal Republicans. In both cases, the liberal
embrace of militarism opened the door to a reactionary politics of
suppressing the left.

In 1971, the journalist Murray Kempton reviewed
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convincing findings of the historian Athan Theoharis and concluded
that “McCarthyism was only Trumanism carried to its logical
conclusion.” This was also the long-held opinion of the towering
dissident journalist I.F. Stone
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himself blacklisted during the second Red Scare. The historian Garry
Wills noted that Truman had multiple motives for inciting panic over
communist subversion. In 1947, Senator Arthur Vandenberg told Truman
that the only way to persuade Americans to send foreign aid to Greece
was to “scare hell out of the country.”
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year, running for reelection, Truman needed to kneecap the Progressive
Party candidacy of former vice president Henry Wallace, who was
running on an anti-war platform. Wills listed an impressive array
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anti-Red initiatives launched by Truman: “the federal-employee
loyalty program, the Attorney General’s list, the establishment of
the C.I.A., the State Department disloyalty firings, the
alien-deportation and loyalty-passport programs, revoking of Pentagon
press credentials, J. Edgar Hoover’s propaganda Freedom Train, the
Smith Act prosecutions.” Truman built the infrastructure of the Red
Scare, which McCarthy then opportunistically and brilliantly
commandeered for partisan ends.

Echoing Kempton, we can say that Trumpism is only Bidenism carried to
its logical conclusion. Joe Biden was in many ways heir to the
militaristic liberalism of Wilson and Truman—especially visible in
his efforts to revive the military Keynesianism of the Cold War. After
the Hamas attack of October 7, 2023, Biden, a lifelong fanatical
Zionist
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embraced a policy of nearly unconditional support for Israel’s war
effort. This continued even as Israel unleashed on Gaza the most
intensive slaughter of civilians in the 21st century
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When mass protests broke out against his policy, Biden
repeatedly condemned the activists as violent
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responding to outlier actions that didn’t represent the movement.

Biden’s slander of pro-Palestinian activists helped splinter the
Democratic coalition during the 2024 election, giving Trump a potent
wedge issue. Once elected, Trump had ample grounds for attacking
pro-Palestinian activists, knowing full well that Democratic Party
leaders such as Senator Chuck Schumer would respond not with a
full-throated defense of free speech but with mealy-mouthed
equivocations.

Schumer’s statement 
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detention—issued after a considerable delay—opened with a
declaration of his abhorrence for Khalil’s “policies and
opinions,” revisited the canard of antisemitism, and concluded with
an insipid legalistic demurral to Trump’s “wrongheaded action.”
Even after Trump denied Columbia funding on the pretext of combating
antisemitism, Schumer agreed that “the colleges had to do something,
and a lot of them didn’t do enough.”

Unlike the two Red Scares, this current repression is not fueled by a
widely shared political consensus. A recent Gallup poll 
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that only 46 percent of Americans are more sympathetic to Israelis
than to Palestinians. Among Democrats, only 21 percent are more
sympathetic to Israelis, while 59 percent are more sympathetic to
Palestinians. In other words, Democrats have ample political room to
fight the latest McCarthyism. Unfortunately, the Bidens and Schumers
of the party are too wedded to liberal militarism and unreservedly
hawkish Zionism to be anything more than Trump’s pathetic
accomplices.

_[JEET HEER is a national affairs correspondent for The Nation and
host of the weekly Nation podcast, The Time of Monsters
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the monthly column “Morbid Symptoms
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of In Love with Art: Francoise Mouly’s Adventures in Comics with
Art Spiegelman [[link removed]] (2013)
and Sweet Lechery: Reviews, Essays and Profiles
[[link removed]] (2014),
Heer has written for numerous publications, including The New
Yorker, The Paris Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, The American
Prospect, The Guardian, The New Republic, and The Boston Globe.]_

_Copyright c 2025 The Nation. Reprinted with permission. May not be
reprinted without permission
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Distributed by PARS International Corp
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_Please support progressive journalism. Get a digital subscription
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to The Nation for just $24.95!_

* Trumpism
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* new cold war
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* McCarthyism
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* Militarism
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* Liberalism
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* Cold War
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* McCarthy Period
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* anti-Palestinianism
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* ICE
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* deportations
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* foreign students
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* Immigrants
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* Mahmoud Khalil
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* Oct. 7
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* Israel
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* Palestine
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* Palestinians
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* Gaza
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* Israel-Gaza War
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* U.S.-Israel relations
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