Deep state in the United States

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_state_in_the_United_States 

The deep state in the United States is—according to a discredited conspiracy theory—a clandestine network of actors in the federal government, high-level finance and high-level industry that operates as a hidden government that exercises power alongside or within the legitimate, elected US government. Claims that such a "deep state" exists are conspiracy theories.

The claim that a deep state might exist has been dismissed by multiple scholars and authors. Political scientist Joseph Uscinski points out that "the concept has always been very popular among conspiracy theorists." Opinion polling from 2017 and 2018 suggests that approximately half of all Americans believe in the deep state. Whilst in office, now-former US President Donald Trump and various officials in his administration repeatedly referenced a so-called deep state and claimed it was working against Trump and his agenda.

Deep state and Donald Trump

2017

President Donald Trump's supporters use the term to refer to allegations that intelligence officers and executive branch officials guide policy through leaking or other internal means. According to a July 2017 report by the United States Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, "the Trump administration was being hit by national security leaks 'on a nearly daily basis' and at a far higher rate than its predecessors encountered". According to David Gergen, quoted in Time magazine, the term has been appropriated by Steve Bannon and Breitbart News and other supporters of the Trump Administration in order to delegitimize the critics of that presidency.

In May 2017, former Democratic U.S. Representative Dennis Kucinich stated in an interview on Fox News that a deep state within the bureaucracy was trying to destroy Trump's presidency. He further elaborated "The political process of the United States of America [is] under attack by intelligence agencies and individuals in those agencies...You have politicization of agencies that is resulting in leaks from anonymous, unknown people and the intention is to take down a president...Now this is very dangerous to America. It's a threat to our republic, it constitutes a clear and present danger to our way of life. So we have to be asking, what is the motive of these people? Who's putting these leaks out? Why doesn't somebody come forward and make a charge and put their name and reputation behind it, instead of attacking through the media and not substantiating their position?" In an interview several months earlier Kucinich said "What's at the core of this is an effort by some in the intelligence community to upend any positive relationship between the U.S. and Russia...There are people trying to separate the U.S. and Russia so this military-industrial-intel axis can cash in."

Trump and Steve Bannon, his former chief strategist, have both made allegations about a deep state which they believed was interfering with the president's agenda. In 2018, describing the deep state as an "entrenched bureaucracy", Trump accused the United States Department of Justice "of being part of the 'deep state'" in a statement advocating the prosecution of Huma Abedin. Some Trump allies and right-wing media outlets have alleged that former president Barack Obama is coordinating a deep state resistance to Trump. While the belief in a deep state is popular among Trump supporters, critics maintain that it has no basis in reality, arguing that the sources of the leaks frustrating the Trump administration lack the organizational depth of deep states in other countries. Critics also warned that use of the term in the U.S. could undermine confidence in vital institutions and be used to justify suppressing dissent.

2020

In February 2020, Trump cabinet member and acting White House Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney, when asked if a deep state working against President Trump exists, stated that it was "absolutely, 100% true". In an article for The New York Review of Books, Michael Tomasky quoted Newt Gingrich as using the term in the context of the Robert Mueller investigation in July 2018, quoting Gingrich stating: "[Mueller is] ... the tip of the deep state spear aimed at destroying or at a minimum undermining and crippling the Trump presidency". Gingrich then added to the statement that "the brazen redefinition of Mueller's task tells you how arrogant the deep state is and how confident it is it can get away with anything".

Stephen Walt, professor of international relations at Harvard University, has written: "There's no secret conspiracy or deep state running U.S. foreign policy; to the extent that there is a bipartisan foreign-policy elite, it is hiding in plain sight."

The term has also been used in comments on the "deep state"-like influence allegedly wielded by career military officers such as H. R. McMaster, John Kelly and James Mattis in the Trump administration. The anthropologist C. August Elliott described this state of affairs as the emergence of a "shallow state": "an America where public servants now function as tugboats guiding the President's very leaky ship through the shallows and away from a potential shipwreck".

On September 5, 2018, The New York Times published an anonymous op-ed titled "I Am Part of the Resistance Inside the Trump Administration" written by a "senior official in the Trump Administration". In the essay, the official was critical of President Trump and claimed "that many of the senior officials in [Trump's] own administration are working diligently from within to frustrate parts of his agenda and his worst inclinations". House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy described this as evidence of the deep state at work, and David Bossie wrote an op-ed at Fox News claiming this was the deep state "working against the will of the American people". However, there was some doubt as to the actual importance of the anonymous author, with some estimating that hundreds or thousands of possible positions could be considered "senior officials" and the inherent paradox of exposing the existence of such a group.

Polls

According to a poll of Americans in April 2017, about half (48%) thought there was a "deep state", defined as "military, intelligence and government officials who try to secretly manipulate government", while about a third (35%) of all participants thought it was a conspiracy theory and the remainder (17%) had no opinion. Of those who believe a "deep state" exists, more than half (58%) said it was a major problem, a net of 28% of those surveyed.

A March 2018 poll found most respondents (63%) were unfamiliar with the term "deep state", but a majority believe that a deep state likely exists in the United States when described as "a group of unelected government and military officials who secretly manipulate or direct national policy". Three-fourths (74%) of the respondents say that they believe this type of group probably (47%) or definitely (27%) exists in the federal government.

An October 2019 The Economist/YouGov poll found that, without giving a definition of "deep state" to respondents, 70% of Republicans, 38% of independents, and 13% of Democrats agreed that a "deep state" was "trying to overthrow Trump."

Statements and opinions about the deep state

Main article: Deep state

• According to the journalist Robert F. Worth, "the expression deep state originated in Turkey in the 1990s, where the military colluded with drug traffickers and hitmen to wage a dirty war against Kurdish insurgents". The term "deep state" is likely a translation from the Turkish derin devlet (literally: "deep state" = "deep polity").
• In 2014, Bill Moyers, the former press secretary during the Johnson Administration, hosted a discussion on his PBS television show with a longterm congressional staff member examining the concept of a "deep state hiding in plain sight" that promotes military conflicts regardless of which party is in charge of the executive or legislative branches. Likewise in The Concealment of the State, political science professor Jason Royce Lindsey argues that even without a conspiratorial agenda, the term deep state is useful for understanding aspects of the national security establishment in developed countries, with emphasis on the United States. Lindsey writes that the deep state draws power from the national security and intelligence communities, a realm where secrecy is a source of power. Historian Alfred W. McCoy states that the increase in the power of the U.S. intelligence community since the September 11 attacks "has built a fourth branch of the U.S. government" that is "in many ways autonomous from the executive, and increasingly so."
• In a Foreign Affairs journal article and subsequent expansion in a law review, UCLA Law professor Jon D. Michaels rejects "the premise of an American deep state" in a defense of what he terms the 'administrative state' against Donald Trump's attempts to "deconstruct" it. Michaels argues that the concept of the 'deep state' is more relevant to developing governments such as Egypt, Pakistan and Turkey, "where shadowy elites in the military and government ministries have been known to countermand or simply defy democratic directives" than the United States "where governmental power structures are almost entirely transparent".
• Former NSA leaker Edward Snowden has used the term generally to refer to the influence of civil servants over elected officials: "the deep state is not just the intelligence agencies, it is really a way of referring to the career bureaucracy of government. These are officials who sit in powerful positions, who don't leave when presidents do, who watch presidents come and go ... they influence policy, they influence presidents."
• In an opinion piece by linguist Geoffrey Nunberg, he said the "deep state" is an "elastic label – depending on the occasion" and its "story conforms to the intricate grammar of those conspiracy narratives". He also contrasted the change in the "twin bogeys of conservative rhetoric", from bureaucratic "meddlesome bunglers" of "big government" to "conniving ideologues" who "orchestrates complex schemes".
• According to political scientist George Friedman, the Deep State has been in place since 1871 and continues beneath the federal government, controlling and frequently reshaping policies; in this view the U.S. civil service, was created to limit the power of the president. Prior to 1871, the president could select federal employees, all of whom served at the pleasure of the president. This is no longer the case.
• On March 20, 2018, Senator Rand Paul said "Absolutely there is a deep state because the deep state is the intelligence communities that do not have oversight." He continued, "There is no skeptic" [emphasis in original] among the four Republican and four Democratic Senators "who are supposedly" providing oversight, so that the intelligence communities, "with their enormous power ... have become a deep state." On December 4, 2018, Paul, in commenting on the CIA Director briefing only those eight Senators rather than the entire Senate, he added "Do you want to know what the deep state is? The CIA Director is coming to the U.S. Senate and only briefing a select few members of the Senate. Why shouldn't every senator know what is going on? The deep state wants to keep everyone in the dark. This is just ridiculous" On December 10, 2018, he said "The very definition of a 'deep state' is when the very people, congressional leaders – people who are elected by the people – are not allowed to hear the intelligence."
• Writing in a piece for the Moyers & Company website, John Light asserts that the term deep state "has been used for decades abroad to describe any network of entrenched government officials who function independently from elected politicians and work toward their own ends," but during the era of Trump the term has been twisted to mean "a sub rosa part of the liberal establishment, that crowd resistant to the reality TV star's insurgent candidacy all along."
• Michael Crowley, senior foreign affairs correspondent for Politico, wrote, "Beneath the politics of convenience is the reality that a large segment of the United States government really does operate without much transparency or public scrutiny, and has abused its awesome powers in myriad ways."
• Tufts University professor Michael J. Glennon claimed that President Barack Obama did not succeed in resisting and/or changing what he calls the "double government": the defense and national security network. Mike Lofgren felt Obama was pushed into the Afghanistan "surge" in 2009. Another major campaign promise Obama made was the closure of Guantanamo Bay Prison Camp, which he was unable to accomplish. This has been attributed indirectly to the influence of a deep state.
• Rolling Stone magazine quoted Fox News panelist Charles Krauthammer, who called the idea ridiculous, and summarized the Deep State concept this way: "Is there actually a deep state? If you mean entrenched bureaucracy, then of course there is. If you mean a government-wide conspiracy, then the answer is almost certainly no." Salon magazine traced Donald Trump's belief in a Deep State to conspiracy theorist Alex Jones of Infowars, who, it says, "believes that the government – a.k.a. the "deep state" – has orchestrated attacks and events throughout history. This includes the bombing of the Oklahoma City federal building, the massacre at Sandy Hook (he claims that many of the parents were actors), the Boston Marathon attack, and on and on," including believing that the 9/11 attack was "executed by the United States government." The magazine also points to Trump's long-time ally, Roger Stone, as an influence. Stone has written several books which center on conspiracy theories, and blames Lyndon Johnson for the death of President John F. Kennedy, and alleges that Ted Cruz's father was involved in that assassination.

Closely related concepts

In his book The State: Past, Present, Future, Bob Jessop notes the similarity of three constructs:

1. 'Deep state' – for which he cites Mike Lofgren's 2014 definition: "a hybrid association of elements of government and parts of top-level finance and industry that is effectively able to govern ... without reference to the consent of the governed as expressed through the formal political process".
2. 'Dark state' – "networks of officials, private firms, media outlets, think tanks, foundations, NGOs, interest groups, and other forces that attend to the needs of capital, not of everyday life" while "concealed from public gaze" (or "hidden in plain sight"), citing Jason Lindsay (2013).
3. 'The Fourth Branch' of U.S. government – consisting of "an ever more unchecked and unaccountable centre ..., working behind a veil of secrecy", citing Tom Engelhardt (2014).

The term "deep state" has been associated with the "military–industrial complex" by Mike Lofgren, who has identified this complex as the private part of the deep state. However, Marc Ambinder has suggested that a myth about the "deep state" is that it functions as one entity; in reality, he states, "the deep state contains multitudes, and they are often at odds with one another."

 

Red-baiting

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red-baiting 

Red-baiting, also known as reductio ad Stalinum (/ˈstɑːlɪnəm/), is an informal logical fallacy that intends to discredit the validity of a political opponent and the opponent's logical argument by accusing, denouncing, attacking, or persecuting the target individual or group as anarchist, communist, Marxist, socialist, Stalinist, or fellow travelers towards these ideologies. In the Philippines, it is known as red-tagging. In the phrase, red refers to the color that traditionally symbolized left-wing politics worldwide since the 19th century, while baiting refers to persecution, torment, or harassment, as in baiting.

Communist and associates, or more broadly socialist, have been used as a pejorative epithet against a wide range of individuals, political movements, governments, public, and private institutions since the emergence of the communist movement and the wider socialist movement. In the 19th century, the ruling classes were afraid of socialism because it challenged their rule, and socialism has faced opposition since then, and the opposition to it has often been organized and violent. During the 20th century, as socialism became a mainstream movement and communism gained power through communist parties, the political right, alongside organized anti-communism and critics of socialism, became their main opponent. The United States are a notable exception among the Western world in not having had a major socialist party, and for having engaged in red-baiting, resulting in two historic Red Scare periods during the 1920s (First Red Scare) and 1950s (Second Red Scare). Such usage as an insult has been used as a tactic by the Republican Party against Democratic Party candidates, and has continued into the 21st century, including conflating German fascist Nazism as socialism and for left-wing politics.

In the United States, the term red-baiting dates to as far back as 1927. In 1928, blacklisting by the Daughters of the American Revolution was characterized as a "red-baiting relic". A term commonly used in the United States, red-baiting in American history is most famously associated with McCarthyism, which originated in the two historic Red Scare periods. While red-baiting does not have quite the same effect it previously did due to the Revolutions of 1989, some pundits posit that notable events in 21st-century American politics indicate a resurgence of red-baiting consistent with the Cold War era.

Background

Further information: History of anarchism, History of communism, and History of socialism

Both communist and socialist movements have faced hostility since their breakthrough in the 19th century. Friedrich Engels stated that in 1848, at the time when The Communist Manifesto was first published, socialism was respectable, while communism was not. The Owenites in England and the Fourierists in France were considered respectable socialists, while working-class movements that proclaimed the necessity of radical change denoted themselves communists; this latter branch of socialism produced the communist work of Étienne Cabet in France and Wilhelm Weitling in Germany. While democrat liberals looked to the Revolutions of 1848 as a democratic revolution, which in the long run ensured liberty, equality, and fraternity, communists denounced 1848 as a betrayal of working-class ideals by a bourgeoisie indifferent to the legitimate demands of the proletariat.

In countries such as 19th-century Germany and Italy, socialist parties have been banned, like with Otto von Bismarck's Anti-Socialist Laws. In the 1950s, West Germany and the United States banned the major communist party, the Communist Party of Germany and the Communist Party USA, respectively. With the expansion of liberal democracy and universal suffrage during the 20th century, socialism became a mainstream movement which expanded for most of the world, as center-left and left-wing socialist parties came to govern, become the main opposition party, or simply a commonality of the democratic process in most of the Western world; one major exception was the United States. In the Eastern world, communist parties came to power through revolution, civil war, coup d'état, and other means, coming to cover one-third of the world population by 1985, while in Western Europe communist parties were part of several post-war coalitions, before being ejected on the United States' orders, such as in Italy. Those parties in the West continued to be an important part of the multi-party democracy process; those in the East became a driving force for most of the 20th century due to the Soviet Union's role in World War II as part of the Allied powers against the fascist-led Axis powers, and later in the Cold War. Socialist parties greatly contributed to existing liberal democracy.

History

Philippines

Main article: Red-tagging in the Philippines

In the Philippines, red-tagging poses threats to the lives or safety of its targets and impinges on the right to free expression and dissent. Red-tagged individuals also tend to become vulnerable to death threats and allegations of terrorism. The United Nations warns that red-tagging is a "criminalizing discourse" that undermines the value of the work of human rights defenders and places them at risk of violence and various forms of harassment.

An anti-redtagging banner in a protest against the closure of Lumad schools, 3 December 2020

Communism has generally been viewed with disfavor and particular distrust by large sectors of Philippine society ever since the country gained independence from the United States on 4 July 1946 through the Treaty of Manila. Shared ideological preferences with the United States, resulting from more than four decades of benevolent assimilation and exacerbated by the onset of the Cold War, have resulted in some Filipinos being predisposed to suspicion of communist sympathies. This predisposition makes red-tagging an effective fear appeal tool used by players in the political arena, given that it authorizes law-enforcement agencies and the military to act on the taggings.

Red-tagging is almost never employed in foreign relations of the Philippines, including members of ruling communist parties, owing to the principle in international law of Westphalian sovereignty in another country's domestic affairs. This can be seen especially in the government's cordial relations with the Lao People's Revolutionary Party and the Communist Party of Vietnam, both of which are ruling parties of ASEAN member states. One of the notable exceptions to the nontagging of foreigners was United States citizen Brandon Lee, an ancestral-domain paralegal in the Cordillera Administrative Region. Lee was tagged as a communist and automatically an "enemy of the state", and was subsequently shot four times. United States citizen Liza Soberano and Australian citizen Catriona Gray have also since been red-tagged and publicly threatened, the former with assassination and the latter with rape.

United States

Further information: Anti-communism in the United States

20th century

Main articles: First Red Scare and Second Red Scare

Red-baiting was employed in opposition to anarchists in the United States as early as the late 1870s when businessmen, religious leaders, politicians and editorial writers tried to rally poor and middle-class workers to oppose dissident railroad workers and again during the Haymarket affair in the mid-1880s. Red-baiting was well established in the United States during the decade before World War I. In the post-war period of 1919–1921, the United States government employed it as a central tactic in dealing with labor radicals, anarchists, communists, socialists, and foreign agents. These actions in reaction to the First Red Scare and the concurrent Red Terror served as part of the organizing principle shaping counter-revolutionary policies and serving to institutionalize anti-communism as a force in American politics.

The period between the first and second Red Scares was relatively calm owing to the success of government anti-communism, the suppressive effects of New Deal policies on radical organized labor and the patriotism associated with total mobilization and war effort during World War II. Red-baiting re-emerged in the late 1940s and early 1950s during the period known as the Second Red Scare due to mounting Cold War tensions and the spread of communism abroad. Senator Joseph McCarthy's controversial red-baiting of suspected communists and communist sympathizers in the United States Department of State and the creation of a Hollywood blacklist led to the term McCarthyism being coined to signify any type of reckless political persecution or witch-hunt.

The history of anti-communist red-baiting in general and McCarthyism in particular continues to be hotly debated and political divisions this controversy created continue to make themselves felt. Conservative critics contend that revelations such as the Venona project decryptions and the FBI Silvermaster File at least mute if not outright refute the charge that red-baiting in general was unjustified. Historian Nicholas von Hoffman wrote in The Washington Post that evidence revealed in the Venona project forced him to admit that McCarthy was "still closer to the truth than those who ridiculed him" but has continued to believe that McCarthy did not identify the correct people. A similar view was expressed by Democratic Senator Daniel Moynihan who led the Moynihan Commission on Government Secrecy declassifying the Venona decryptions. Liberal scholars contend that even if someone could prove that the United States government was infiltrated by Soviet spies, McCarthy was censured by the Senate because he was in fact reckless and politically opportunistic, and his red-baiting ruined the lives of countless innocent people. In 1950, President Harry Truman had called Joseph McCarthy "the greatest asset the Kremlin has." Historian Ellen Schrecker wrote that "McCarthyism did more damage to the constitution than the American Communist Party ever did".

21st century

Further information: History of the Republican Party (United States)

Although red-baiting in the United States does not have quite the same effect it previously did due to the fall of most Marxist–Leninist governments in the 1990s, some pundits posit that events in 21st-century American politics indicates a resurgence of red-baiting consistent with the 1950s. The United States government's measures in 2008 to address the subprime mortgage crisis such as the Troubled Asset Relief Program were not only criticized as corporate welfare but red-baited as a "gateway to socialism". Political activist and author Tim Wise says that the emergence of such red-baiting may have been motivated by, and given additional force by, racism towards President Barack Obama and fear that the progressive policies of his administration would erode white privilege in the United States.

Some commentators posit that red-baiting was used by John McCain, Republican presidential nominee in the 2008 United States presidential election, when he commented that Obama's improvised comments on wealth redistribution to Joe the Plumber was a promotion of socialism. Journalist David Remnick, who wrote the biography The Bridge: The Life and Rise of Barack Obama, countered that it should be obvious that after one year in office Obama is a center-left president and the majority of his policies are in line with the center-left Democratic tradition. In July 2011, The Fiscal Times columnist Bruce Barlett wrote that an honest examination of the Obama presidency must conclude that he has in fact been a moderately conservative Democrat, and that it may take twenty years before Obama's basic conservatism is widely accepted. Author and columnist Chris Hedges posits that the Obama administration's policies have been mostly right-wing.

In April 2009, Representative Spencer Bachus made the claim that seventeen of his Congressional colleagues were socialists but could only name Senator Bernie Sanders, who has been openly describing himself as a democratic socialist for years. Sanders countered that American conservatives blur the differences between democratic socialism and authoritarian socialism, and between democracy and totalitarianism. For Sanders, the United States would benefit from a serious debate about comparing the quality of life for the middle class in the United States and in Nordic countries with a long social-democratic tradition.

In May 2009, a number of conservative members of the Republican National Committee were pressing the committee and by extension chairman Michael Steele to officially adopt the position that the Democratic Party is socialist. Over a dozen members of the conservative wing of the committee submitted a new resolution, to be eventually voted on by the entire committee, that would call on the Democratic Party to rename itself the Democrat Socialist Party; had this resolution been adopted, the committee's official view would have been that Democrats are socialists. On 20 May 2009, supporters of the resolution agreed to accept language urging Democrats to "stop pushing our country towards socialism and government control", ending a fight within the ranks of the Republican Party that reflected the divide between those who want a more centrist message and those seeking a more aggressive, conservative voice such as the one expressed by the Tea Party movement. Frank Llewellyn, the national director of Democratic Socialists of America, commented that Republicans never really define what they mean by socialism, and are simply engaging in the politics of fear.

In July 2009, talk show host Glenn Beck began to devote what would become many episodes on his TV and radio shows, focusing on Van Jones, a special advisor in President Obama's White House Council on Environmental Quality. Beck was especially critical of Jones' previous involvement in radical protest movements and referred to him as a "communist-anarchist radical". In September 2009, Jones resigned his position in the Obama administration after a number of his past statements became fodder for conservative critics and Republican officials. Time credited Beck with leading conservatives' attack on Jones, who characterized it as a "vicious smear campaign" and an effort to use "lies and distortions to distract and divide".

Insult usage

Communist or socialist have been used as a pejorative within red-baiting, mainly in reference to authoritarian state socialist regimes and Communist states but also for any proposal that may further expand the role of the government, by anti-communists and the political right for both communists and socialists, and for those who are neither but are alleged to be adopting socialist policies, as is done by Republicans for Democratic candidates in the United States. Those terms have also been used as an insult for several left-wing politicians in center-left socialist parties to describe them as farthest left and more extreme than they actually are in an effort to marginalize them. For some scholars, communist and socialist, and the memories of such authoritarian regimes, are used as an insult to dismiss any criticism of capitalism and support for socialism by positing that any form of communism or socialism would always and inevitably result in 20th-century Communism and authoritarian regimes.

Germany

Further information: 1994 German federal election and 2021 German federal election

The 1994 federal election saw a "red socks" campaign used by the center-right, including the CDU/CSU and the Free Democratic Party (FDP), to scare off a possible red–red–green coalition alliance (SPD–PDS–The Greens). Analysts have stated that such a strategy likely paid off, as it was seen as one of the decisive elements for the narrow victory of Helmut Kohl for the CDU/CSU–FDP. The red-baiting campaign was criticized as an obvious attempt to discredit the whole left; the PDS reinterpreted it for itself by printing red socks.

As the CDU/CSU was falling down while the SPD was surging in the polls, the 2021 federal election saw a Red Scare campaign against a possible red–red–green federal government, which was feared by conservatives, who engaged in red-baiting by promoting a Red Scare. A capital flight to Switzerland ensued due to fear of increased taxes for the very rich through higher inheritance taxes and a wealth tax. As The Left underperformed, a left-wing coalition was ruled out by just a few seats in the Bundestag, and the German financial market rallied as a result, as such threat was eliminated.

United Kingdom

Further information: 2017 United Kingdom general election, 2019 United Kingdom general election, and Labour Party leadership of Jeremy Corbyn

In the United Kingdom, former Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn was called a communist or Marxist, and a communist spy by The Daily Mail, The Sun, The Telegraph, and The Times, despite experts and researchers stating that no evidence exists. During the 2017 general election campaign, Steve Bush and George Eaton of the New Statesman commented that the Labour Party's manifesto was more Keynesian than anything, with Eaton stating that the adopted policies "would be regarded as mainstream in most European countries". According to some studies, media coverage of Corbyn has often been hostile and misrepresenting of his views.

United States

Further information: 2020 United States presidential election

During the 20th century, the United States underwent two Red Scares, first in the 1920s and then in the 1950s through McCarthyism. In a speech on 10 October 1952, outgoing United States president Harry S. Truman (Democratic Party) lambasted Republicans for having "opposed almost all our programs to help the economic life of the country" and "having blindly turned [their] back on the tradition of public action for the public good", referencing then-Republican United States senator Robert A. Taft, who made the 1952 United States presidential election campaign about "creepy socialism", a scare word "they have hurled at every advance the people have made in the last 20 years" according to Truman. Socialism and socialization have been mistakenly used to refer to any state or government-operated industry or service (the proper term for such being either municipalization or nationalization); both terms have also been incorrectly used to mean any tax-funded programs, whether government-run or privately-run.

Into the 21st century, with the rise in popularity and to the mainstream of self-declared democratic socialist United States senator Bernie Sanders, socialist has continued to be used as an insult, mainly by conservatives. Among conservatives, socialist is used as an insult to imply that Nazism, and by extension fascism, was a left-wing ideology, which is contrary to the consensus among scholars of fascism as a far-right ideology. An example of this is conservative columnist Jonah Goldberg's book Liberal Fascism, where modern liberalism and progressivism are described as the child of fascism, which is considered to be socialist. For conservative figures such as Dinesh D'Souza and Candace Owens, American Left figures like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Sanders, and Elizabeth Warren are not only socialists but since the Nazis are wrongly considered to be socialists in this view, they are dangerous, and in turn anyone who oppose them cannot have any link to Nazism or the far right. The use of socialist as an insult to falsely imply that the Nazis were leftists is seen as a way to disavow far-right history, erase leftist victims of Nazi violence, and justify violence against leftists.

House Un-American Activities Committee

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_Un-American_Activities_Committee 

 

Chairman Dies of The House Un-American Activities Committee proofs his letter replying to President Roosevelt's attack on the committee, October 26, 1938.

The House Committee on Un-American Activities (HCUA), popularly dubbed the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), and from 1969 onwards known as the House Committee on Internal Security, was an investigative committee of the United States House of Representatives. The HUAC was created in 1938 to investigate alleged disloyalty and subversive activities on the part of private citizens, public employees, and those organizations suspected of having either fascist or communist ties. When the House abolished the committee in 1975, its functions were transferred to the House Judiciary Committee.

The committee's anti-communist investigations are often associated with McCarthyism, although Joseph McCarthy himself (as a U.S. Senator) had no direct involvement with the House committee.McCarthy was the chairman of the Government Operations Committee and its Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations of the U.S. Senate, not the House.

History

Precursors to the committee

Overman Committee (1918-1919)

Lee Slater Overman headed the first congressional investigation of American communism back in 1919.

The Overman Committee was a subcommittee of the committee on the Judiciary chaired by North Carolina Democratic Senator Lee Slater Overman that operated from September 1918 to June 1919. The subcommittee investigated German as well as Bolshevik elements in the United States.

This committee was originally concerned with investigating pro-German sentiments in the American liquor industry. After World War I ended in November 1918, and the German threat lessened, the committee began investigating Bolshevism, which had appeared as a threat during the First Red Scare after the Russian Revolution in 1917. The committee's hearing into Bolshevik propaganda, conducted February 11 to March 10, 1919, had a decisive role in constructing an image of a radical threat to the United States during the first Red Scare.

Fish Committee (1930)

U.S. Representative Hamilton Fish III (R-NY), who was a fervent anti-communist, introduced, on May 5, 1930, House Resolution 180, which proposed to establish a committee to investigate communist activities in the United States. The resulting committee, commonly known as the Fish Committee, undertook extensive investigations of people and organizations suspected of being involved with or supporting communist activities in the United States. Among the committee's targets were the American Civil Liberties Union and communist presidential candidate William Z. Foster. The committee recommended granting the United States Department of Justice more authority to investigate communists, and strengthening of immigration and deportation laws to keep communists out of the United States.

McCormack–Dickstein Committee (1934–1937)

From 1934 to 1937, the Special Committee on Un-American Activities Authorized to Investigate Nazi Propaganda and Certain Other Propaganda Activities, chaired by John William McCormack (D-Mass.) and Samuel Dickstein (D-NY), held public and private hearings and collected testimony filling 4,300 pages. The committee was widely known as the McCormack–Dickstein committee. Its mandate was to get "information on how foreign subversive propaganda entered the U.S. and the organizations that were spreading it". Its records are held by the National Archives and Records Administration as records related to HUAC.

In 1934, the Special Committee subpoenaed most of the leaders of the fascist movement in the United States. Beginning in November 1934, the committee investigated allegations of a fascist plot to seize the White House, known as the "Business Plot". Contemporary newspapers widely reported the plot as a hoax. However contemporary sources and some of those involved, such as Gen. Smedley Butler, confirmed the validity of such a plot.

It has been reported that while Dickstein served on this committee and the subsequent Special investigation Committee, he was paid $1,250 a month by the Soviet NKVD, which hoped to get secret congressional information on anti-communists and pro-fascists. A 1939 NKVD report stated Dickstein handed over "materials on the war budget for 1940, records of conferences of the budget subcommission, reports of the war minister, chief of staff and etc." However the NKVD was dissatisfied with the amount of information provided by Dickstein, after he was not appointed to HUAC to "carry out measures planned by us together with him." Dickstein unsuccessfully attempted to expedite the deportation of Soviet defector Walter Krivitsky, while the Dies Committee kept him in the country. Dickstein stopped receiving NKVD payments in February 1940.

Dies Committee (1938–1944)

Conservative Texas Democrat Martin Dies Jr. served as chair of the Special Committee on Un-American Activities, predecessor to the permanent committee, for its entire seven-year duration.

On May 26, 1938, the House Committee on Un-American Activities was established as a special investigating committee, reorganized from its previous incarnations as the Fish Committee and the McCormack-Dickstein Committee, to investigate alleged disloyalty and subversive activities on the part of private citizens, public employees, and those organizations suspected of having communist or fascist ties; however, it concentrated its efforts on communists. It was chaired by Martin Dies Jr. (D-Tex.), and therefore known as the Dies Committee. Its records are held by the National Archives and Records Administration as records related to HUAC.

In 1938, Hallie Flanagan, the head of the Federal Theatre Project, was subpoenaed to appear before the committee to answer the charge the project was overrun with communists. Flanagan was called to testify for only a part of one day, while an administrative clerk from the project was called in for two entire days. It was during this investigation that one of the committee members, Joe Starnes (D-Ala.), famously asked Flanagan whether the English Elizabethan era playwright Christopher Marlowe was a member of the Communist Party, and mused that ancient Greek tragedian "Mr. Euripides" preached class warfare.

In 1939, the committee investigated people involved with pro-Nazi organizations such as Oscar C. Pfaus and George Van Horn Moseley. Moseley testified before the committee for five hours about a "Jewish Communist conspiracy" to take control of the US government. Moseley was supported by Donald Shea of the American Gentile League, whose statement was deleted from the public record as the committee found it so objectionable.

The committee also put together an argument for the internment of Japanese Americans known as the "Yellow Report". Organized in response to rumors of Japanese Americans being coddled by the War Relocation Authority (WRA) and news that some former inmates would be allowed to leave camp and Nisei soldiers to return to the West Coast, the committee investigated charges of fifth column activity in the camps. A number of anti-WRA arguments were presented in subsequent hearings, but Director Dillon Myer debunked the more inflammatory claims. The investigation was presented to the 77th Congress, and alleged that certain cultural traits – Japanese loyalty to the Emperor, the number of Japanese fishermen in the US, and the Buddhist faith – were evidence for Japanese espionage. With the exception of Rep. Herman Eberharter (D-Pa.), the members of the committee seemed to support internment, and its recommendations to expedite the impending segregation of "troublemakers", establish a system to investigate applicants for leave clearance, and step up Americanization and assimilation efforts largely coincided with WRA goals.

In 1946, the committee considered opening investigations into the Ku Klux Klan, but decided against doing so, prompting white supremacist committee member John E. Rankin (D-Miss.) to remark, "After all, the KKK is an old American institution." Instead of the Klan, HUAC concentrated on investigating the possibility that the American Communist Party had infiltrated the Works Progress Administration, including the Federal Theatre Project and the Federal Writers' Project. Twenty years later, in 1965–1966, however, the committee did conduct an investigation into Klan activities under chairman Edwin Willis (D-La.).

Standing Committee (1945–1975)

Democrat Francis E. Walter of Pennsylvania was chair of HUAC from 1955 until his death in 1963.

The House Committee on Un-American Activities became a standing (permanent) committee in 1945. Democratic Representative Edward J. Hart of New Jersey became the committee's first chairman. Under the mandate of Public Law 601, passed by the 79th Congress, the committee of nine representatives investigated suspected threats of subversion or propaganda that attacked "the form of government as guaranteed by our Constitution".

Under this mandate, the committee focused its investigations on real and suspected communists in positions of actual or supposed influence in the United States society. A significant step for HUAC was its investigation of the charges of espionage brought against Alger Hiss in 1948. This investigation ultimately resulted in Hiss's trial and conviction for perjury, and convinced many of the usefulness of congressional committees for uncovering communist subversion.

The chief investigator was Robert E. Stripling, senior investigator Louis J. Russell, and investigators Alvin Williams Stokes, Courtney E. Owens, and Donald T. Appell. The director of research was Benjamin Mandel.

Hollywood blacklist

Main article: Hollywood blacklist

In 1947, the committee held nine days of hearings into alleged communist propaganda and influence in the Hollywood motion picture industry. After conviction on contempt of Congress charges for refusal to answer some questions posed by committee members, "The Hollywood Ten" were blacklisted by the industry. Eventually, more than 300 artists – including directors, radio commentators, actors, and particularly screenwriters – were boycotted by the studios. Some, like Charlie Chaplin, Orson Welles, Alan Lomax, Paul Robeson, and Yip Harburg, left the U.S or went underground to find work. Others like Dalton Trumbo wrote under pseudonyms or the names of colleagues. Only about ten percent succeeded in rebuilding careers within the entertainment industry.

In 1947, studio executives told the committee that wartime films – such as Mission to Moscow, The North Star, and Song of Russia – could be considered pro-Soviet propaganda, but claimed that the films were valuable in the context of the Allied war effort, and that they were made (in the case of Mission to Moscow) at the request of White House officials. In response to the House investigations, most studios produced a number of anti-communist and anti-Soviet propaganda films such as The Red Menace (August 1949), The Red Danube (October 1949), The Woman on Pier 13 (October 1949), Guilty of Treason (May 1950, about the ordeal and trial of Cardinal József Mindszenty), I Was a Communist for the FBI (May 1951, Academy Award nominated for best documentary 1951, also serialized for radio), Red Planet Mars (May 1952), and John Wayne's Big Jim McLain (August 1952). Universal-International Pictures was the only major studio that did not produce such a film.

Whittaker Chambers and Alger Hiss

Whittaker Chambers (1948)

On July 31, 1948, the committee heard testimony from Elizabeth Bentley, an American who had been working as a Soviet agent in New York. Among those whom she named as communists was Harry Dexter White, a senior U.S. Treasury department official. The committee subpoenaed Whittaker Chambers on August 3, 1948. Chambers, too, was a former Soviet spy, by then a senior editor of Time magazine.

Alger Hiss (1950)

Chambers named more than a half-dozen government officials including White as well as Alger Hiss (and Hiss' brother Donald). Most of these former officials refused to answer committee questions, citing the Fifth Amendment. White denied the allegations, and died of a heart attack a few days later. Hiss also denied all charges; doubts about his testimony though, especially those expressed by freshman Congressman Richard Nixon, led to further investigation that strongly suggested Hiss had made a number of false statements.

Hiss challenged Chambers to repeat his charges outside a Congressional committee, which Chambers did. Hiss then sued for libel, leading Chambers to produce copies of State Department documents which he claimed Hiss had given him in 1938. Hiss denied this before a grand jury, was indicted for perjury, and subsequently convicted and imprisoned. The present-day House of Representatives website on HUAC states, "In the 1990s, relying on Soviet archives and records from the Venona project – a secret U.S. program that decrypted Soviet intelligence messages – some scholars argued that Hiss had indeed been a spy on the Kremlin's payroll."

Decline

Democrat Richard Howard Ichord Jr. of Missouri was chair of the renamed House Internal Security Committee from 1969 until its termination in January 1975.

In the wake of the downfall of McCarthy (who never served in the House, nor on HUAC), the prestige of HUAC began a gradual decline in the late 1950s. By 1959, the committee was being denounced by former President Harry S. Truman as the "most un-American thing in the country today".

In May 1960, the committee held hearings in San Francisco City Hall which led to the infamous riot on May 13, when city police officers fire-hosed protesting students from the UC Berkeley, Stanford, and other local colleges, and dragged them down the marble steps beneath the rotunda, leaving some seriously injured. Soviet affairs expert William Mandel, who had been subpoenaed to testify, angrily denounced the committee and the police in a blistering statement which was aired repeatedly for years thereafter on Pacifica Radio station KPFA in Berkeley. An anti-communist propaganda film, Operation Abolition, was produced by the committee from subpoenaed local news reports, and shown around the country during 1960 and 1961. In response, the Northern California ACLU produced a film called Operation Correction, which discussed falsehoods in the first film. Scenes from the hearings and protest were later featured in the Academy Award-nominated 1990 documentary Berkeley in the Sixties.

The committee lost considerable prestige as the 1960s progressed, increasingly becoming the target of political satirists and the defiance of a new generation of political activists. HUAC subpoenaed Jerry Rubin and Abbie Hoffman of the Yippies in 1967, and again in the aftermath of the 1968 Democratic National Convention. The Yippies used the media attention to make a mockery of the proceedings. Rubin came to one session dressed as a Revolutionary War soldier and passed out copies of the United States Declaration of Independence to those in attendance. Rubin then "blew giant gum bubbles, while his co-witnesses taunted the committee with Nazi salutes". Rubin attended another session dressed as Santa Claus. On another occasion, police stopped Hoffman at the building entrance and arrested him for wearing the United States flag. Hoffman quipped to the press, "I regret that I have but one shirt to give for my country", paraphrasing the last words of revolutionary patriot Nathan Hale; Rubin, who was wearing a matching Viet Cong flag, shouted that the police were communists for not arresting him as well.

Hearings in August 1966 called to investigate anti-Vietnam War activities were disrupted by hundreds of protesters, many from the Progressive Labor Party. The committee faced witnesses who were openly defiant.

According to The Harvard Crimson:

In the fifties, the most effective sanction was terror. Almost any publicity from HUAC meant the 'blacklist'. Without a chance to clear his name, a witness would suddenly find himself without friends and without a job. But it is not easy to see how in 1969, a HUAC blacklist could terrorize an SDS activist. Witnesses like Jerry Rubin have openly boasted of their contempt for American institutions. A subpoena from HUAC would be unlikely to scandalize Abbie Hoffman or his friends.

In an attempt to reinvent itself, the committee was renamed as the Internal Security Committee in 1969.

Termination

The House Committee on Internal Security was formally terminated on January 14, 1975, the day of the opening of the 94th Congress. The committee's files and staff were transferred on that day to the House Judiciary Committee.