From The Forever War (Nick Bryant, 2024) pp104-6
What was striking about the demagogues of the 20th century was how easily they won mainstream acceptance. Lindbergh’s America First movement enjoyed support from Walt Disney and Henry Ford. McCarthy was a close friend of Joe Kennedy, dated both Patricia and Eunice Kennedy, and became a regular visitor to the family compound at Hyannis Port. Robert Kennedy served as an aide for the notorious Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations chaired by McCarthy — although he resigned five months later in protest at his guilt-by-association tactics. Jack Kennedy was a friend. When the Senate voted in 1954 to censure McCarthy, after tiring of his crackbrain tirades, Kennedy was in hospital recuperating from life-threatening surgery on a wartime spinal injury. Yet unusually for a senator absent from a critical vote, he did not seek a pair. His reticence on McCarthyism partly explained why leading liberals, such as Eleanor Roosevelt, doubted his progressive credentials. But JFK understood that McCarthy was hugely popular with his blue-collar Massachusetts constituents.
After George Wallace was forced from the race in 1972, George McGovern, the most left-wing presidential candidate the Democratic Party had ever fielded, tried repeatedly to secure his endorsement. George H. W. Bush had to offer Pat Buchanan a keynote speaking slot at the 1992 Republican convention, which Pitchfork Pat used to deliver his famed ‘Culture War’ speech in which he claimed, ‘There is a religious war going on in this country. It is a cultural war so critical to the kind of nation we shall be as the Cold War itself, for the war is for the soul of America.’
Frequently, these populist extremists shaped public policy. Coughlin and Long heavily influenced Roosevelt’s New Deal, forcing him to drift leftwards after his early policies were deemed too Wall Street-friendly. The so-called ‘Second New Deal’, from 1935 to 1936, which included interventionist economic reforms that Roosevelt initially opposed, came partly in response to Long and Coughlin’s anti-business populism. ‘Roosevelt owes his liberal sainthood,’ noted the veteran journalist Robert Sherrill, ‘to having been goaded by ideological roughnecks like Long and Coughlin into advocating reforms he was basically rather cool to.”
The virulent anti-communism of McCarthyism shaped US foreign policy for decades after his demise. No president wanted to be accused of being soft on communism, which was partly why Truman waged war on the Korean Peninsula, a conflict in which more than 36,000 Americans lost their lives, and why Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon Americanised the war in Vietnam.
Though Barry Goldwater was buried by a landslide in 1964, his hardline campaign provided the blueprint for Republican victories in five of the next six presidential elections, As the columnist George Will once so memorably put it, ‘He lost 44 states but won the future.’
Likewise, George Wallace shifted the parameters of political acceptability. Prior to his success in the 1972 Florida Primary, as his biographer Dan T. Carter has noted, the White House had ruled out President Nixon ever going on national television to make a speech that was anti-busing Less than 48 hours after Wallace’s victory in the Sunshine State, however, the president did just that by calling for a moratorium. Pat Buchanan’s overt nativism made the Republican Party more hostile towards immigrants. Joe Biden has resumed construction of a section of Donald Trump’s fabled border wall (although, pre-Trump, the Bush and Obama administrations had erected hundreds of miles of walls and fencing along the southern border).
Always there has been a tendency to relegate American demagogues. To view them as fringe figures. To see them as bit players in some historical sideshow. But, as the rise of Trump served to show, they were more central to the story.
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