#robert taft

From The Robert Alphonso Taft Story: "it's on the record!"

Hirsute Taft supporters at the Republican National Convention

Republicans who enable Trump’s narcissistic anti-democratic inclinations are similar to the Republicans who enabled the witch-hunting red-baiting Sen. Joseph McCarthy in the early 1950s. Both groups seek political gain and don’t care about the consequences for the country as a whole.

In McCarthy's era, most of the GOP's leaders found excuses to avoid challenging conspiracy theories that they knew to be implausible, even as evidence of their costs to the nation steadily mounted. For years, despite their private doubts about his charges and methods alike, the top GOP leadership -- particularly Senate Republican leader Robert A. Taft, the Mitch McConnell of his day -- either passively abetted or actively supported McCarthy's scattershot claims of treason and Communist infiltration.

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Walter Lippmann, the most influential newspaper columnist of his time, wrote that the senator's goal was to establish himself as the GOP's "supreme boss." Wrote Lippmann, "This is the totalitarianism of the man: his cold, calculated, sustained and ruthless effort to make himself feared. That is why he has been staging a series of demonstrations, each designed to show that he respects nobody, no office, and no institution in the land, and that everyone at whom he growls will run away."

Each of those words could apply as well to Trump and the GOP today.

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Some Republicans may fear Trump; others may find his fraud accusations a useful tool for weakening Biden or justifying a new wave of voter suppression measures. But whatever their motivation for enabling Trump's baseless and corrosive claims, Mitch McConnell, Kevin McCarthy and the vast majority of other Republican legislators are likely consigning themselves to the same withering verdict that history has applied to the party predecessors who found their own reasons not to object as Joe McCarthy tore for years at the nation's deepest values.

In that excellent article, Ronald Brownstein compares Mitch McConnell to Robert Taft who led Senate Republicans in the McCarthy era.

Though Moscow Mitch reminds me more of the pro-nullification Senator John C. Calhoun -- a proud slaveholder. Calhoun’s advocacy on behalf of nullification and slavery provided the ideological basis which put the South on the path to the Civil War.

Robert Taft throws a campaign carnival