Alan Dean and Charles Petersen at n + 1:
The early days of the second Trump Administration have been greeted with both shock and a search for lessons from history. Journalists have turned to the Nixon Administration’s attempts to “impound” congressionally allocated funds as both a precedent for Trump’s actions and evidence of their illegality. The rollback of DEI and the targeted firings of women and Black leaders across the military and the civil service is redolent of the southern “Redemption” that brought Jim Crow to power in the 1870s and 1880s after the end of Reconstruction. Notably absent in many of these discussions is the last time mass firings and large-scale workplace intimidation occurred in the federal government: the McCarthy Era and the Second Red Scare of the late 1940s and early 1950s.
In 2004, at the height of the war on terror, the political theorist Corey Robin published Fear: The History of a Political Idea. Among other contributions, Fear offers a searching examination of McCarthyism, showing how the Second Red Scare should be seen not simply as an aberration but an embodiment of many of the core dynamics in American politics. In 2017, at the beginning of the first Trump Administration, Robin wrote for n+1 two of the most incisive early examinations of the new presidency. Eight years later we asked Robin to help us think through the present conjuncture.
More here.
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