None Dare Call it Treason

In 1964 a book called None Dare Call it Treason was self-published and widely distributed in bulk, often for free, repeating a right-wing wacko conspiracy fairy tale about the federal government being infiltrated by communists.  Among the malicious absurdities of this fairy tale was this line: "Amazingly, the fortunes of America’s most successful tycoons...have been redirected to finance the socialization of the United States.”

The fairy tale had been taken up in 1949 by Senator Joseph McCarthy and used with no evidence to destroy the careers of many loyal foreign service officers, apparently in an effort to spread hatred and fear among vulnerable sectors of the electorate.  Senator Margaret Chase Smith, a Republican from Maine, was the first Senator to take McCarthy on, in 1950.  "I don't want to see the Republican Party ride to political victory on the four horsemen of calumny—fear, ignorance, bigotry, and smear," she said.  Democrats in the Senate and elsewhere, while complaining in private, refused to take McCarthy on in public, cringing with fear at the notion they might be accused by McCarthy of being fellow-travelers.  President Eisenhower was not happy with McCarthy but there was little he could do and McCarthy continued spewing lies until he died of liver failure aggravated by alcoholism in 1957.

There is a Trump connection here.  Roy Cohn was McCarthy's attorney.  Cohn was a truly malicious man who ended up being disbarred in 1986 for pressuring a dying client to change his will naming him a beneficiary.  He was McCarthy's lawyer in the 1950s at hearings where unfounded allegations were launched.  He represented several mobster bosses.  He was a friend of Roger Stone and represented Rupert Murdoch.  He also represented Donald Trump, and mentored Donald Trump in the art of  malicious trickery, defending him in a lawsuit by the federal government for discriminating against African Americans in 39 of Trump's properties in Manhattan.  Throughout Cohn's career there were accusations of theft, obstruction, bribery, blackmail, fraud, perjury, and witness tampering.  Sound familiar?  The gang of thugs surrounding our outgoing President didn't begin with Trump's election:  They had been practicing their trade, conniving on the fringes of legality for decades, and only the permissiveness of the conservative movement toward their own unscrupulous allies allowed them to maintain a shaky respectability. 

The title of the book None Dare Call it Treason was taken from a political poem written in the late 1500s by a British writer in the court of Elizabeth I. The relevant line is, Treason doth never prosper? What's the reason?  For if it prosper, none dare call it treason.  Ponder that line for a moment.

This past weekend, the President committed another serious criminal act that should elicit immediate removal from office as well as jail time. Once again scoundrels in the US Senate are protecting him, as might be expected.  What is even more alarming, however, for the long-term prospects for American democracy, is the cowardice in the US House of Representatives, led by an autocrat from San Francisco.  

As the President's already-infamous hour-long recorded criminal phone call to an election official, asking him to "find" votes, was being broadcast 24/7 throughout the media world this weekend, the House of Representatives was too busy to respond, preoccupied as it was with the ceremonial niceties of re-electing the president of the club, Nancy Pelosi, to another term as Speaker.  And Nancy, whose national approval rating at one point in 2020 stood at 14%, is well known for her autocratic refusal to allow the people's chamber to take action against the criminal actions of the President. (Isn't "autocratic" the term many Democrats use to characterize Mitch McConnell's use of power?) She had to be dragged into holding a vote for impeachment after universal demand for it following proof the President had offered to bribe a foreign official for his own political benefit.  Her rationale for not taking action until then (gobbledigook about "strategy") was even less intelligible than the laughable rationale offered by an obviously frightened Senator Susan Collins for not voting to impeach the President:  "I think he has learned his lesson."

The rabbit hole of Alice and Wonderland leads to a topsy-turvy world.  Two female Senators from Maine:  one stood up courageously against malicious mischief; seventy years later another cowered in fear.  The same movement that created the fairy tale of treason during the 1950s protects the undeniable reality of treason from the President in 2020, while those elected officials sworn to protect us against threats to the Constitution cringe in fear.  Members of the most democratic institution in the United States ignore the signs of a failing democracy, refusing to place the T-word where it belongs.  House members seem content to cross their fingers, close their eyes, hiding behind the skirts of their leader, hoping for the best against all odds while doing nothing--except wringing their hands--to prevent further damage in the next three weeks.  Do you trust these people with your democracy?

Democracies fall this way.  I spent four decades observing democracies rise and fall in Latin America.  This is nothing new.  Seventy seven years ago Robinson Jeffers offered this line, contemplating the end of American democracy:  Our men will curse, cringe, obey; our women uncover themselves to the grinning victors for bits of chocolate. (We Are Those People)