Fear and loathing with Pat McCarran

With the possible exception of illegally pilfered top secret documents, Donald Trump is reportedly not much of a reader. So any opinion he might have formed about former Nevada Sen. Pat McCarran probably doesn’t extend beyond wishing the Las Vegas airport was still named for him, if for no other reason than that it’s now named for Harry Reid.

Then again, Trump’s father (and psychological albatross, it would seem), Fred, made the papers as a young man for participating in a fascist sympathizing anti-immigrant KKK rally in the name of protecting “native-born Protestant Americans.” 

That sort of thing would have been right up McCarran’s alley.

So who knows? Fred later made millions and millions (that he would hand down to his self-made son who pulled himself up by his bootstraps), and with great wealth comes the great responsibility to buy politicians. Maybe Fred and McCarran were chummy back in the day, and a starry-eyed young Donald, future megalomaniac (or MAGAlomaniac, as it were), got to meet the powerful Nevada senator a time or two.

In any case, Trump wittingly or not, is channeling an ethos that during the 1950s had perhaps no greater champion than McCarran.

“I believe that this nation is the last hope of Western civilization and if this oasis of the world shall be overrun, perverted, contaminated or destroyed, then the last flickering light of humanity will be extinguished,” McCarran said in 1952, according to the Congressional Record. 

“We have in the United States today,” McCarran added, “hard-core, indigestible blocs which have not become integrated into the American way of life, but which, on the contrary are its deadly enemies. Today, as never before, untold millions are storming our gates for admission and those gates are cracking under the strain.”

Meanwhile, just a couple months ago while campaigning in Iowa, Trump said, “Following the Eisenhower model, we will carry out the largest domestic deportation operation in American history.”

Trump was referring to “Operation Wetback” – yes, that was its official name – in which the the U.S. army, in 1954, went into Latino neighborhoods, rounded up undocumented people, and deported a million of them to Mexico. It was a policy in sync with 50s-style xenophobia that had been enshrined into law with passage of the International Security Act of 1952. Which had been sponsored by McCarran.

Trump’s plan to deport people in his second term was recently detailed by his minister of xenophobia (not a real title) Stephen Miller, in an interview with the New York Times. 

Mass deportations are merely one of multiple fronts against immigrants to be launched in a second Trump term, Miller and other Trump advisers told the Times. 

Another one: What Miller called “vast holding facilities that would function as staging centers” for the mass deportation centers. 

In other words, detention camps.

And yup. There’s a McCarran act for that. The McCarran Internal Security Act of 1950 had an “emergency detention” provision under which the president was authorized to arrest and detain people who were, you know, disloyal.

Problematically for U.S. humans, Trump, though an ardent practitioner of disloyalty, despises it in others, and sees it everywhere. 

The detention provision of McCarran’s 1950 law was overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court a couple decades later.

But in a second term, Trump would have one of his own. A Supreme Court, that is.

“We pledge to you that we will root out the communists, Marxists, fascists and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country that lie and steal and cheat on elections,” Trump frothed last weekend. In an uncharacteristic show of restraint, his adoring worshipers refrained from shouting “Sieg Heil!”

Wisconsin Sen. Joe McCarthy was the snarling face of the “Red Scare” in the early 1950s. That’s why “McCarthyism” is a word, and not in a nice way.

But McCarranism was orders of magnitude more consequential, legislatively, than anything McCarthy got enacted, (i.e., jack doodly squat).

Fear and loathing of The Other – southern and eastern Europeans, Asians, Jews, Mexicans – was the McCarran move, the McCarran motif.

And nearly always at the heart of McCarran’s legislation and rhetoric was a heaping pile of wild-eyed red-baiting.

Communists, Mr. Trump? Must be Throwback Thursday.

Of course Trump doesn’t think intolerance, bigotry, and punitive authoritarian policies are features (and certainly not bugs) of the McCarran era past, but the underpinnings of a glorious future when the Trump rump is reseated in the Oval Office.

If you see something, say something

In his 2004 book, “Washington Gone Crazy: Senator Pat McCarran and the Great American Communist Hunt,” Michael Ybarra recounts a scene from 1950:

“The manager of Harold’s Club in Reno marched six hundred employees – pit bosses, showgirls, janitors – behind a brass band down Virginia Street, across the bridge over the Truckee and up the Washoe County Courthouse steps to sign non-Communist loyalty oaths. Down the block at Brodsky’s saloon the owner also handed out loyalty forms to his employees. “Either sign or get out,” he barked.

Such a show seems unimaginable in Nevada now.

But is it?

Trump is threatening to apprehend taxpayers (yes, undocumented workers pay taxes), force them into detention camps, and then deport them to whatever uncertain fate may await them. 

Many of those people and/or their family members would be employees of Nevada core industries. The Trump-Miller vision, if implemented as planned, would be devastating not only to Nevada families, but Nevada industries, delivering a crushing blow to Nevada’s social and economic well-being.

And recent polling suggests an alarming portion of Nevada voters are channeling long lost Melania and saying “I really don’t care, do U?”

Whether the polling is accurate, or meaningful, or an outlier, it is true that normal voters, being people, have lives, jobs, pressures, and perhaps not a lot of bandwidth for paying attention to what politicians are saying – or threatening, in Trump’s case – a year away from an election.

But Nevada’s elected officials, and perhaps more importantly the industries for which they stand, hire people to do exactly that. They know what Trump, who has made clear his contempt for and malice against Nevada and Nevadans, has in store. They know the damage he intends to inflict on the state, its workforce, and its people.

They might want to say something. Anytime now would be fine.