When History Rhymes: Muskism and McCarthyism

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.

(This transcript has been lightly edited for brevity and clarity.)

— Charles Petersen and Alan Dean

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Charles Petersen: What do you find helpful in turning back to McCarthyism as you’re analyzing the Trump-Musk moment today?

Corey Robin: One of the things that I discovered about McCarthyism when I was writing my first book on fear, which I hadn’t known before, was how few people actually went to jail as a result of the anticommunism investigations.

I start with that because we have an image of McCarthyism overly focused on the man himself, the rogue figure of the senator making outlandish accusations, slandering people. And the narrative goes from that story to communists in jail. But in the end, only about 200 people were imprisoned during the McCarthy era for what we would think of as political reasons. That obviously should not be underestimated, but from the perspective of comparative politics, it’s not a lot.

Even so, under McCarthyism, you had a whole society on lockdown for an extended period of time. People were absolutely petrified of being punished for their political beliefs, and they drew in their political limbs to avoid getting punished. The puzzle at the heart of McCarthyism is that, on the one hand, you didn’t see a lot of traditionally repressive or coercive means of political power being exercised, yet the scale of the intimidation was intense, with real consequences for how people thought and acted and worked.

When you begin with that puzzle, what you find is that the real instrument of creating political fear was sanctions in the workplace. Somewhere in the realm of 20 percent to 40 percent of the American workforce — these numbers come from Ralph Brown’s “Loyalty and Security” and Griffin Fariello’s “Red Scare” — was subject to some kind of surveillance and the possibility of being fired.

The mass firings in January and February 2025 were something we really did not see during the first Trump administration. And if there’s anything that American history teaches us, it’s that this is an extraordinarily effective way of creating politically quiescent, politically silent, politically obedient people.

One of the claims you often heard during Trump 1.0, which I always thought was misleading, was that “the cruelty is the point.” If you know anything about the history of political intimidation and politically repressive fear, you know that the cruelty is not the point. Silence, obedience and submission — subjugation for political ends — that’s the point. The goal of McCarthyism was to crush what was left of the New Deal left-liberal alliance, primarily in the labor movement, and it succeeded. The point wasn’t to be cruel.

Trump and some of his allies really are just sadists, psychopaths and sociopaths. There is no doubt about that. But political intimidation and political repression does have a political goal beyond generic “cruelty.”

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Alan Dean: One of “Fear’s” fundamental concerns, to me, is toggling between the exceptional and continuous nature of fear as an instrument of social discipline. This recent wave of firings seems to have an obvious forerunner, just over the past two years, in the institutional and workplace discipline for Palestine solidarity of all kinds, which of course we saw happening continuously across the political spectrum. Looking back to the war on terror, McCarthyism and so on, where does our current moment fit in? Is the present moment of a piece with the longer history of fear in the American workplace, or is this a genuine state of exception with a constitutive element of novelty?

CR: I think this moment of Trump 2.0 gives us an example to be genuinely historical about, to show what’s novel and what’s continuous. That has been a polarizing conversation on the left, with one side saying everything is continuous and another side saying everything is novel. I have always argued that it’s both, but I’ve fallen more on the side of continuity. Now, with Trump 2.0, we can see very stark elements of both continuity and novelty.

I’ll start with the continuity, and here I would not connect the current moment back to the workplace repression during the genocide in Gaza or during the war on terror. I think what’s going on here has a slightly different trajectory.

The American right has had a program for restructuring the American workplace since the 1970s. This project has obvious economic dimensions, but it also has political dimensions. Crushing the labor movement and removing any form of workplace representation has been the front line of neoliberalization, creating politically quiescent or silent citizens who cannot protest what happens to them. The right has overwhelmingly succeeded in the private sector.

But one area where they have not succeeded as much, and which has remained a very tempting target, is the public sector. The public sector is the last part of the workforce with genuine and robust protections against arbitrary power, whether through unions — public-sector employees remain highly unionized — or civil service protections. Groups like ALEC (the American Legislative Exchange Council) have spent the last 20 years stripping public-sector workers at the state level of all kinds of representation. I see that project, and the mass federal firings now, as a continuation of the assault on the private sector. What private sector workers went through in the ’70s and ’80s was absolutely devastating — and what it created was a docile workforce. Today there are 2 million federal government workers, of which 800,000 or so are in the military. It’s the non-military workers, 1.2 million or so, who we’re talking about, who are now facing a real question not just about their economic futures, but a whole host of related questions that go with the kind of work that they once had.

At the same time, there’s plenty about the present moment that’s historically novel. The fact that Elon Musk has this — I hate these metaphors — this Sauron-like access to information and data on every single government worker is terrifying. And though it’s misleading, the way he talks about what they’re doing makes it sound very arbitrary, which enhances the fear. He spins his little globe and, zap!, we’re going to just get rid of this agency.

Part of what my book argues is that fear is often rational. But when punishment appears to be arbitrary, to fall at moments that you can’t predict, this rational fear of real and predictable consequences can tip over into irrational terror. I think Musk adds to that sense of arbitrariness, and to the sense that it doesn’t matter whether you’re unionized or what kind of civil service protections you have. “We just don’t care. Fine, file all your lawsuits and file all your injunctions and temporary restraining orders. By the time that’s all resolved, you will have already been drummed out and have had to figure out another way to make a living, so you’ll be gone.” Court cases are supposed to take a long time, to be slow and deliberate. But when it comes to employment cases, slowness and deliberateness works against you. Any worker who’s been through an NLRB election will tell you that time is not on your side, because you’re living under the axe, and the longer it goes on, the more intolerable becomes the fear. At a certain point, it can’t be tolerated at all.

CP: I think one of the big contributions of your work is showing how, as much as Americans like to think of themselves as living in a democratic society, one of the great centers of authoritarianism has been the workplace. And, in part, the story you’re telling is how over the last 50 years, the American right has been chipping away at the democratic procedures that the 20th century labor movement brought into the workplace — that the right has been, in effect, fighting to restore the power of the boss as a kind of feudal mastery. What you’re highlighting now is how this ambition to remove labor protections is moving from the private workplace to the public workplace. That, of course, has been true for some time at the state level, even penetrating into the old bastions of liberalism as we saw state workers lose union protections in, for instance, Wisconsin in the 2010s.

What seems like a real rupture at the moment, though, is that the right is not only going after the public sector — they’re approaching governance with the attitude of a hostile takeover, with the methods of a private equity manager. We could probably make sense of this by turning to the playbooks of big-time private equity guys like Stephen Schwarzman. But what I’ve found remarkable in the past two months is how much putting the methods of private equity into the federal government looks like 1950s-style McCarthyism. So there’s both a sense of rupture, something new like private equity in power, and of continuity, something old like McCarthyism.

For me, as an American historian, it’s hard not to see the sense of general terror among professional workers — who are the core of the Democratic Party right now and were hitherto protected from much of the fear that was commonplace in other workplaces — without being reminded of how white-collar workers in particular experienced McCarthyism. So many of my friends and colleagues right now are quite literally saying “I’m afraid” in a way I’ve only ever seen in historical documents.

So I guess my question is: What kind of political work is required to resist this kind of fear?

CR: One of the interesting things about the historiography of McCarthyism is that there’s not a lot about resistance, even though you have to assume there was quite a bit of it. The people who were the victims of McCarthy were themselves extraordinarily talented bureaucratic players. These were not rubes who didn’t understand the levers of federal government power. Some of them had reached fairly high levels of government power. There must have been many, many moments of resistance in the course of this massive purge and reorganization, and I wonder to what extent we just don’t know about it because these people knew better than to create a paper trail. Still, there are some lessons, though they’re not particularly surprising.

Let’s start with this question of fear itself. The cliche that “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself” was voiced in a very different moment, during the New Deal, although, interestingly enough, FDR gets it from Thoreau. The Thoreauvian aspect is important because there is a kind of stoicism in that dictum about fear that teaches you, first, that the emotion, the affect that one has, is real, and that it is a response to a reality. It’s not a hallucination. It’s not irrational. There are reasons to be afraid, grounded in material reality. One of the reasons we feel fear, of course, is that fear can protect us from danger, alert us to a peril that we don’t sense immediately. That suggests that there is a distance between whatever it is that it is causing our fear and ourselves. When we say that fear provokes a fight-or-flight response, we’re saying that that there is something in between us and the object of our fear.

That something is, in part, our judgment and agency. Even though we may feel intense fear, we still have quite a bit of room for maneuver.

We can understand this better by understanding why political actors and government officials use fear in the first place. It goes back to Thomas Hobbes, who was really the first person to think about the politically radial dimensions of fear. Fear is an amplification method. Governments only have certain level of coercive power; they can’t map, let alone control, all of society. What they can do is use fear to extend the coercive power they do have further than it might otherwise go. Fear, then, is a way of getting people to do what you want them to do, without having to exercise the coercive power that might otherwise be necessary to get them to do it.

This is important for us to remember. Because it means that when fear is doing the extra work of coercive power — when it is engineering repression without the constant exercise of coercive power — there will be some room for maneuver to oppose or resist that power. Perhaps more room than we even know or realize.

We’re already seeing this today. There was this email that went out from Musk, saying, tell us five things that you did this week, tell us by 5 o’clock on Monday, or you’ll be fired. But then some agency heads say, well, no, we’re not going to do that. And then, lo and behold, half the government doesn’t do it!

I’m not saying there’s a happy ending there, not by a long shot. But we can see these little, micro-mini steps of resistance. If you start taking advantage of these moments on a much more mass and concerted level, it becomes possible to spin the outcome in many different directions. This is why it’s so important not to say that we’re already living in a totalitarian society or an authoritarian society, because you have to leave open this space of contestation, which is real. It’s not that there aren’t consequences to resistance, but there is a real space for resistance. That space is still there and can still determine outcomes.

AD: There are two quotes I’ve been thinking about in this regard. First is Russell Vought’s declaration that he and his collaborators want “bureaucrats to be traumatically affected. … When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work, because they are increasingly viewed as the villains. We want their funding to be shut down. … We want to put them in trauma.” That much-quoted line really indicates how deliberate and self-conscious the use of fear is here.

And then, on the other end of the spectrum, is the total misapprehension of a response to this fear from James Carville in the New York Times, warning that there’s absolutely nothing to be done and advising the Democrats to “roll over and play dead.”

CR: In a way, Carville is doing the work for Vought. That’s a classic form of collaboration. And it’s the worst possible thing that you could do.

A much more concerning statement, given that Carville is such a clown, is what Connecticut Gov. Ned Lamont said after the meeting of the National Governors Association. During that meeting, the governor of Maine directly confronted Trump and said to him, “We’re going to follow the Federal and State law. We’re not going to do what you want us to do on these trans orders,” to which Trump replied, “I am the federal Law” or “We know we are the federal law.” Lamont was there, but rather than standing with the governor of Maine and saying, “What she said,” he tells the New York Times, “I’m really just trying to keep my head down.” This is the Democratic governor of a very blue state.

Now, it’s important to recognize that in the United States, even and sometimes especially on the left, we have a very moralistic discourse around fear: that the more you sacrifice, the more risk you take in active resistance — the more you have to lose and the more you will lose — the more heroic is your resistance. I bring this up because I want to acknowledge that there are real stakes to a governor resisting Trump in this moment, even beyond reelection or their political future. Trump is seriously threatening to pull federal funding for a whole bunch of stuff in those states.

CP: And to prosecute them personally.

CR: Yes, and to prosecute them personally. But I think even more important than that threat is the governor’s thought, “I could really fuck over my entire state or my entire institution.” If I’m a university president, or the head of a museum, or the principal of a school, it sounds very romantic and principled and righteous to say, “No, I’m going to stand up to you.” But I could imagine the leaders of those institutions thinking to themselves, “Where are you going to be 20 days from now, when the shit starts really piling up because we can’t do X, Y or Z, because we don’t have the money?” These are the material and political realities that people, particularly leaders of institutions, have to navigate, and the discourse of courage and resistance is unhelpful here.

I bring this up not to say that these people should cooperate, but to emphasize that if we perceive resistance as the actions of one heroic individual or leader, then we’re really screwed. This is where I think Gaza and what happened last year is important. Those university presidents acted shamefully. But they were deliberately plucked out, isolated and brought up by themselves to confront this phalanx of congresspeople, and it’s not like Biden or Democratic leaders of Congress were saying to them, “I’ve got your back.” When people are isolated, they tend to cooperate with the authority that’s wielding power over them.

I think the left has an answer for this dynamic, which involves not depending on single figures of authority or great figures of heroic virtue. Bertolt Brecht has this great line in “Mother Courage and her Children,” where Courage says, “Whenever there are great virtues, it’s a sure sign something’s wrong. … In a good country, virtues wouldn’t be necessary.” We understand the idea of collective provision. We understand the idea of solidarity. You don’t just go out on strike. You have a strike fund; you have alternative means of provision. But I don’t know what those are in this case, if what’s being threatened is an NIH grant that funds an entire chemistry department, for example. But I do think this is what the conversation has to start getting around to, because if our only horizon is courage against power, then we’re totally screwed and it’s already over. It’s not over, of course, and I think we have to really change this discourse.

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CP: All this reminds me of something you wrote many years ago — a defense of what you called, I think, the Leftism of Cowards. You were describing a protest during the war on terror, maybe the 2004 RNC, where you were packed in next to these cops riding huge police horses, and you just desperately wanted to get out of there. One response to that experience would be to say: who cares, I’m brave, I can face down my fear. But that’s not really the Corey Robin style. Instead, you insisted on acknowledging just how scared you were, and how rational that fear was — these horses, basically the NYPD cavalry, really could run me over. You’re not giving up on protests, but you’re getting away from those fucking horses. I’m sure what you wrote was more sophisticated, but that’s what I remember about the Leftism of Cowards: basically, you don’t have to pretend you’re not afraid, or that you’re a hero, to resist.

I guess one thing we could take away from this conversation is not to expect too much of institutional leaders, who have demonstrated their own cowardice in all kinds of ways. I’m curious, though, about the relationship between mass resistance and elite resistance. Do we need elites to stand up so that the masses feel unafraid? Can we really all be cowards? In “Fear,” you talk about the eight individuals who stood up against the Soviet invasion in Red Square during the Prague Spring in 1968. You quote one survivor of the gulag who said those eight “made millions stop being afraid.” Can we really get by without that kind of heroism? At what point should the head of an institution take some kind of stand? I think there’s a feeling that we just need some big names to stand up to Trump and Musk, and that will liberate all of us from this state of terror. But that’s ultimately an escape fantasy, right? Instead, you need to look for some other way to deal with your fear, something that actually works.

CR: First of all, I don’t think that somebody else standing up is ultimately going to really relieve your fear. Fighting, in my experience, is the best solution. If you’re sitting still, if you’re just pondering these forms of power, they are objectively very frightening, and then you can fill in the blanks and add in all kinds of other stuff in your head to make them even more frightening. One of the reasons why people wielding repressive power want to break resistance is because they understand that so long as people are resisting, they’re actually fighting their fear! So the actual fighting is really important.

Regarding the elite question: politically repressive regimes understand that you start at the top and work your way down, because if the people at the top are resisting, then the people underneath them will too. While on the one hand you definitely should not be looking at any elite as your savior, we shouldn’t let people at the top leadership levels of our institutions off the hook in advance; if they do cooperate, that will filter down. We also have to work on institutional leaders, not because we believe in them, but because if the chair of your department or the manager of your unit is standing up, you’re more inclined to stand up too. And if they’re standing down and working against you, it makes your job that much harder. So, I do think we have to both build out and put pressure on the top. And ideally we organize in such a way that we have leadership at the top that’s basically in touch with the workers at the bottom, and you proceed from there.

One of the ironies here is that government workers understand this quite well, whether because they’re unionized or because there’s a kind of civil service ethos. That’s the sociology of the workplace: you have these figures playing a kind of bureaucratic game, which I don’t think is necessarily opposed to the kind of deep organized resistance that needs to happen as well.

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AD: On key issues like immigration, policing and trans rights, we’ve seen a shift to the right from the Democrats — what you call the reactionary center. (This concept was quite deftly appropriated by Andrea Long Chu in her recent New York piece on Pamela Paul.) The reactionary center explained a lot about the Biden administration, especially with regard to Palestine, but its leading figures have felt very absent for the past two months. Where are they?

CR: Part of what was remarkable about the first Trump administration was the level of Democratic opposition. I hate the Democratic Party as much as anybody else on the left, but from a comparative historical perspective, they acted with a level of unity that was extraordinary. And it wasn’t just symbolic: they were able to play that unity to their advantage despite being in the minority. Trump got repeatedly rolled, and it wasn’t just because John McCain stuck his thumb down at the right moment. There was a whole host of other ways in which that unity had an effect. And this is where you’ll miss them when they’re gone. The fact of the matter is that when you don’t have a strong opposition party speaking out, it has an effect on the rest of the society. People on the left won’t want to admit this, but I’m absolutely sure that the absence of a strong opposition is amplifying the fear right now. There’s just no doubt about it.

The issue with the reactionary center, more than Pamela Paul, is the collapse of the Democratic Party. I think this is where Israel and Gaza come in, in ways we may not yet fully understand. But there is no doubt that something broke over that issue, because it involved all these liberal Democratic institutions capitulating. You had a Democratic president. You had Democrats in control of at least the Senate. I’m sure every one of those university presidents were Democrats. And it was a total collapse. Again, I don’t quite understand how and why, and I think I’m still waiting for that argument to be pieced together. But I think that had a huge impact.

AD: During the first Trump term, you argued, quite convincingly, that Trump was a weaker leader than he seemed to be, and that the right, or at least the MAGA formation, was a weaker and less entrenched movement than it appeared. But so much has shifted rightward since then, resulting in a number of other currents of political fear — from real economic worries to more specious anti-immigrant, anti-trans and anti-homeless panics. Specifically in New York, the almost wholly unsubstantiated post-COVID crime panic does a lot of work in this regard. But, more generally, where do we stand, and how has the terrain shifted in the last four or eight years?

CR: I have been surprised at how the right has come back with kind of elan or esprit de corps at these top levels, if for no other reason than that they now have a smaller majority in Congress than they did the first time. A fair number of the arguments I made during the first term are just not true this time around.

I don’t know, though, that the difference is that popular opinion has shifted and that the sense of panic is much more widespread. It’s certainly true in some sense, but the thing that is so amazing to me is that what they’re doing on the broadest and most frightening scale, and where they seem to be having the most success, is this assault on government workers. When it comes to immigration, they had a big bang of spectacular, frightening stuff at the beginning, but at present the numbers of arrests and deportations are back to or sometimes below Biden levels. So that’s not a real area of tremendous success, at least so far. And a lot of the anti-trans stuff, which is also very frightening, is caught up in the courts.

But again, where they’ve been most successful in terrorizing the population is with these government firings. And public opinion polling isn’t showing a synergy between these policies and popular fear, the way the ’70s crime panic stoked Richard Nixon’s law-and-order programs. I don’t see that happening right now. What I do see is this very top-down corporate downsizing or hostile takeover model, which doesn’t involve popular authorization. It, in fact, seems to be fairly unpopular.

The Trump administration does have much, much more power this time. It’s definitely scarier. But I don’t think this increased power is the result of a shifting relationship to popular opinion and cultural hegemony. What we’re seeing is a much more top-down operation, the success of which depends upon these little micro- and mini-decisions all up and down the hierarchical ladder, more than it depends upon what I think we feared the first time around, which was racist sheriffs conducting roundups in concert with a Trump loyalist military. That could still happen, of course, but it’s not really on the table right now.

CP: It’s interesting what you’re saying about the disconnect between Trump’s actions and any claim to real cultural hegemony. There’s no comparison, as you say, between what’s happening right now and the synergy in the early 1970s between the Nixon administration and the cultural politics of law and order. A similarly unhelpful analogy might be the George W. Bush administration and the culture of the war on terror. Anyone who lived through the 2000s knows that while the scapegoating of immigrants and trans people right now is obviously awful, it doesn’t really compare to the scale of cultural hegemony after 9/11, and the political license that culture gave to Bush. To take the tamest example, the Chicks were effectively blacklisted for simply questioning the invasion of Iraq. So far at least, Taylor Swift is doing fine despite endorsing Trump’s opponent.

CR: I just want to be careful and clear about what I think the contrast is. As you said, the Bush administration was able to take this widespread popular fear of terrorism, of Muslims, of Arabs — fear of a whole constellation of ideas and identities — and convert it almost seamlessly into a political project of reorganizing the government, reorganizing American foreign policy and intimidating the opposition in the process. It really involved a popular form of anxiety transformed by the instruments of power and repression.

What we’re seeing now is a much more frightening kind of top-down effort. Frightening, but also brittle. There’s a reason why Gramsci used the language of warfare to describe the conflict over cultural hegemony: this is what battle forces do, they test and probe for weaknesses. I think it’s a helpful metaphor, to be prepared for battle and unsure in advance. This is also why I really object to these oracular social media conversations that in effect decide in advance what the outcomes are. I think it’s irresponsible, because we just don’t know. We have to test what’s possible without being reckless. That’s a really hard space to be in. But the American labor movement and the civil rights movement accumulated their repertoire of knowledge and praxis over decades precisely through that kind of probing, assault and retreat. In the past two decades, we grew so used to everybody showing up downtown, at Herald Square, at Zuccotti Park or wherever. But this is a different moment, and it requires a different kind of sensibility.

CP: I think one of the great contributions of your work is that by returning to these fundamental feelings that just seem so basic that we don’t even really address them — and, for the professional classes, can be really drained out of our work lives, at least in the case of fear — we can meet the shock of the present moment. That’s the great thing about politics, as one of your favorite thinkers, Hannah Arendt, reminds us. It’s also what make politics so terrifying, and at the same time fills me with hope in the face of disaster: that the world still has the capacity to surprise, to be new.