“Those of us who shout the loudest about Americanism in making character assassinations are all too frequently those who, by our own words and acts, ignore some of the basic principles of Americanism,”
Margaret Chase Smith
Lately, it’s a preoccupation of many to look for other areas of US history where our circumstances were as dire as they now seem to be without introducing an existential conflagration like, say, the Civil War. To my eyes McCarthyism fits that bill best, a relatively brief time frame when the US Senate’s worst was on full display. Imagine if most Democratic Senators were showing Trump the same servility as the GOP and you have exactly where things stood in 1950. Fear and loathing were the order of the day and it was left to one freshman Republican Senator from Maine, Margaret Chase Smith, a direct woman with clear ideas about what duty to country meant, to speak up. She did so brilliantly, providing hope to those fearful a tipping point may have been passed and America was prepared to consume itself. Perhaps it came naturally, a reaction to what she deemed madness, or maybe she saw history to be made and decided to make it. Does it really matter?
It’s always been the same sorry formula. Attack those with the most vulnerable constituencies, groups ill-equipped to fight back. Paint them by numbers as threats to God and country, all the while shouting how doing so is courageous and principled. Deem opponents to the bullying insidious collaborators and… voila. Very mindless and shameful stuff, otherwise how could Trump possibly succeed at it. That he learned at the foot of Roy Cohn, who sat at McCarthy’s right hand, and later, well after his boss succumbed to alcoholism, carved out a niche as the nation’s most vile citizen, is either ironic or fully logical… or both. Again, who cares? Point is we’ve seen it all before and sent it packing, er, sort of. Make no mistake, these episodes leave residue because they reflect where we are capable of going…. and we’re surely going there now.
Bill Cohen, another Mainer, served honorably wherever he found himself, whether it was as one of the first of the GOP House caucus to support Nixon’s impeachment, or in the Senate as a moderate voice countering Reagan’s Cold War schemes, and later helping HW Bush navigate the fall of the Eastern Bloc, and finally as Clinton’s 2nd term Secretary of Defense, where he struggled against Pentagon waste and outdated commitments.
Yet and still, perhaps Cohen, despite his splendid career, now rues one aspect of it, the rise of one of his protégés, a loyal staffer, to the Senate for a span much longer than the two terms she originally implied she would limit herself to. Susan Collins came to Washington branding herself fully in line with the sensibilities of both Chase Smith and Cohen. Like her predecessors, she would be a voice of reason and principle, nothing fancy, just hard work and courageous decency. Whether supporting the right to choose or backing spending priorities that balanced prudence with compassion, a position increasingly at odds with Republican inclinations, Collins was supposed to reflect independence, swim upstream when necessary. Now, however, like the party Trump abased and then fully consumed like a quarter pounder, Collins’ standing is in shambles, a cautionary tale about how making friends in the Cannon building cafeteria isn’t the same thing as having the guts to make enemies on the Senate floor, or the Twitterverse.
Trump is still in office, still out of jail, because the GOP has maintained its slim margin of control in the Senate. Only near constant Republican unanimity has permitted the ruinous conduct and agenda of the Trump Presidency. A couple of heroes could have stopped much of the travesty in its tracks. Nobody was better positioned politically to take a stand than Collins. Everything she had always claimed to be demanded she step forward. Sadly, nobody has disappointed more. At every critical juncture, from giving her blessing to a parade of US history’s worst Cabinet appointments to providing the deciding vote that passed a 1%-coddling, deficit ballooning $2 trillion tax cut at full employment. From approving the scandal-plagued and certain vote against Roe v Wade to shrugging off most all of Trump’s unhinged ugliness, Collins has been strictly rank and file. Nothing to see here as she proceeds to do what incumbents do best… raise cash for re-election.
Speaker of the Maine House of Representatives, Sara Gideon, is running against Collins in 2020. She is young, attractive and, after being forced to deal with Trumpie Governor Paul LePage, whose nastiness and incompetence rivaled his hero, the President, seems well prepared for DC’s current climate of bad faith. No matter, the race will almost exclusively be a referendum on Collins and how Maine voters have digested her acquiescence to Trumpism. Certainly money will not be a problem for the challenger, as a torrent of outside contributions from national Democratic interests seeking to turn Maine blue come flowing Gideon’s way.
Since mid-2017, polls have punctuated how disenchanted Maine voters have become with Collins’ servility to Trump. She has lost 44 points from an approval rating that once made her the nation’s most popular incumbent. Indeed, as of last month, no Senator enjoyed less support back home than Collins. Near 24 years ago she promised Mainers she would never force them to give her the boot, assuring one and all two terms was more than enough time to make a mark and move on to other things. Now she seeks a fifth term and appears ready to do whatever is necessary to get it, including going negative against a very likable opponent.
Trump is making it clear the binary choice he wants to offer in 2020: keep it white vs. radical socialism. Of course his wretched core is all in with such bigoted mindlessness. Whether American democracy continues as a going concern depends on what roughly 8-10 percent of voters, now intent to clasp hands over ears and tune out the din they abhor, decide is the lesser of two evils this cycle. Collins fate will be instructive. After proving conclusively to Mainers, who pride themselves on inconvenient independence, that she never got Edmund Burke’s memo about evil’s requirement of silence by those who know better, and she was the wrong person to rely on for saving the republic, Collins should be an early casualty on the first Tuesday next November. If not, it may be a very long night…. and a far longer still walk in the wilderness. BC