No, Trump is not the new Joseph McCarthy

In the 1950s, hysterical fears that America was being overrun by Communist subversives had a deeply chilling effect on freedom of speech. Anyone who was outed, or usually falsely accused, of harbouring Communist sympathies lost their jobs or were otherwise ostracised from public life. Everyone from government employees, including teachers and professors, to artists and journalists were treated with suspicion. Many were terrified of revealing the wrong views or saying the wrong thing. This crusade against the alleged Communist threat was led in large part by Republican senator Joseph McCarthy.

Today, the spectre of ‘McCarthyism’ has been raised once more, particularly in relation to the arrest of Mahmoud Khalil by US immigration officers last month. Khalil, a 30-year-old Palestinian Syrian and recent graduate of Columbia University, entered the United States legally in 2022. He was a permanent resident in the US and is married to an American woman, who recently gave birth to their American child. Nevertheless, he is currently awaiting deportation.

Khalil has been targeted because he played a prominent role in the anti-Israel protests at Columbia last spring, and is purportedly a leader of Columbia University Apartheid Divest (CUAD). In 2024, CUAD organised a celebration on the anniversary of the 7 October massacre in Israel and has previously declared its support for Hamas’s ‘armed resistance’.

As such, the government deemed that Khalil’s actions and presence in the US pose ‘adverse foreign-policy consequences’ – language that first appeared in the 1952 Immigration and Nationality Act, which was sparked by fears of ‘Communist infiltration’. According to US president Donald Trump, Khalil’s arrest was the ‘first of many to come’. He also warned that his administration expects ‘every one of America’s colleges and universities to comply’ with future roundups of alleged ‘terrorist sympathisers’.

Such actions, against both individuals like Khalil, as well as universities deemed to be sympathetic to ‘pro-Palestine’ activism, have led to claims that McCarthyism is back. ‘Donald Trump has restored McCarthyism to America’, warns the Canadian Globe and Mail. An article from the libertarian Cato Institute similarly argues that Trump’s tactics and rhetoric ‘echo similar attacks on US colleges and universities during the darkest days of the Cold War’. Todd Wolfson, president of the American Association of University Professors, describes Trump’s campaign against higher education as the ‘new McCarthyism’. The Nation, not to be outdone in its indignation, argues that Wolfson is ‘wrong’ because ‘what’s happening now is far worse’. ‘The current wave of threats and attacks could actually – and is intended to – wipe out the American system of liberal higher education as we know it’, it claims, somewhat implausibly. Clearly, the McCarthy years hold no monopoly on hysteria.

In truth, however egregious Trump’s attacks on higher education may be, to view them as unprecedented or uniquely dangerous is to rewrite history. Ellen Schrecker’s Nation article, for instance, minimises McCarthyism by claiming it attacked only a few isolated lecturers and public servants for past indiscretions. Whereas Trump’s crusade today ‘reaches into classrooms, laboratories, curricula, libraries, dormitories, DEI programmes, admissions offices, personnel decisions, athletics, accreditation agencies’. In other words, it is not just the deporting of individuals like Khalil that supposedly have echoes of McCarthyism, but also the Trumpian project more broadly – including the work of Elon Musk’s anti-woke Department of Government Efficiency and Trump’s various executive orders targeting DEI and trans ideology in federal organisations. Opposition to identity politics, no matter how justified, is cast as inherently sinister and censorious.

There are plenty of other reasons to doubt the overblown comparisons with the 1950s. As these historians no doubt know, McCarthyism arose at a time when a consensus existed across the political divide that Communism posed a clear threat to the US. McCarthy, a Republican, may have popularised the crusade, but it was Democratic president Harry Truman’s administration that turned anti-Communism into an expression of American nationalism. The sinister House Un-American Activities Committee, which imprisoned the ‘Hollywood 10’ and spurred a blacklist of left-wing filmmakers, was also chaired by a Democrat.

Today, in contrast, the US is wracked by division and instability. There is no such consensus between Republicans and Democrats that, say, identity politics has been detrimental and must be rooted out of federal institutions. Trump may hold political office, but powerful forces remain hostile to his every move.

There is also something deeply ironic about these accusations of McCarthyism coming from academia. According to Schrecker, the McCarthy years were ones where ‘professors censored themselves, pruned their syllabi and avoided dealing with controversial subjects’. This might sound familiar to anyone who has been watching cancel culture take over universities in recent years. Just look at cases like Paul Zwier, a white professor who was suspended from Emory University School of Law in 2018 because he used the n-word while quoting from a civil-rights case. Or that of Pace University student Houston Porter, who was investigated last year for allegedly ‘misgendering’ a trans person. Surely, there are hints of McCarthyism here, too?

There is no doubt that Trump and his officials are guilty of trampling on the free expression of those with whom they disagree. Yet many of those accusing Trump of McCarthyism are less concerned about defending free speech than they are with being on the wrong side of the censor for the first time. Hysteria, conformism and the stifling of speech have been the norm in universities for decades. Where have these brave warriors against McCarthyism been all this time?

Kevin Yuill is emeritus professor of history at the University of Sunderland and CEO of Humanists Against Assisted Suicide.