Deep state8/18/2023 ![]() He opposed subsidized school lunches and all federal funding for education, and argued for the complete loosening of gun laws and the deportation of “illegal aliens.” He emphasized America’s “Christian heritage,” and he decried the welfare state’s “road to totalitarianism” and America’s “retreat from greatness.” One of McDonald’s Republican congressional challengers excoriated him publicly as a “fascist.” The columnist Jack Anderson called him “a bush-league McCarthy.”Īs his star rose in the early 1980s, McDonald, though still a Democrat, became a national force for the New Right-the movement of conservative Christian and other ideologically orthodox organizations that pried power away from the Republican political establishment-forging close relations with Jerry Falwell and his Moral Majority, Senator Jesse Helms,and Richard Viguerie, the godfather of conservative direct-mail campaigns. ![]() He kept a framed portrait of Spanish Dictator Francisco Franco in his office. “wedded to violence” and opposed a federal holiday in King’s name. Spurred above all by what he saw as insufficient anticommunist zeal, he ran for Congress in 1972, winning election on his second try two years later.ĭuring nearly a decade in Washington, McDonald espoused extreme views: a philosophy of steep cuts in government spending and foreign aid programs abolishing the income tax and undoing almost all the post-New Deal welfare and regulatory state. But by the early 1970s, McDonald had become a well-known local right-to-life activist, not to mention a commanding and persuasive orator with a mellifluous voice. Patton, a distant relative-was happy with his life as a practicing urologist in exurban Georgia. McDonald-the “P” stood for Patton, after General George S. ![]() “He emerged as a very far right voice in the time he was there.”īy his own telling, in his early years, Larry P. While in Congress, McDonald was “famously out of step” with his colleagues, says Kevin Kruse, a Princeton historian and scholar of the conservative movement. Even by conservative Southern standards, Larry McDonald, a telegenic rhetorician from northern Georgia, was one of the most radical congressmen, from either party, elected during the later 20th century. These “Watergate babies” represented the most liberal group of incoming representatives in the country’s history-with one very notable exception. In the post-Watergate election of November 1974, the American people elected 75 new Democratic members of Congress. But in his Cold War story are many lessons for our own age-about the dangers of obsession, and our national obsession over danger. It was from this earlier era that McDonald emerged. “So, whether it was a communist conspiracy then, or a ‘deep state’ plot now, these are attempts to undermine people who are dissenting from the powers of the moment.” Such groups “perpetuated conspiracies by gathering so-called intelligence in an effort to discredit people to try and link them to grand and dastardly schemes,” Seth Rosenfeld, author of Subversives: The FBI's War on Student Radicals, and Reagan’s Rise to Power, told me. “Private spy rings can be traced back all the way to the 1920s,” says Darren Mulloy, a professor of history at Wilfrid Laurier University and an expert on radical political and social movements, “or even back to Pinkerton’s detective agency at the end of the 19th century.” The tradition picked up during the 1950s, Mulloy says, reportedly with the likes of anticommunist groups like the American Security Council and the John Birch Society. The tale of Representative Larry McDonald might be the weirdest, most unbelievable one in modern American politics that you’ve never heard. McDonald was a militant cold warrior and talented zealot who built his own mini-deep state-a foundation that worked with government and law enforcement officials to collect and disseminate information about supposed subversives. It is about an archconservative congressman, Larry McDonald, who became a leader of the New Right, founded his own private intelligence agency and died at the hands of his geopolitical nemesis, all while in office. This is the story of one such example, now largely forgotten. Outlandish as the charge might be, we shouldn’t be surprised: Conspiratorial thinking has long had a grip on American politics, and warping effects. Loose talk of a “deep state” seeking to undermine the Trump administration and its allies has entered the political mainstream. You’d be forgiven for thinking that 2018 is a uniquely worrying moment in America’s great, clamorous experiment with representative government. Zach Dorfman is senior fellow at the Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs.
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