Rare John Steinbeck column probes strength of US democracy [View all]
NEW YORK (AP) — Decades ago, as communists and suspected communists were being blacklisted and debates spread over the future of American democracy, John Steinbeck — a resident of Paris at the time — often found himself asked about the headlines from his native country.
The question he kept hearing: “What about McCarthyism?”
The future Nobel Laureate wrote that the practice embodied by U.S. Sen. Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin was “simply a new name for something that has existed from the moment when popular government emerged.”
“It is the attempt to substitute government by men for government by law,” Steinbeck continued in a 1954 column for Le Figaro that had rarely been seen until it was reprinted this week in the literary quarterly The Strand Magazine. “We have always had this latent thing. All democracies have it. It cannot be wiped out because, by destroying it, democracy would destroy itself.”
https://apnews.com/article/democracy-john-steinbeck-government-and-politics-29cf93a3781f0c020df22f00fdb2bcfe
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