Red scare, 2: Determined to retain control of both houses of Congress in November midterm elections, the Republican Party is tearing a page from Joe McCarthy’s Red-baiting book. He was the 1950s congressional demagogue who rose to national prominence by portraying all liberals and progressives, no matter their walks of life, as insidious communists attempting to undermine the republic. He was a fraud and a chronic liar but did considerable damage before being both confronted and humbled by broadcaster Edward R. Murrow in a seminal television interview. What today’s Republicans are banking on is the absence of a Murrow-like figure in divided America. Interestingly, this Red-baiting strategy was also used with great success by the late Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, a tycoon who labeled all enemies as communist conspirators and as a result won support from Italy’s populism-prone southlands. Many dubbed him a pernicious autocrat, but he basked in the attention and exercised political influence for three decades, mostly because he owned the country’s three major private TV networks. He would react with delight to this American president’s choice of enemies. Demagogues of a feather flock together, and unless America’s Democratic party can deliver a rational response to this new-era red baiting and a president with a McCarthy-like sneer, it will be trampled in the manner of those who were not resolute enough to challenge McCarthyism and, 50 years later, a charismatic Italian who carried its torch.