Most Americans have either forgotten or never learned that McCarthyism was an equal-opportunity political crime wave. The Wisconsin senator made a big -- and utterly unexpected -- media splash with his Wheeling, West Virginia speech (“I hold in my hand the names of …”) and commentators soon slapped his name on anticommunist witchhunting for convenience’s sake. But both parties tangoed; there was, indeed, both a Republican and Democratic McCarthyism at work. In fact, some historians believe that the Truman administration was more culpable in launching “McCarthyism” than McCarthy. (I don’t happen to subscribe to that argument, but I concede a partial validity.)
Although it’s true that McCarthy, especially, used anticommunism as a partisan weapon against domestic liberalism (read him and you’ll see Tail-Gunner Joe gunning for Democrats more than homegrown commies, whom he knew were as scarce as Alabama Buddhists), anticommunism’s political appeal and hysterical grip were too strong a force for most liberal politicians to publicly reject or denounce. To their discredit, they either played along or remained silent, hoping the madness would simply die a quick and quiet death. Consequently the madness lasted much longer than most political life-expectancies, and liberal complicity gave oxygen to needless suffering.
We face a similar and as great a danger today. Too many liberal pols are playing along, hoping for a better day, a more enlightened electorate, a more opportune time to strike.
And as in the 1950s, the reasonable person of today must ask -- If not now, when? Because here’s a little more eye-opening history that connects the then and now: The lunacy of today’s right still swings from the politico-genealogical tree of Republican McCarthyism and its eponymous practitioner.
McCarthy’s anti-liberal goonism reemerged in the 1960s through brash Goldwaterism -- Barry himself being a classic cold warrior who admired Joe and who added McCarthy’s “morality politics” to his presidential campaign portfolio. When Goldwater was crushed in ’64, liberals assumed that right-wing politics, if not the Republican Party, was as dead as the cirrhosis-eaten Senator McCarthy.
The Old Left relaxed and basked in its permanent victory and celebrated its own anticommunist credentials in the form of Vietnam, while the New Right picked up the strains of take-no-prisoners McCarthyism-Goldwaterism in the 1970s. New Righters carried on the crusade against godless liberals, who in turn ignored the New Right by and large and assumed it would go away soon enough.
It didn’t. Because then came Reaganism, kindly fed and funded by the New Right. He too was a passing fad, thought old and new liberals, who could afford to play along while the public figured out the scam of Reaganomics. Meanwhile the right wing demagogued its case and boom -- those quirky, temporary Reagan Democrats transmogrified into solid Republicans who were soon voting in Gingrichism.
So what did liberals do when George W. Bush then stole office? What did they do with the Bushism they were handed, which came from Gingrichism, which descended from Reaganism, which was birthed by New Rightism, which dropped from the clouds of Goldwaterism, which sprouted from McCarthyism?
They played along. They gave Bush his tax cuts. They gave him his illegal war. And they gave him the post-9/11 free rein that Karl Rove demanded of them -- for post-9/11 hysteria was psychological blood kin to anticommunist hysteria.
Besides, the only liberals winning elections were the triangulating appeasers. Right? And while liberals cowered in exiled self-denial, the right continued striking through think-tank “studies,” grassroots organizing, direct-mail financing, carefully developed media outlets and rock-solid, people-metered demagoguery.
Naturally, what and who did the public hear throughout all this? Well, they heard the message of the ones who were screaming a message.
The political accommodations that degraded to postwar McCarthyism have survived in odd ways and brought us to the crossroads we stand at today. Democrats can either feed more accommodation or they can fight the right’s growing ideological hegemony and jackbooted tactics that have sponsored a criminal war abroad and homebred autocratic overtones, which always, always grow uglier.
Senate Democrats seem poised, finally, to fight. But salvation also starts around the office water cooler.
So don’t be shy. Tell a wayward friend it’s time to shut down McCarthyism for good.