The Modern Joe McCarthy Mindset
The Red Scare wasn't about some narrow technical issue about whether the government was wrong about Communism. It was about using power to ruin people's lives.
I feel a bit of trepidation to even write this post. In a sense, I am going to be guilty of something I decry- catastrophizing the present by comparing it to some horrible villain of the past. Everyone does this, and it isn’t good. Hitler is thrown around all the time, and everyone compares their least favorite people in politics to him, for instance. Most of our problems and political actors present different issues than the great villains of the past.
And yet, we strangely have started to under-learn the lessons of the McCarthy era, and as a result, while we shouldn’t expect a new Red Scare any time soon, there’s a lot of people who go around thinking in exactly the frames that Sen. McCarthy exploited so well in the 1940’s and 1950’s.
Here’s a capsule history of the McCarthy era. The Bolshevik Revolution in Russia caused a lot of concerns all over the world, as governments and elites feared that their own societies could be next. As a result there were crackdowns not only on Communist Parties but on all sorts of left-wing organizations as well as trade unions and syndicates between World War I and World War II. However, in World War II, things changed, as the Nazis invaded the Soviet Union and the Soviets joined Allies and proved key in defeating the Germans. This created a lot of good feeling between the United States and the Soviet Union, as well as a lot of now-embarrassing pro-Soviet propaganda produced or supported by the US government.
After the war was over, it became clear that the Soviets had broad territorial goals. Most famously, they refused to allow Eastern Europe to reconstitute itself (and even hoped to seize Berlin), instead installing a bunch of client states in places like East Germany, Romania, Hungary, Poland, and Czechoslovakia. To be clear, two things were true- the Communists were a real threat, because they not only had territorial ambitions but an ideology that was actually attractive to many oppressed populations; however, the Communists were also a problem for ambitious imperialists in the United States government, who dreamed of a “Pax Americana” of United States military dominance of the world in the post-war era. So there were enormous forces brought to bear on stopping the Soviets.
This was the world in which Joe McCarthy came to prominence. America was itching for anti-Communism, and McCarthy delivered the most strident version of it possible. And he became a symbol for an era that extended far beyond his own person- the House Un-American Activities Committee investigated alleged Communists throughout American society, the Smith Act was utilized to prosecute Communists, and, most famously, politicians sought to remove Communists from the entertainment industry, which gave rise to the Hollywood Ten’s refusals to testify in Congress, and the Blacklist.
The basic lesson of McCarthy’s era is that even though politicians had limited power (the Communist Party USA was never an extremely powerful organization, but it did manage to survive all the prosecutions), if private organizations’ and vocal citizens’ power was brought to bear, enormous damage could be done. This is actually the same lesson as Jim Crow- the laws mandating segregation were bad enough, but what really made the system function was that anyone trying to run an integrated business would be subjected to private violence, and the perpetrators would be acquitted by white juries or not even prosecuted by white prosecutors.
And we’ve forgotten it.
How many times have you heard the argument that anything that a private party does isn’t censorship? That it isn’t censorship when someone loses their job? That it’s just the market deciding it doesn’t want someone’s views anymore. Those statements are truisms (although First Amendment law isn’t quite that simple). They are also the McCarthy era mindset.
The reason, after all, that Hollywood caved in rather than fighting the persecution of its screenwriters and talent is quite simple- tickets needed to be sold to the general public, and if the public had perceived that an actor, director, or writer was a Communist, that would be box office poison. It wasn’t state power. No government at any time required Hollywood to blacklist anyone, and in actuality, the courts even in the 1950’s and 1960’s were quite receptive to First Amendment arguments from the entertainment industry (Hollywood, for instance, was winning all of its obscenity cases). Hollywood could have fought. It didn’t.
And the reason it didn’t is because when you have loud voices out there who are willing to call you a Communist merely because you employ someone who is labeled one, and even if the employee isn’t even really a Communist but just disagrees with the loud people, well, innocent people are going to become unemployable. That’s the McCarthy mindset.
And that’s the mindset of too many loud people online today. Back in the 1950’s attending a party with friends, voting for a left wing candidate, supporting a strike, or buying a book could be sufficient “proof” that you were a Communist, and then you would need to lose your job lest the mobs come after you employer. Nowadays, online mobs scour for evidence of politically incorrect thought, even if it is in the form of some offhand comments made under a different set of rules 10 years ago.
And there’s another McCarthy-type mindset around today, and that concerns foreign policy and accusations of treason. “Treason” has always been a poisonous allegation- the framers of the Constitution were aware of this, which is why it is the only crime defined in the Constitution. And it is defined narrowly (levying war against the US or adhering to a declared enemy), and has to be proven by two witnesses. Nonetheless, the main tool in the McCarthy foreign policy toolkit was accusing everyone who favored a less confrontational policy with the Soviet Union of being a traitor. Good faith disagreement about American power, critiques of American imperialism, or opposition to American adventurism were all treasonous.
Well, nowadays, spurred, I believe, by the Russian attacks on Hillary Clinton’s 2016 election campaign, the same thing is happening over again. Vladimir Putin is no friend of the United States, but his basic foreign policy ambition is one that we take for granted in the United States- that there’s not going to be a hostile military alliance next door to his country. Bear in mind, we murdered tens of thousands of Cubans with 50 years of sanctions because Cuba had the audacity to ally itself with the Soviet Union. And we fought numerous proxy wars in Central America for the same reasons. We don’t accept hostile military alliances near our borders.
But Russia’s hostility to the exact same thing is coded as illegitimate, because a lot of Americans have default assumptions that we will be the sole superpower and that everything NATO does is good and could never be seen as a threat by anyone other than some dictator with bad intent. The result is, we are seeing the McCarthy mindset take hold. I first noted it when Hillary Clinton- who surely should know better- accused her critic Tulsi Gabbard of being a Russian agent. Since then, accusations that politicians and commentators are in bed with Russia have become a constant feature of foreign policy discourse, deployed for much the same reasons that McCarthy deployed such tactics- they work. And conservatives have started doing the same thing with politicians who are dovish on China.
The fact of the matter is, American foreign policy debates are just that- debates about American policy. It wasn’t “supporting the Soviets” during the Cold War to try and stop the insanity of bad US military policies, and it isn’t “supporting the Russians” now to argue that NATO needs to avoid confrontational tactics in Russia’s backyard. These are policy debates, and the point of the McCarthy mindset is to win the debate by derailing it, turning everything into a question of your opponents’ supposedly extremist ideology.
We should all try to avoid the McCarthy mindset.