Two Cheers for "McCarthyism"? Part I

TomF

I never know whether to put the question mark outside the quotation marks or inside them (see this thread's title) so I just followed the way of the man who wrote the column below.

This is probably the last column I'll post for a while, I don't want to over-do it and take up too much space in these forums.

"McCarthyism" is a term like "Fascism" in that both are pitched freely about by the zany lefties, and in defense of all my McCarthy neighbours (there are three families in my street alone!) I thought this column should get put on the boards to at least get insinuated into the Collective's memory. It reminds us that there really were people running around in the late 1940s and the 1950s who wanted to overthrow the West and substitute the likeable Joe Stalin as everyone's director of activities.

February 26, 2003 2:20 p.m.
Two Cheers for “McCarthyism”?
Taking it back — a little.

by Jonah Goldberg
Editor-at-Large, National Review On Line


One of the most difficult things for a conservative to write about is McCarthyism. Oh, I don't mean "difficult" in the Oprah Book Club sense of difficult. It's not painful, or heart-wrenching, or cathartic. I mean it is technically challenging to write about it with clarity and precision. The problem is simple: McCarthyism has come to mean anything liberals or leftists consider to be unfair, unjust, un-nice. It's simply another example of the general phenomenon described by George Orwell when he wrote in "Politics and the English Language" that "The word Fascism has now no meaning except in so far as it signifies 'something not desirable.'" (See "Orwell's Orphans.")

What makes McCarthyism so hard to discuss is that McCarthy behaved like a jerk, but he was also right. Every movement has its jerks, the Left included — but liberals are unwilling to elevate these people to villain status or to make their tactics into a full-blown "ism." Jesse Jackson or Al Sharpton are perfectly willing to accuse any Tom, Dick, or Harry of racism without regard to the damage this might do their careers. But we don't talk about "Jacksonism" or "Sharptonism," even though being labeled a racist is the modern equivalent of being labeled a Communist. Indeed, being a prick has become something of a badge of honor on the Left. Alan Dershowitz is brilliant and eloquent. He is also one of the most obnoxious people in public life. Michael Moore is by all accounts so ugsome, so selfish, so noisome (yes, noisome), and so unlikable that if he'd been a conservative, the New York Times would have stepped on him and wiped its shoe on the curb. Feminists, gay activists, and other champions of social change even wear their nastiness on their sleeves. Just look at the bitch cult among feminists. There are any number of books dedicated to the glories of being a "bitch": Bitch: In Praise of Difficult Women, Getting in Touch With Your Inner Bitch, and so on. Elizabeth Wurtzel, a feminist priestess of bitchdom, has explained that "bitch" is a sexist label for difficult, strong women. So, she argues that women should reclaim the word "bitch" in the same way as homosexuals reclaimed "queer."

Well, I would dearly love to reclaim the word McCarthyism, if only a little bit. Which gets back to the challenge of writing on the topic.

Senator Joe McCarthy was a lout, generally speaking. But he was on the right side of history and, in a broad sense, of morality as well. If, in some sort of parallel-universe exercise, the same number of (now proven) Soviet-Communist spies, collaborators, sympathizers, and the like were somehow switched to Nazis, and McCarthy went after them with the same vehemence as he went after Reds, Joe McCarthy might well have universities and foundations named after him today. Just imagine if a ring of Nazi party members were found to be working in Hollywood, never mind the State Department, taking money from Berlin to advance the Nazi cause. Does anyone really think "McCarthyism" would still be denounced as an unmitigated evil, often put at the front of the parade of horribles alongside Hitlerism and Stalinism?

Now, I'm sure many people are rolling their eyes at this point. "It's not the same thing!" say those who believe that the lost jobs of a few Hollywood writers and the loyalty oaths reluctantly offered by some unjustly accused union officials are the American equivalent of concentration camps. Maybe, maybe not. The argument over which was worse, Communism or Nazism, will never be settled. Nor should we expect it to be. But even if you firmly believe that Nazism was more evil than Communism, as even Robert Conquest does, you must concede that Communism was evil enough. If the sight of an American Communist screenwriter being forced to take the Fifth Amendment before Congress and have his "career ruined" still fills you with blinding rage, it's indeed curious why the forced slaughter of millions by Stalin seems like a trivial event to you. After all, there were plenty of men and women invoking their "rights" as their heels left lines in the dirt on the way to the gulag. Needless to say, their careers were ruined too. And if the American Communists had had their way, much the same thing would have happened here as well. But, yeah, Roy Cohn's the devil.

Regardless, wherever you come down on McCarthyism, Communism, and the rest is a matter of opinion. What is a matter of fact — unmitigated, irrefutable, undeniable fact — is that there were hundreds of Communists working for Moscow, directly or indirectly, in the United States during the Roosevelt and Truman administrations. The Rosenbergs were guilty and got what they deserved. Alger Hiss too. Victor Perlo, Judith Coplon, Morton Sobell, William Perl, Alfred Sarant, Joel Barr, and Harry Gold were all either pawns or lackeys of a foreign and evil foe. We know the Hollywood Ten were all Communists, but what else they were we can't know for sure, because they believed taking the Fifth was more important than protecting the country (and if you think it's unfair to cavalierly call people who devotedly followed the Moscow line for all their adult lives "Communists," I sure hope you don't ever call, say, President Bush a "fascist" on the basis of no evidence at all). The American Communist Party (CP-USA) was in fact a Soviet franchise.

In other words, you are free to describe McCarthyism as a witchhunt if and only if you are willing to concede that actual witches existed in our midst. The evidence — from declassified Venona transcripts, Soviet archives, memoirs, etc. — is still mounting, but what we have so far is plenty in itself. In 1996, Nicholas Von Hoffman wrote an essay for the Washington Post that caused no small amount of hysteria on the American Left, which has been milking its myths and denial for decades. McCarthyism was the product of the "paranoid style" in American politics. There were no witches — only zealots and brown-shirted bullies. The playwright Lillian Hellman declared: "The McCarthy group — a loose term for all the boys, lobbyists, congressmen, State Department bureaucrats, CIA operators — chose the anti-Red scare with perhaps more cynicism than Hitler picked anti-Semitism."