The Lessons of McCarthyism
Arthur Herman, author of a book on Senator Joseph McCarthy, has an interesting column in today's New York Post that contrasts the Republican and Democratic responses to McCarthy's downfall, in the context of the Alito confirmation hearings:
McCarthy's fall sank the anti-Communist crusade he had championed, and crippled the Republican Party's right wing, which had made anti-Communism its lodestone, for a generation. Those dramatic minutes on TV began a political landslide that buried McCarthy's friend Barry Goldwater in the 1964 presidential election 10 years later.Republicans, and the conservative movement, learned a powerful lesson. They would now pay a high price for their rhetorical excess or hysteria, which the media would instantly denounce as "McCarthyism." ***
The right began policing its own. Conservatives who didn't or couldn't make the adjustment were relegated to the swamps of the John Birch Society — or later, like white supremacist David Duke or evangelist Pat Robertson, instantly denounced. The new attitude was embodied in a new magazine that appeared soon after McCarthy's fall, William F. Buckley's National Review, which taught conservatives that they could gain more through reasoned debate than through conspiracy theories, name-calling, and sleazy innuendo.
Conservatives learned their lesson: The Reagan Revolution would be the result.
But liberals have not learned this lesson. McCarthy's defeat seemed to vindicate their own excesses. Liberals began to label conservatives as closet fascists, embodiments of a primitive and pathological "paranoid style" of politics, while the media applauded.
Over the next decades, while conservatives were reining in the rhetoric, liberals were settling into the habit of attacking every Republican as a crypto-Nazi, a racist, a sexist and a religious bigot — and those who supported them as an ignorant redneck lynch mob.
So instead of a Red Scare, America endured 30 years of a Conservative Scare. The volume and fury of denunciation reached new heights with each battle over GOP Supreme Court nominees, from Clement Haynesworth through Robert Bork and Clarence Thomas — to Sam Alito.
Democrats came to see themselves as entitled to smear every conservative as a racist and every conservative organization as a looming threat to civil liberties, while the media accepted that rhetorical excess as standard operating procedure.
And — like McCarthy — as the Democrats' political fortunes began to slip, they assumed that the way to reverse course was to ramp up the rhetoric, "to get their message out," instead of turning it down.
All true, I think. But isn't there a key difference between the right's excesses of the 1950s and the left's excesses over the past several decades? Anti-Communism was a noble and vital cause. Conservatives were able to shake off the damage done by demagogues like McCarthy, and ultimately succeeded in winning the Cold War. But what, exactly, is the noble cause that underlies the Democrats' rhetorical excess today? Perpetuation of abortion? Higher taxes? I wonder whether one reason why the Democrats have a hard time putting their fear-mongering behind them is that, when you strip away the hysteria, there isn't much left.
PAUL adds: Another point, I think, is that the Democrats are harder pressed to internalize the lesson the Republicans learned from McCarthy because the MSM has provided them with cover. With the MSM serving as an amen chorus, the Dems can pretend that their ugly tactics do indeed serve noble causes. Even in the Alito hearings, Ted Kennedy hid behind his alleged repulsion against sexism, unequal opportunity, homophobia, etc.
But the emergence of new media makes it increasingly difficult for the MSM successfully to cover for the likes of Ted Kennedy, and perhaps less inclined to want to do so.
