Miscellany

Do you know who the ancestors of Joe McCarthy are?

Do you know who the ancestors of Joe McCarthy are? Pericles, Marc Antony and Franklin Roosevelt. This startling genealogy of the man from Wisconsin we owe to Will Herberg in the The New Leader, January 18, 1954.

In case the connection is not readily apparent, be advised that all these men were engaged in “government by rabble-rousing,” that they committed the crime of directly appealing to masses — or “mobs” — in the agora, the forum and before the radio. (Why people sitting mutely and singly before the radio or TV screen should become a “mob” Herberg neglects to explain.) Pericles, Antony and FDR stand accused of the crime of believing that masses of people may be allowed a direct voice in the determination of their destiny.

To Herberg democracy is tolerable only if administered in homeopathic doses, and even then at specified intervals. Democracy “can be achieved only if the affairs of government are administered in established ways through established channels by established agencies under constitutional safeguards and restrictions.” Beyond established agencies there lies rabble-rousing madness.

Now the key to democracy as a way of life has commonly been seen as the participation of mature human beings in the formation of the policies that regulate the community; the foundation of democracy is a certain “faith” in the capacities and potentialities of human beings. Mr. Herberg’s “democracy through channels” so redefines the old concept as to castrate it.

In itself this effort to make McCarthy into Pericles’ heir would seem ludicrous; what makes it interesting is that it expresses, though in particularly crude form, a trend of thought that is far from ludicrous in its impact.

Contempt for the masses of mankind, in America at least, was forced until recently to subsist in the underworld of political rhetoric. It is now being elevated to heights of eminence as the last word in political sophistication. The hubris of the intellectual, member of a self-styled elite, snobbishly sneering at the “mob,” manifests itself openly just when, in reality, he is often on the point of being degraded into a mere tool of most robustly unintellectual men of power. Just when it would appear that escape from the “Garrison State” is possible only through an alliance between intellect and mass power, many intellectuals criticize the rulers for insufficiently domesticating the masses.

As always, it is the hysterical voice of the neophyte that most grates on one’s ears. We have come to take for granted the authoritarian musings of the Ortegas and the Eliots—they at least speak in measured accents. But one feels like blushing when one sees such things prominently displayed in that former socialist organ The New Leader, and displayed under cuts of Antony, Roosevelt and McCar...