Theories of McCarthyism – A Survey

There are signs that Senator McCarthy is slipping. One holds one’s breath, for he has stormed back into the headlines to win new triumphs before. But whether he stays or goes it is important to define the social and political roots of “McCarthyism” to see how closely the “ism” is linked to the man. By now, one would expect to find many authoritative interpretations of the political tendency he personifies. Yet such are the passions McCarthy arouses that most discussions of him amount to little more than manifestoes of denunciation or documented exposes. The number of serious political analyses of the man, his mass support and the national mood he expresses, remains surprisingly small.

The very terms in which McCarthy is castigated imply certain “theories” about him. Those who view him primarily in the perspective of the American political tradition assimilate his career to that of other specimens of demagogus Americanus. Their verdict is that he is just another unscrupulous politician feeding on the tensions of the period, but destined to be repudiated and to descend into the limbo of “lunatic fringe” politics. Others, more impressed by analogies with recent European history, picture McCarthy as the leader of a formidable reactionary, even fascist, movement, enrolling new millionaires, segments of the Army and the Catholic Church, and an embittered small-town bourgeoisie in what will, it is predicted, remain a powerful faction in American politics for some time to come. A third view sees McCarthy as a mere incident in the slow drift toward the garrison state which started before his rise and will not be checked appreciably by his fall.

The most recent book-length study, McCarthy and the Communists by James Rorty and Moshe Dector, sticks fairly closely to the man and his public record. The book is essentially a “campaign document” meant to persuade that public which approves McCarthy’s “objectives” while deprecating his “methods,” of the insincerity and opportunism of his anti-Communism. The authors’ documentation is thorough and they make a few useful distinctions between the McCarthyites and organized totalitarian movements, but their book is chiefly of interest as an expression of the embarrassment and irritation with which those intellectuals who have, as it were, enlisted for the duration of the Cold War confront McCarthy. Their main complaints are that “he has never proved the seriousness and substantiality of his anti-Communism” and that “both [his] tactics and strategy can only be destructive of the ends sought by authentic anti-Communists.”

There is something profoundly disquieting about these terms of opposition to McCarthy, particularly when one remembers that the research for the book was supported by the American Committee for Cultural Freedom....