Mccarthyism Quotes

No one man can terrorize a whole nation unless we are all his accomplices.

There are significant analogues between the American fear of Communism during the McCarthy era and the American fear of Islam at the beginning of the twenty-first century.

In the blood-heat of pursuing the enemy, many people are forgetting what we are fighting for. We are fighting for our hard-won liberty and freedom; for our Constitution and the due processes of our laws; and for the right to differ in ideas, religion and politics. I am convinced that in your zeal to fight against our enemies, you, too, have forgotten what you are fighting for.

Joseph McCarthy, the Junior Republican Senator from Wisconsin, ruled America like devil king for four years. His purges were an American mirror image of Stalin's purges, an unnoticed similarity.

Most of them don't know what communism is, could not pick it out of a lineup. They only know what anticommunism is. The two are practically unrelated.

America has entered one of its periods of historical madness, but this is the worst I can remember: worse than McCarthyism, worse than the Bay of Pigs and in the long term potentially more disastrous than the Vietnam war. —John Le Carré

[we are] going to continue to fight communism. Now I am going to tell you how we are not going to fight communism. We are not going to transform our fine FBI into a Gestapo secret police. That is what some people would like to do. We are not going to try to control what our people read and say and think. We are not going to turn the United States into a right-wing totalitarian country in order to deal with a left-wing totalitarian threat.

I believe profoundly that in the struggle against Communists and their organizations [...] we cannot and should not resort to the methods and forms employed by the Communists.

There are today many Communists in America. They are everywhere -- in factories, offices, butcher stores, on street corners, in private businesses. And each carries in himself the germ of death for society.

By then Einstein had finally discovered what was fundamental about America: it can be swept by waves of what may seem, to outsiders, to be dangerous political passions but are, instead, passing sentiments that are absorbed by its democracy and righted by its constitutional gyroscope. McCarthyism had died down, and Eisenhower had proved a calming influence. “God’s own country becomes stranger and stranger,” Einstein wrote Hans Albert that Christmas, “but somehow they manage to return to normality. Everything—even lunacy—is mass produced here. But everything goes out of fashion very quickly.”9 Almost

The serious Sylvia was agonizing over the execution of the Rosenbergs and McCarthyism; others were delighting to dream over trousseau lingerie at Vanity Fair's showroom.

Perhaps some guest editors would keep Ethel and Julius Rosenberg in their peripheral vision. But Sylvia recognized their execution as the most extreme and gruesome example of McCarthy's red-baiting paranoia.

What was new to our ears these days, and thrilling to hear, was the steadiness and justice of those who spoke, the abscence of panic and exaggeration the quiet insistence on legal processes as opposed to trial by suspicion. McCarthyism so repelled the English that they take special care not to be infected by it.

The last time that I consciously wrote anything to 'save the honor of the Left', as I rather pompously put it, was my little book on the crookedness and cowardice and corruption (to put it no higher) of Clinton. I used leftist categories to measure him, in other words, and to show how idiotic was the belief that he was a liberal's champion. Again, more leftists than you might think were on my side or in my corner, and the book was published by Verso, which is the publishing arm of the New Left Review. However, if a near-majority of leftists and liberals choose to think that Clinton was the target of a witch-hunt and the victim of 'sexual McCarthyism', an Arkansan Alger Hiss in other words, you become weary of debating on their terms and leave them to make the best of it.

Have you no sense of decency, sir?

During the early 1950s the hangman operating with the cold war troops was McCarthyism. For years it decimated social organizations, throttled free expression, and intimidated into bleak silence not only liberals and radicals but men in high and protected places.

He was an American character, one typical of men of his generation, men who embraced the notion of freedom and individualism and the open road without always knowing its price, and whose enthusiasms could as easily lead to the cowardice of McCarthyism as to the heroics of World War II. Men who were both dangerous and promising precisely because of their fundamental innocence; men prone, in the end, to disappointment.

Einstein, of course, didn’t think America was Nazi Germany and he didn’t believe Oppenheimer needed to flee. But he was truly alarmed by McCarthyism. In early 1951 he wrote his friend Queen Elizabeth of Belgium that here in America, “The German calamity of years ago repeats itself: People acquiesce without resistance and align themselves with the forces of evil.

I am in a state about all of this. I comb the newspapers. I listen to the commentators. And I get into fights all over the place. If a Republican knows his place and hates McCarthy and wishes to God Eisenhower would get more aggressive about these bastards, well and good and I will admit him to the brotherhood. If he says nasty things about Truman (who is rapidly becoming the Man I Love although I have been sore enough at him in my time) or still thinks taxes are coming down and we can get out of Korea‡ and we ought to fire all the Democrats in Washington and don’t worry, McCarthy-ism will blow over or alternately Where There’s Smoke There’s Fire—well, dear, I am no lady and I argue loudly and lose my temper and it’s disgraceful.

Writing of a chance early meeting with Dylan Thomas in a London bar, Kay Boyle writes (1955, in the era of McCarthyism, 1947-1956): Perhaps because he [Dylan Thomas was so often out of place among men, we take him now as symbol. Perhaps because we who write in America are in great difficulties now, we cherish Dylan Thomas as if he were our own ego, our own wild soul freed of the flesh. An American critic, writing of the American literary scene, points out that thinking Americans, in this period of our nation's development, are deeply troubled because "the demands for national security and for individual freedom" are in conflict.

Young Goodman Brown,” The Scarlet Letter, or his 1851 bestseller, The House of the Seven Gables, but Hawthorne proved that territory still radioactive. Guilt and blame have grown up lushly on the scene, attracting writers from Walt Whitman to John Updike. Arthur Miller read the court papers under the spell of McCarthyism. He discovered, as New England itself had, that events must be absorbed before monuments can be raised. The Crucible

I was also part of a post-Vietnam generation that had learned to question its own government and saw how - from the rise of McCarthyism to support for South Africa's apartheid regime - Cold War thinking had often led America to betray its ideals. This awareness didn't stop me from believing we should contain the spread of Marxist totalitarianism. But it made me wary of the notion that good resided only on our side and bad on theirs, or that a people who'd produced Tolstoy and Tchaikovsky were inherently different from us. Instead, the evils of the Soviet system struck me as a variation on a broader human tragedy: The way abstract theories and rigid orthodoxy can curdle into repression. How readily we justify moral compromise and relinquish our freedoms. How power can corrupt and fear can compound and language can be debased. None of that was unique to Soviets or Communisists, I thought; it was true for all of us. The brave struggle of dissidents behind the Iron Curtain felt of a piece with, rather than distinct from, the larger struggle for human dignity taking place elsewhere in the world - including America.

Whenever the communists are under fire, it [the term "red-baiter"] has served to divert attention from the subject matter to futile discussion of personal motives, the critic’s private life and other deliberate tricks of befuddlement.

But that’s what happens. Once the human tragedy has been completed, it gets turned over to the journalists to banalize into entertainment. Perhaps it’s because the whole irrational frenzy burst right through our door and no newspaper’s half-baked insinuating detail passed me by that I think of the McCarthy era as inaugurating the postwar triumph of gossip as the unifying credo of the world’s oldest democratic republic. In Gossip We Trust. Gossip as gospel, the national faith. McCarthyism as the beginning not just of serious politics but of serious everything as entertainment to amuse the mass audience. McCarthyism as the first postwar flowering of the American unthinking that is now everywhere.

Anticommunist propaganda saturated our airwaves, schools, and political discourse. Despite repeated and often factitious references to the tyranny of the Red Menace, the anticommunist opinion makers never spelled out what communists actually did in the way of socioeconomic policy. This might explain why, despite decades of Red-bashing propaganda, most Americans, including many who number themselves among the political cognoscenti, still cannot offer an informed statement about the social policies of communist societies.

And so, with all due respect to the office you hold, Mr. President, the “enemy of the people” is not the press. It is you.

Of the things I had not known when I started out, I think the most important was the degree to which the legacy of the McCarthy period still lived. It had been almost seven years since Joe McCarthy had been censured when John Kennedy took office, and most people believed that his hold on Washington was over. ... among the top Democrats, against whom the issue of being soft on Communism might be used, and among the Republicans, who might well use the charge, it was still live ammunition. ... McCarthyism still lingered ... The real McCarthyism went deeper in the American grain than most people wanted to admit ... The Republicans’ long, arid period out of office [twenty years, ended by the Eisenhower administration], accentuated by Truman’s 1948 defeat of Dewey, had permitted the out-party in its desperation, to accuse the leaders of the governing party of treason. The Democrats, in the wake of the relentless sustained attacks on Truman and Acheson over their policies in Asia, came to believe that they had lost the White House when they lost China. Long after McCarthy himself was gone, the fear of being accused of being soft on Communism lingered among the Democratic leaders. The Republicans had, of course, offered no alternative policy on China (the last thing they had wanted to do was suggest sending American boys to fight for China) and indeed there was no policy to offer, for China was never ours, events there were well outside our control, and our feudal proxies had been swept away by the forces of history. But in the political darkness of the time it had been easy to blame the Democrats for the ebb and flow of history. The fear generated in those days lasted a long time, and Vietnam was to be something of an instant replay after China. The memory of the fall of China and what it did to the Democrats, was, I think, more bitter for Lyndon Johnson than it was for John Kennedy. Johnson, taking over after Kennedy was murdered and after the Kennedy patched-up advisory commitment had failed, vowed that he was not going to be the President of the United States who lost the Great Society because he lost Saigon. In the end it would take the tragedy of the Vietnam War and the election of Richard Nixon (the only political figure who could probably go to China without being Red-baited by Richard Nixon) to exorcise those demons, and to open the door to China.

Einstein, of course, didn’t think America was Nazi Germany and he didn’t believe Oppenheimer needed to flee. But he was truly alarmed by McCarthyism. In early 1951 he wrote his friend Queen Elizabeth of Belgium that here in America, “The German calamity of years ago repeats itself: People acquiesce without resistance and align themselves with the forces of evil.” He now feared that by cooperating with the government’s security board, Oppenheimer would not only humiliate himself but would lend legitimacy to the whole poisonous process.

I’m starting to feel that nowadays there’s no one more bigoted than a liberal. The right-wingers, at least they own their hatred and don’t try to dress it up in anything other than the intolerant, narrow-minded, self-serving bullshit that it is. You know where you are with the Right. But the Left? My God, disagree with them for even a moment, dare to ask a question or deviate from the company line, and they’re on you like flies on shit. They won’t stand for even an iota of disagreement, pleading for kindness while masking their own intolerance in sanctimony. It’s McCarthyism hidden beneath the umbrella of Wokeness.

Einstein walked to his office in Fuld Hall, and nodding in Oppenheimer’s direction, told his assistant, “There goes a narr [fool].” Einstein, of course, didn’t think America was Nazi Germany and he didn’t believe Oppenheimer needed to flee. But he was truly alarmed by McCarthyism. In early 1951 he wrote his friend Queen Elizabeth of Belgium that here in America, “The German calamity of years ago repeats itself: People acquiesce without resistance and align themselves with the forces of evil.” He now feared that by cooperating with the government’s security board, Oppenheimer would not only humiliate himself but would lend legitimacy to the whole poisonous process.

In an article titled "The Ex-Communists," she analyzed how these McCarthy loyalists had simply switched allegiances. Instead of demanding communism as they had earlier, they now called for unconditional loyalty and cooperation in denouncing others for the sake of freedom and democracy. They still had a cause, just a different one from before. The new cause, the right cause, she continued, had a totalitarian catch to it. By turning democracy "into a cause," something that would arrive in the future and to which the present must be devoted, the present became unfree. The idea of futurity destroyed the present moment. How could one escape this destruction of the present by fear of the future....?

American foreign policy was a mirror image of Russian foreign policy: whatever the Russians did, we did in reverse. American domestic policies were conducted under a kind of upside-down Russian veto: no man could be elected to public office unless he was on record as detesting the Russians, and no proposal could be enacted, from a peace plan at one end to a military budget at the other, unless it could be demonstrated that the Russians wouldn't like it.

What this reveals about our universities is the operation of a pathological element. One need not ban the American flag from most of our campuses. It is more useful to deceive the world by allowing that flag to fly in a place where, all things being equal, its meaning and spirit has been abolished. In the Humanities and Social Science departments, where freedom of thought is of central importance, the American flag is more hated than loved by the faculty and the graduate students. I know this from firsthand because I was a graduate student at UC Irvine from 1986-1989. Professors there promoted Marxism, engaged in active recruitment of students amenable to Marxist ideas, and damaged the careers of those who were anti-Marxist. In those days it was done very quietly, administratively. If you dared speak up for America or economic freedom, you were persecuted. Your reputation was ruined. It is preferable to avert one’s eyes from such a situation, and very unpleasant to experience it directly; that is why those singled out for persecution were never defended. They were hung out to dry, and nobody dared interfere. Who, after all, wants trouble? This is the beauty of a quiet and selective intimidation.

During the notorious McCarthy anti-Communist witch-hunt in the United States in the 1950s, popular hysteria could be whipped up with amazing ease. To illustrate the public’s dangerous suspension of common sense, William Evjue, editor of the Capital Times, a newspaper in McCarthy’s home state of Wisconsin, who had launched a campaign to expose McCarthyism, had a reporter stand on a street corner in the state capital, Madison, asking passers-by to sign a petition. It was in fact the American Declaration of Independence. Of 112 people approached to sign it, 111 thought it subversive and refused.

While there was plenty of free-floating xenophobia, anti-Semitism, and anti-intellectualism around, what would be called McCarthyism was less a product of the American people as it was the collateral damage inflicted by the return to full power of the corporate world and its right-wing political allies.

McCarthyism can be viewed, in many ways, as a means of brainwashing American citizens about the dangers from “reds” who were said to have infiltrated the U.S. government.

How did academic freedom fare during the 1950s? Schrecker speaks of a “witch-hunt” during which more than a hundred professors were dismissed or threatened with dismissal for political reasons.85 Whatever one may think of the wisdom of and the procedures used for getting rid of Communist professors, the use of the term “witch-hunt” is surely inappropriate. There is no evidence for the existence of witches, but there could be no doubt about the presence of Communists in the educational system. It is also unfair to put the major blame for these dismissals upon the “moderate and respectable professors,” for many of these professors opposed McCarthyism.

Whether we realize it or not we are indoctrinated to react predictably to specific signs, symbols, words, and images. These trig-gers have included Red and Communist during the United States’ 1950s McCarthyism; or Muslim terrorist during the currently constructed “War on Terror.” Targeted reactions can thus be achieved, making the populace open to further manipulation in this state.

As the machinations of the end-time conspiracy seemed to become more involved, some fundamentalists felt a need to monitor the enemy. Conspiracy theorists share a passion for gathering and collating data matched only by professional intelligence agencies. In 1937, the fundamentalist Church League of America, in Wheaton, Illinois, began to compile dossiers on the enemies of Christ. By the late 1960s, the group claimed to have seven million index cards on subversives, a collection they said was second only to that of the FBI. An associate of Mclntire, Major Edgar C. Bundy, assumed control of the Church League of America in 1956. Using his experience as a former Air Force intelligence officer, Bundy built up a data bank the organization had inherited from J. B. Matthews, a former investigator for Senator McCarthy.

In 1950, he was accorded the dubious honor of being the first prominent scientist to appear on the earliest of Senator Joseph McCarthy’s famous lists of crypto-communists.

In large measure, his clientele were millennials, that generation born between 1980 and 2000. Defined by the Internet, the iPhone, and a lack of economic opportunity, at least according to the human media, they were a demographic of lost moralists, committed to saving each other, preserving the rights of everyone, and championing a false utopia of mandated liberal thinking that made McCarthyism looked nuanced.

The crisis of the 1860s represented a far greater threat to the survival of the United States than did World War I, World War II, Communism in the 1950s, or terrorism today. Yet compared with the draconian enforcement of espionage and sedition laws in World War I, the internment of more than one hundred thousand Japanese Americans in the 1940s, McCarthyism in the 1950s, or the National Security State of our own time, the infringement of civil liberties from 1861 to 1865 seems mild indeed.

In McCarthy’s case, the correspondents’ reasons for their choice were given with considerable vigor. Some of them: ‘His record is reason enough to consider him the most ignorant and vicious member of the Senate.’ ‘As a Senator his disregard for personal rights and freedoms make him an extremely dangerous man.’ ‘A shrewd and dangerous exploiter of uninformed prejudice.’ ‘A demagogue who has introduced McCarthyism (the technique of the Big Lie) to split the country.’” Joe

Not all of the New Dealers, it must be said, bought into the Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan. For instance, Henry Wallace, the former vice president and secretary of agriculture, who was fired by Truman for disagreeing with the Cold War’s imperatives, referred to the Marshall Plan as the ‘Martial Plan’. He warned against creating a rift with America’s wartime ally, the Soviet Union, and remarked that the conditions attached to the Soviet Union’s invitation to be part of the Marshall Plan were intentionally so designed that Stalin would be obliged to reject them (which, of course, he did). A number of academics of the New Deal generation, among them Paul Sweezy and John Kenneth Galbraith, also rejected Truman’s cold-warrior tactics. However, they were soon to be silenced by the witch-hunt orchestrated by Senator Joseph McCarthy and his House Committee on Un-American Activities.

All right. Let him ask me, and I will be glad to answer. And I am not a dupe, or a dope, or a moe, or a schmoe, and everything I did - I was absolutely conscious of what I was doing, and I am not ashamed of everything I said in public or private...

When an individual suffers anxiety continuously over a period of time, he lays his body open to psychosomatic illness. When a group suffers continuous anxiety, with no agreed-on constructive steps to take, its members sooner or later turn against each other. Just so, when our nation is in confusion and bewilderment, we lay ourselves open to such poison as the character assassinations of McCarthyism, witch hunts, and the ubiquitous pressures to make every man suspicious of his neighbor.

Writings on McCarthyism, including Naming Names, by Victor S. Navasky, and The Age of McCarthyism: A Brief History with Documents, by Ellen Schrecker and Phillip Deery, provided a chilling glimpse into how all-pervasive fear can become; Perilous Times: Free Speech in Wartime, by Geoffrey R. Stone, cataloged dozens of historical examples with eerie resonances to our current times; and books such as Ronald C. Rosbottom’s When Paris Went Dark: The City

If a political leader finds it to his advantage to attack a free press, to humiliate it, to disparage it, he is really attacking democracy at its core, and that has no place in this country.

Almost immediately after World War II, our most important ally, the Soviet Union, became our most serious adversary-cum-enemy. For Americans in 1950, it was not delusional to worry about international Communist aggression or Soviet espionage in the United States. But that’s the problem with a conspiracist mindset. After some kernel of reality triggers exaggerated fears and a possible explanation, it grows into an imaginary labyrinth of all-powerful evil, an elaborate based-on-a-true-story fiction that passes for nonfiction, such as the fantasy that thousands of committed Communists were covertly using movies and TV shows to propagandize on behalf of Communism and the Soviet Union. Anti-Communism was realistic; McCarthyism was fantastical.

Had the cold war gone hot, there’s no question but that religious fervor would have played a role in the battle against “godless Communism.” Not “brutal” communism, not “economically suicidal” communism, not “anti-democratic” communism. Godless. In 1957, midway between McCarthyism and the Cuban Missile Crisis, the words “In God We Trust” were added to U.S. paper currency. In 1954, “under God” was added to the Pledge of Allegiance that had previously said, “one nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.”19 Note that “In God We Trust” had been added to U.S. coins by the Union during the Civil War.20 Abraham Lincoln himself said, “Both (sides) read the same Bible and pray to the same God, and each invokes His aid against the other.”21 But it was the Union that stamped its claim to God’s allegiance on the coins.22 Warring parties want strong allies, and God is one ally who can be recruited simply by declaration.

Bernstein poured his unfulfilled ambition into stupefying powerful performances of the Mahler symphonies, freighting them with the themes that he should or would have addressed in his own music if only he had the time or the energy or whatever it was that he ultimately lacked: “It is only after fifty, sixty, seventy years of world holocausts, of the simultaneous advance of democracy with our increasing inability to stop making war, of the simultaneous magnification of national pieties with the intensification of our active resistance to social equality—only after we have experienced all this through the smoking ovens of Auschwitz, the frantically bombed jungles of Vietnam, through Hungary, Suez, the Bay of Pigs, the farce-trial of Sinyavsky and Daniel, the refueling of the Nazi machine, the murder in Dallas, the arrogance of South Africa, the Hiss-Chambers travesty, the Trotskyite purges, Black Power, Red Guards, the Arab encirclement of Israel, the plague of McCarthyism, the Tweedledum armaments race—only after all this can we finally listen to Mahler's music and understand that it foretold all. And that in the foretelling it showered a rain of beauty on this world that has not been equaled since.” Bernstein's enthusiasm for Mahler was infectious, but his claims were exaggerated. In twentieth-century music, through all the darkness, guilt, misery, and oblivion, the rain of beauty never ended.

Palmer Hoyt, the editor and publisher of The Denver Post, thought McCarthyism required a new way of reporting. In a memorandum to his staff, Hoyt suggested that neutrality was not the highest virtue—truth was. Reporters should “apply any reasonable doubt they [might] have to the treatment of the story.” In other words, if a McCarthy statement was demonstrably false, the journalists should feel free to say so—in print. “It seems obvious that many charges made by reckless or impulsive public officials cannot and should not be ignored,” Hoyt wrote, “but it seems to me that news stories and headlines can be presented in such a manner that the reading public will be able to measure the real worth or value and the true meaning of the stories.

At the time, Sills said, “the main thing we experienced was the repression of any kind of deviant behavior under the guise of anti-Communism.” None of them could understand why there weren’t more people, especially artists, fighting it. “A pall of McCarthyism lay over the land,” said Bernie Sahlins, a producer at Playwrights, “and all you heard on TV were mother-in-law jokes.

The strange part of was that so many of these victims were racked by shame, clearly believing that they were somehow flawed. It was like a target of McCarthyism immediately breaking down and admitting that he was wrong, or a Holocaust victim hating herself because she was indeed a "dirty Jew." Often it seemed that in China there was no internal compass that was able to withstand these events. Group thought could be a vicious circle - your self-identity came from the group, which was respected even if it became deranged, and thus your sense of self could fall apart instantly. There wasn't a tradition of anchoring one's identity to a fixed set of values regardless of what others thought, and in certain periods this had contributed to the country's disasters.

Thus, beginning in 1955, a formidable file on Marilyn Monroe also began to accumulate in Washington [...]. They represent some of the most ludicrous waste of paper in history.

I think paranoia is an unavoidable moment in the discovery of truth for a variety of reasons. First, you could say that paranoia is the structure of 'knowledge' as a chain of signifiers: S1 --> S2 --> S3, etc. That is, just as knowledge works by perpetually adding new signifiers, so paranoia is characterised by the endless work of adding new connections. In McCarthyism, we discover that x is friends with y who has a business in z which has been the recipient of Soviet bloc investment. Or that a is a supporter of the Palestinian cause which often also gets the support of b who is friendly with c who has said antisemitic things. That's the logic of paranoia. And it's why you might find it difficult to argue with conspiracy theorists however absurd their claims are because, as soon as you knock down one part of their argument, they can invoke dozens of other supports which don't have to hang coherently together. Second, perhaps you could say that paranoia is a moment in the discovery of truth in the Cartesian/Augustinian sense: to arrive at certainty, you have to suppose that everything you perceive is the result of deception by an evil demon (of which the contemporary equivalent is the Matrix, or better yet the Truman Show). Or, at a stretch, in the sense Hegel discusses in the Phenomology: there is a moment when the object appears to have a deeper 'essence' that is not accessible in its appearance. In a manner of speaking, you feel the object is deceiving you, until you press forward and discover the the indecipherable 'essence' is actually in the form of the object's appearance. But this suggests that the "labour of the negative", as Hegel calls it, necessitates a moment of solipsistic despair, panic, the sense of being at the centre of an entirely simulated reality that is motivated by some nefarious Other's bad libido. [...] So, [in society today] paranoia might be unavoidable. But obviously it's a very, very bad place to get stuck. Politically, the logic is most often turned against the Left by its opponents, and within the Left usually appears as a disintegrative moment, when it starts operating as a circular firing-squad, and you get practices of snitch-jacketing or ill-founded 'calling out'. But more fundamentally, it's bad hermeneutics. Being stuck in paranoia means fortifying oneself against doubt, so that all evidence essentially becomes evidence for a delusional structure of certitude. It means that we lose the capacity for critical thinking, for the labour of the negative through which any lucid totalisation might be possible. The reparative moment comes when we stop making 'connections', and instead introduce the cut, the disconnect. That's when we say, "look, this argument might often be used for bad purposes, or it might be wrong in its current articulation, but there are ways to think with it to make a better argument." Or, "x might be friends with y, but that doesn't mean x approves of or was complicit in anything wicked that y has done, and actually everything we know about x makes such complicity racingly unlikely." And so on. The cut is reparative because it militates against the tendency toward social decomposition. The cut is the starting point for a critical procedure that takes all of the reasons for paranoia into account, fully acknowledges their force, but then integrates them into a strategy for repairing the social link.

Joe McCarthy possessed something like a photographic memory—his mind was like a “sponge,” or a “blotter,” his college classmates said—that enabled him to spew forth answers “lightning quick” in cram sessions and on exams. From the beginning of his career, he demonstrated a kind of instinctive political genius that owed nothing to campaign consultants or image makers. He was not interested in ideas, except in appropriating the thoughts or opinions of others if they helped him exploit an issue like Communism. His law degree and native intelligence notwithstanding, he was ill educated, had no sense of history, and was incurious and carelessly ill-informed about the great public questions—again, like Communism—that he addressed with such assurance. He did not read books, with one fascinating exception: Hitler’s Mein Kampf.

When people’s lives and careers are subject to litmus tests, and fired if they do not publicly renounce what may well be their sincere conviction, we have crossed a line. This is McCarthyism applied by civil actors. This is the definition of intolerance.”28

There have been witch-hunts throughout time. Here, in Europe, in every corner of the world. Even when most stopped believing, or admitting to a belief, in witchcraft, there were hunts. Nazism, McCarthyism, the KKK, and so on. Nothing more than fanatics, with power, pushing their own agendas and finding enough weak minds to do the dirty work.” And

Believe me, there is nothing wrong with this country that repeated strong dosages of the facts will not correct,” Hoyt told other editors at a Tucson, Arizona, meeting in November 1954. “Even McCarthyism will melt away before this treatment.

McCarthy­ism” is the logical outcome of the system of government by rabble-rousing initiated in the first years of the New Deal — only, in “McCarthyism,” the rabble-rouser is not a cultured and aristocratic gentleman, but a crude and rather primitive plebeian, not a Pericles but a Cleon. McCarthy, like Roosevelt, wants action and goes directly to the people to get it. McCarthy, like Roosevelt, is impatient with the restraints and limitations of what are called proper constitutional channels. When McCarthy wants a change in the Administration’s foreign policy, he does not, as Senator, raise it for deliberation in the Senate; he appeals to the people to swamp the White House with letters and telegrams. He rouses the “rabble” for direct action, in contempt of constitutional channels and procedures. But how far different is that from the mode of operation of the Roosevelt regime in the 1930s?

He exploited the privileges of power and prominence without regard to its responsibilities; to him politics was not about the substantive but the sensational. The country feared Communism, and McCarthy knew it, and he fed those fears with years of headlines and hearings. A master of false charges, of conspiracy-tinged rhetoric, and of calculated disrespect for conventional figures (from Truman and Eisenhower to Marshall), McCarthy could distract the public, play the press, and change the subject—all while keeping himself at center stage. Showcasing largely unfounded accusations of Communist subversion, McCarthyism was

Government surveillance is an egregious violation of personal autonomy, leaving in its wake not only legal ramifications but a trail of emotional turmoil and shattered trust. The emotional toll on individuals living under constant scrutiny is immeasurable, fostering an environment of anxiety and self-censorship. Trust, a cornerstone of democracy, crumbles when citizens become aware of being surveilled, creating a chasm between the governed and those in power. Historical examples, from McCarthyism to contemporary revelations, underscore the profound consequences of unchecked surveillance, emphasizing the urgency to recognize its unlawfulness and protect the emotional well-being and trust that are integral to the fabric of a free society.