The news tells us that Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), and one oddly named Sen. John Kennedy (R-La), have falsely claimed that a Soviet-born Biden nominee, Saule Omarova, whose family was nearly wiped out by Josef Stalin, was a "Communist."
On the whole, the American public was never fond of V. I. Lenin's and later J. V. Stalin's application of the obscure and hyper-intellectual phrase "dictatorship of the proletariat" — which Karl Marx had never intended to mean a state with a secret police and concentration camps for political prisoners.
However, it took one Joseph Raymond McCarthy, a Republican senator from Wisconsin between 1947 and his death in 1957, to seize upon a groundswell of fear generated by the surprisingly early acquisition of the atomic bomb by the Soviet Union and whip it up into a second Red Scare, the first having occurred right after the original Russian revolution.
In a speech in February 1950, McCarthy presented a list of alleged members of the Communist Party USA working in the State Department, which attracted substantial press attention, and the term "McCarthyism" was published for the first time in late March of that year in The Christian Science Monitor, along with a political cartoon by Herblock in The Washington Post.
Now, some Republicans are trying again. Will they succeed?
The primary targets of McCarthyist persecution in the 1950s were government employees, prominent figures in the entertainment industry, academics, left-wing politicians, and labor union activists. McCarthy accused them. often without conclusive evidence, and exaggerated the person's real or supposed leftist associations and beliefs.
Incredibly, the McCarthyist accusation fell on people as diverse as Lucille Ball, Aaron Copland, Albert Einstein, and Linus Pauling.
The dramatic demise of McCarthyism came in April 1954, during the Army-McCarthy hearings, which were televised live. In one exchange, McCarthy reminded the attorney for the Army, Joseph Welch, that he had an employee in his law firm who had belonged to an organization that had been accused of Communist sympathies.
"Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?" Welch said in his famous rebuke of the senator.
The Supreme Court subsequently ruled, repeatedly and consistently, against actions such as firing or disciplining employees who invoke the Fifth Amendment when asked about Communist sympathies or even the State Department denying passports based on an applicant's Communist beliefs or associations. However, loyalty oaths are still required by the California Constitution for all officials and employees of the government of California (a problem for Quakers and Jehovah's Witnesses, whose beliefs preclude pledging absolute loyalty to the state).
The oppression of liberals and leftists during the McCarthy is also similar to 2000s-era actions against suspected terrorists, most of them Muslims. In fact, conservative writer and political bomb-thrower Ann Coulter has drawn parallels, arguing that the liberals hindered the anti-communist cause and todayś critics hinder the "War on Terrorism."
At some point, as the public realizes that 9/11 inspired actions that were mainly designed to enrich military contractors, the new McCarthyism will also wane.
Until the next time.
This is the latest in a series of entries on the development of ideas that made the United States and the economic, social, and political issues Americans debate, posted under the label WeHoldTheseTruths.
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