Something I’ve been trying to trace back is the failure of the Democratic Party, in the late 1940s, to rebut the charge of inherent “fellow-traveling in Communism” (or, what is now called ‘communism’ by conservatives, which is akin to the catch-all that ‘CRT’ has become to them--a container into which they’ve stuffed all manner of irrelevant but inflammatory associations). I understand this goes back to Alger Hiss and related cases. But why was the Party unable to push back effectively against McCarthy and his incessant haranguing? What made Democrats susceptible for so long to such charges, and what accounts for their resultant, continued disavowal of liberalism in the years since?
What made “liberal” an effective slur? And please don’t just say, “Rush Limbaugh.” The man may have popularized the use of the term as such, but why did liberals slink back from their own self-identification? Did those in the party not realize that might lead to some sort of minor schism in the party itself? And did no one understand that abandoning that stance would enable the political center to continue to be malleable, with no bulwark of liberalism standing sentinel?
We need to address this confidence gap, this identity crisis, now, because what we face is being referred to as “electoral McCarthyism”, according to the Guardian:
Ned Foley, a constitutional law professor at Ohio State University, said the current moment is “unique in American history”. He called it “electoral McCarthyism”.
Foley sees parallels between Trump and the anticommunist panic or “red scare” whipped up by senator from Wisconsin Joe McCarthy in the 1950s. “What’s unique about Trump and about what he’s trying to do in 2024 is that he’s applying McCarthy-like tactics to voting, and that’s never happened before.”
Back mid-century, in the aftermath of WWII and in the wake of Brown v. Board of Education, the majority of America generally was subdued in terms of racial turbulence. There was, in retrospect, a surprising lack of tension following the SCOTUS decision. The world was still coming to terms with the ramifications of the concentration camps in Nazi Germany and so the U.S. populace had begun to turn away from ideas associated with race prejudice and superiority. Eugenics soon disappeared from the public intellectual square and blatant antisemitism in mainstream culture became more taboo by the 1960s; all together, this amounted to an era where overt race prejudice was at best gauche. At worst, it could lead to ostracism. Richard Hofstadter, in “The Pseudo-Conservative Revolt” (included in The Radical Right, edited in 1967 by Daniel Bell), said:
[T]he typical prejudiced person and the typical pseudo-conservative are usually the same person, that the mechanisms at work in both complexes are quite the same, and that it is merely the expediencies and the strategy of the situation today that cause groups that once stressed racial discrimination to find other scapegoats.
In the same vein, and in the same volume, Seymour Martin Lipset had this to say in his “Three Decades of the Radical Right”, and I quote him at length because I believe what he has to say is central to this point.
As I noted in my original essay [“The Sources of the ‘Radical Right’” (1955)], McCarthy’s relationship with Jews was extremely friendly. In his original essay for this collection, Peter Viereck noted that at one McCarthy mass meeting, “a rabbi accused the opposition to Roy Cohn of anti-Semitic intolerance. Next Cohn’s was called ‘the American Dreyfus Case’ by a representative of a student McCarthyite organization, Students for America.” Viereck went on to suggest a new phenomenon of “transtolerance,” a concept that I think should receive more attention than it has:
Transtolerance is ready to give all minorities their glorious democratic freedom provided they accept McCarthyism or some other mob conformism of Right or Left. . . . “Right” and “Left” are mere fluctuating pretexts, mere fluid surfaces for the deeper anti-individualism (anti-aristocracy) of the mass man. . . .
Transtolerance is also a sublimated Jim Crow: against “wrong” thinkers, not “wrong” races. . . . It is the Irishman’s version of Mick-baiting and a strictly kosher anti-Semitism. It very sincerely champions against anti-Semites “that American Dreyfus, Roy Cohn”; simultaneously it glows with the same mob emotions that in all previous or comparable movements have been anti-Semitic.
If I understand Mr. Viereck correctly, he is saying that the object of intolerance in America has never been as important as the style, the emotion, the antagonism and envy toward some specified other who is seen as wealthier, more powerful, or particularly, as a corrupter of basic values. The Jew, like the Wall Street banker, has been a symbol on which the intolerant could hang their need to hate what is different, or what is powerful, more wealthy, or better educated. Basically there is some undefined segment of the population that responds to the need to hate, not to the specific target. (pp. 442-43, emphasis added)
Instead of overt race prejudice or antisemitism, Lipset and others in TRR postulate that conservatives of the era turned instead to the catchword of “communism” to bash political rivals after the Cold War espionage trials of the late ‘40s enveloped the psyche of the nation. It was a trade-word, a proxy slur, that took the symbolic place in politics that race prejudice would normally have taken in (other) social settings.
Democrats have run from that epithet and its offspring, “liberal”, ever since.
But now that sublimation of race prejudice has been discarded in the main arena of ideas. So now, the Democratic Party is facing a pincer attack, both in the cipher-slur attack of “communism” on the overt political plane but also now abject racism in the general marketplace of ideas (see Tucker Carlson and that ilk promulgating the Great Replacement Theory and other racially ideological content in primetime airspace). It is by this pincer attack that fascism is taking hold in this country.
Some scholarly work has demonstrated that the perception of threat increases the tendency to adopt conservative attitudes in a need to find closure and obviate anxiety. This is a streak among authoritarian types, which skew conservative. Social dominant types, also who skew conservative, value traditionalism (related to fundamentalism), tend to believe in a dangerous world, and also pursue cognitive closure. (John Duckitt and Boris Bizumic [2013] speak about these values in “Multidimensionality of Right-Wing Authoritarian Attitudes: Authoritarianism - Conservatism - Traditionalism”. See also Hulda Thórisdóttir and John T. Jost [2011], “Motivated Closed-Mindedness Mediates the Effect of Threat on Political Conservatism”.)
Moreover, it has been shown also that covert and overt racial prejudice bind these two strains of threat response (that is, the need for closure and the obviation of anxiety). Without a thread of racism to hold these together, the strength of fascist morale flags. It loses momentum as its fuel is cut. Stefano Passini (2017) in “Different Ways of Being Authoritarian: The Distinct Effects of Authoritarian Dimensions on Values and Prejudice” says,
[E]ven if authoritarian submission is positively correlated to prejudicial attitudes, this relationship is driven by authoritarian aggression. [...] [I]t is interesting to note that this dimension of [aggressive] authoritarianism has many analogies with that of the social dominant orientation, given that it identifies more a propensity to lead and control than to be just a passive follower of the authority. . . . Authoritarian aggression is also the only predictor of security. That is, even if all three dimensions are correlated with these values, aggression is the dimension driving this relationship. . . . In this sense, authoritarian aggression is the strongest predictor of both blatant and subtle prejudicial attitudes. These results are in line with those studies that have shown that those items related to authoritarian aggression are the ones mainly linked to hostility and intolerance (e.g., Funke 2005).
Authoritarian aggression is also the only dimension that predicts political affiliation, by which the more one is authoritarian, the more one is affiliated to the right-wing.
So we need to fight this head-on, and it is my best guess, my deep hunch and strong suspicion that we need to confront this dragon of reactivated racism in order to slay the heart of this beast. The attack on CRT was launched this spring purposely. The GOP is baiting us to run from the very thing that we need to defeat. We must find our footing. If we don’t turn around and stand our ground in this fight, the Republic may be lost.