I've been thinking much the same thing myself when I wrote this reply trying to trace the effect of the " anti-anti-communism" crusade against logic which has so taken over academia, then the media, and our culture. We have migrated a long way from a time when a senator could electrify the nation by announcing that there were Communists in the State Department to the point where we elect a president whose most profound associations throughout his biography were with Communists, felons, and terrorists. Here's the reply:
Once upon a Time in America the great divide in our society was expressed by where you stood on Joe McCarthy. Of course, that was all wrapped up with Whittaker Chambers and Alger Hiss and which one of those two you believed. Did you think the Rosenbergs were guilty? The answer that question told everyone whether you were a Democrat or a Republican.
The other American dramas I can invoke to describe the hold the Army -McCarthy hearings had on the nation are the OJ Simpson trial and the Clarence Thomas hearings. I can remember as a boy coming home from school and finding my mother transfixed before a black-and-white television over the Army McCarthy hearings. In our house we believed McCarthy, and Chambers, and we thought that the Rosenbergs were certainly guilty. But this was not the universal opinion of suburbia and certainly not the politically correct version to which I was exposed to in school which was connected to a university.
The impact of McCarthy was not limited to the era which bears his name. In subsequent years in college I learned that my parents must have been real Neanderthals to believe the way they did. Most of this was imparted to me by my professors through innuendo; we quickly absorbed the culture of the University and knew what sort of opinions were acceptable and which were not acceptable to express in learned company.
Today the term "McCarthyism" has assumed a meaning which contains its own DNA and expresses a whole left-wing point of view. We see the same thing now happening with the phrase, "Swift boating." These phrases have been turned on their head by a consensus in academia and in the media which simply ignores any other interpretation of events except the one favoring the left.
McCarthy was connected to Chambers who was connected to Nixon. If the left was irrational in its support of Alger Hiss, it was almost psychotic in its hatred of Richard Nixon. There was a chain of events that led to the impeachment of Richard Nixon for actions that had mostly been done already by previous Democrat presidents. What I find so fascinating so many years later is the question, why was the left so irrational, so emotional in its judgments about the Communists and the anti-Communists? Why was the left so purblind to Communists in high places where they could mortally wound the nation and so viscerally obsessed about the men like McCarthy, Chambers, and Nixon who exposed them?
Why, for example, was President Truman so indifferent to the evidence of Communists in the State Department? Perhaps Truman's inertia can be explained by his parochial Midwestern background, his naïveté, his partisanship, his ignorance of the lay of the land on the day he assumed office. But Roosevelt's involvement was more than indifference. It strikes me that Roosevelt was almost the model of the patrician who sees himself as larger than his own country. John Kerry, of Swift Boat fame, seems to be cast in the same mold, although without Roosevelt's political acumen.
Do men of great wealth like George Soros or Franklin Roosevelt regard the concept of national sovereignty to be merely the outmoded belief systems of the masses, akin to the belief in God which provide some comfort and meaning to their lives, but which is outmoded and not particularly useful in the grand games played for world stakes. Just a thought, but one prompted by knowledge that the financial backer of THE FRANKFURT SCHOOL was also a man of great wealth who founded the school which has done so much damage to our culture. The school was founded for the express purpose of breaking down those institutions which frustrated the victory of communism.
Roosevelt must have known that there were Communists in his government. His vice president was virtually an avowed communist. I believe he just didn't care. Either he was so arrogant that he believed he could control events even as he was being undermined by a fifth column, or, more likely, he didn't care because he didn't think it mattered when viewed from the exalted perspective of his world.
George Soros does not care what passport he holds except as it advances his interests. Patricians in general do not see the world as contained and defined by national boundaries but by markets, routes, and centers of supply and demand.
McCarthyism, like Swift Boating, has been distorted and twisted into a widely accepted definition by political correctness. Political correctness is the explicitly contrived belief system created by THE FRANKFURT SCHOOL. The Frankfurt school was founded by a character who could change skins with George Soros and each could live comfortably in the other's century. They view the rest of us as impediments or useful idiots.
They could be right. The useful idiots enforce the rules of political correctness and obligingly define against the weight of history the meaning of phrases like, " McCarthyism" or, "Swift Boating." I for one choose to count myself among the impediment class.
