The second coming of Joe McCarthy
Patrick Lawrence for l'AntiDiplomatico
Janurary 2024
Americans have long been given to periods of delusion made of a strange, bitter-to-the-taste mix of paranoia, insecurity, and a givenness to primitive purification rituals. They are also given to thinking about this feature of the American character as if it were a peculiarity of the past—as if, by dint of their excellently rational thought, they stand atop some high promontory from which they can look back on the American past with some combination of contempt, pity, derision, or a combination of all three.
Of all the self-deceptions in which Americans indulge, this seems to me among the most preposterous. We are, to put this point another way, who we have always been. Give me a moment to explain what I will name the First Law of American Illusion.
A very fine scholar I know published a book a dozen years ago called After Evil: A Politics of Human Rights. In it, Robert Meister explains what we in the present think as we think about the oddities and wrongs we find in our history—the wars, the coups, the interventions, the sponsored genocides. The past is evil, but the evil is past: This is the story Americans like to tell themselves. After reading his book I conducted a lengthy interview with Meister (to be found here and here). “Past evil is not to be revisited or disturbed,” he said in the course of our exchange. “‘Evil’ becomes a time that we have surpassed.”
Meister’s remarkably simple observation has stayed with me ever since I read his book and did my interview. His thought seems to me to transcend its own bounds, so often does it prove a propos. And so often does it land America in trouble, given how reliably the First Law blinds Americans to who they are. Another such case, among the hardest to fathom of late, is now upon us. Having lived through all but the Cold War’s earliest years, I am utterly aghast to discover again how consistently the First Law applies.
Two years ago this coming autumn the House of Representatives, the lower chamber of the national legislature, began debating a proposed law called H.R. 5349, otherwise known as the Crucial Communism Teaching Act. In its current form this bill was drafted and introduced by a congresswoman named María Elvira Salazar, the typically extreme offspring of Cubans who exiled themselves to Florida after the Castro revolution in 1959. The draft authorizes an organization called the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation to develop high school curricula intended—I will go to plain language here—to turn American students into paranoid anti–Communists in the mold of the McCarthyist 1950s.
The document as presented in the House can be read in full here. And here is one of its pertinent passages:
Communism has a long, dark history of political suppression, persecution, and violence. It has led to the deaths of over 100 million victims worldwide and currently tramples the human rights of over 1.5 billion people across the globe. Unfortunately, younger generations of Americans are increasingly unaware of communism’s abuses. H.R. 5349, the Crucial Communism Teaching Act, makes educational materials available through the VOC [the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation] to help educate students about how communist ideology is contrary to the founding principles of freedom and democracy in the United States.
Reading this bill was for me like stepping into some kind of bizarre time warp. For example:
…the Crucial Communism Teaching Act directs the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation to develop a civic education curriculum and oral history resources for high school students to promote understanding of communism that conflicts with the principles of U.S. democracy….
The purposes of this Act are… to ensure that high school students in the United States— (A) learn that communism has led to the deaths of over 100,000,000 victims worldwide; (B) understand the dangers of communism and similar political ideologies; and (C) understand that 1,500,000,000 people still suffer under communism.
It gets stranger, far stranger, as one reads further into the text. “K–12” in this passage refers to the American system as it is structured from kindergarten through the 12th grade:
On September 19, 2023, the Committee’s Subcommittee on Early Childhood, Elementary, and Secondary Education held a hearing on “Academic Freedom Under Attack: Loosening the CCP’s Grip on America’s Classrooms.” The purpose of the hearing was to examine the covert influence of foreign governments and organizations, particularly the Chinese Communist Party, on U.S. K–12 Schools….
The covert influence of the Chinese Communist Party on American kindergarteners and high school students: Do you see what I mean when I say this piece of legislation, this case of the First Law in action, leaves me aghast?
Alan MacLeod, an always-excellent investigative journalist at MintPress News, published a very sound analysis of H.R. 5349 in mid–December, when it passed in the House by a vote of 327 to 62 in the 435–member chamber. As MacLeod points out, the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation is a notoriously right-wing organization initially funded by the U.S. government and dedicated to one of the most insidious projects of our time: erasing the Soviet role in defeating the Reich and casting the Soviet Union as responsible for the mid–20th century’s death toll.
The VOC, what is more, relies on The Black Book of Communism, a thoroughly discredited work of pseudoscience—MacLeod’s term—to conjure from thin air the fantastical figure of 100 million “victims of communism.” As to the 1.5 billion who “still suffer under communism,” that is merely the population of China combined with Cuba’s, Venezuela’s, and various other nations that are the objects of extreme right hatred.
So far as I can make out from the congressional record, H.R. 5349 passed in the House after two debates, one lasting an hour and the other 10 minutes. It is now under consideration in the Senate, which is widely expected to pass it into law and send it to the White House for the president’s signature.
?
There are various ways to explain the odd, delusional character of the ever-odd American republic, as the scholars will tell you. These have to do with historical realities, the collective psychology, and America’s essentially religious character—the mark left by the early Puritan colonists, this is to say. G.K. Chesterton, having crossed the ocean a century ago for a look around, published What I Saw in America in 1922. In it the English author famously called the United States “a nation with the soul of a church.”
This is as true now as it was 103 years ago. Most Americans—the majority in the House high among them, as we can now see—remain closer to parishioners than citizens, given to believing as against thinking. And as it has in the past, this unfortunate trait is once again leading to no good place.
I have long nursed a preoccupation with the waves of irrational fervor that have overtaken Americans long before they called themselves Americans. There were the Boston hangings of the 1650s and 1660s, and the better-known Salem witch trials a few decades later. In the 18th and 19th centuries came the Great Awakenings—frenetic religious revivals that swept across the country like winds off the high plains. By the 1850s Protestant Americans were convinced Catholics, arriving in the millions from Italy and Ireland, were dangerous papists plotting an overthrow in Rome’s behalf.
Nearer our time, and the immediate context of H.R. 5349, there was the first Red Scare following the October Revolution in Russia. And in the 1950s, of course, we had the second Red Scare, during which Joe McCarthy, the famously fanatical senator from the Midwest, whipped the country into a fever-pitch fear of “Reds under every bed,” as the common expression had it.
I had thought that with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the demise of the Soviet Union in the final decade of the past century, America was done with Red Scares. But no, we are now well along in our third. The historians will one day decide to capitalize the “T” and give it its own chapter in the texts.
I used to look back to the McCarthyist 1950s, to put this point another way, with the typical combination of derision and contempt I mentioned earlier. How could so many people behave so foolishly? How could paranoia run so deeply? Fallout shelters? Televised inquisitions on Capitol Hill? Blacklisting? Prison terms?
Neither I nor anyone else any longer needs to ask these questions. There is no ground left to marvel from a position of distanced superiority. What America has done many times before it is doing again. It seems to me now that periodic returns to one or another kind of moral panic (a shared dread of an imagined threat, either external or from within) is inscribed in the American character. There will be no more moral panics when there is no more America, or at least no more America as we have had it to date.
The events of the past three and some centuries only appear to be unrelated: They exhibit a pattern monotonously repeated over and over again. It is always a question of moral panic and a compulsion to remove one or another kind of impure agent—a witch, a Catholic from Calabria, a socialist. Always there is a defense of an idea of America as a sacred space that must be preserved from all manner of pollution, the uncleanliness that afflicts the world beyond America’s shores.
I am always and all for placing events in their proper historical context. But there are present circumstances to consider, too. H.R. 5349 reeks of the Sinophobia that has consumed Washington—the policy cliques, the Congress—for some years now. The possibility or probability of a war with the People’s Republic seems to me the bill’s unmistakable subtext. I also read H.R. 5349 as part of the broader war—across the Western world, this—to suppress dissent of any kind.
This is as much like the McCarthyist 1950s as the altogether weird language in which H.R. 5349 is written. The past was evil, but the evil has by no means passed.
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