David Horowitz and Peter Collier have published a new updated edition of their classic, Destructive Generation: Second Thoughts About the Sixties. A lengthy excerpt from the introduction to the new volume is up at FPM, and is well worth your time, even if you don't pick up the book.
I read the 1996 edition when it came out, and along with Radical Son, it's among my favorites from Horowitz. I have long wished that David would make some of the essays from Destructive Generation available online, just so I could share them with people (without lending out my copy of the book.) I have always thought that the chapter on McCarthyism ("McCarthy's Ghost") was the best piece I'd ever seen on the subject. Horowitz and Collier capture eloquently how the "M-word" has been co-opted by the Left as their trump card in debates they can't win on the basis of ideas, while the actual methods used by McCarthy, the deplorable "guilt by association" tactics which were the rightful reasons for his disgrace, have come to be practiced by Leftists as a matter of course. Some excerpts from the "McCarthy's Ghost" chapter of Destructive Generation...
In life, McCarthy was part of the Right. In death, he has been possessed by body snatchers on the Left. The apprehensions aroused by charges of "McCarthyism" are based on the Left's assertion that there is a powerful and destructive impulse lurking just under the surface of our political life: a native fascism easily ignited and ready to rage dangerously out of control. It is an assumption not often questioned, although the evidence suggests that the opposite is true. Arthur Miller's efforts in The Crucible to portray it as a peculiarly American atavism notwithstanding, the history of McCarthyism actually shows how alien the witch-hunt mentality is to the American spirit and how superficial its hold on the American psyche. Appearing in the extraordinary circumstances of the postwar period, McCarthyism was brief in its moment and limited in its consequences. And it was complete in the way it was purged from the body politic. The Wisconsin senator's strut on the stage ended in a crushing repudiation by his colleagues in the Senate and an enduring obloquy in the rogues' gallery of American history, a position close to that of Benedict Arnold and a handful of other villains. His enemies survived to be rehabilitated as martyrs and heroes of an American political “ nightmareâ€, while he himself is the only figure from that haunted era to suffer irreparable damnation.......Why do we hear so much about McCarthyism in the contemporary political debate? Is there a basis for the fear that we will return to the spirit of that brief moment in the 1950s when this bizarre figure dominated our politics? Is there legitimate worry that we will once again be victimized by a pathology that Harry Truman defined in 1951 when he went on television to defend himself against the charge that he had knowingly protected Harry Dexter White (an official in his administration who had been named as a Soviet agent), a pathology that Truman identified as the big lie and the reckless smear; corruption of truth, indiscriminate use of guilt by association, and disregard for due process?
If there is such a danger, it comes not from Joseph McCarthy's followers on the Right, but from the Left, which professes to hate McCarthy's memory. The Nation and other left-wing journals regularly smear James LeMoyne, Robert Leiken, Ronald Radosh, and other Central American experts who deny that the Sandinistas are building a utopia as being contra hirelings or CIA agents. For his dissent on affirmative action programs, black economist Thomas Sowell was labeled “an enemy of his people†by Roger Wilkins in the same radical journal. There was also the reaction on the liberal left to the appointment of John H. Koehler as Reagan's White House communications director, replacing Pat Buchanan. Once it was discovered that Koehler as a child of ten in his native Germany had belonged briefly to a Nazi youth group, there was a tremendous liberal outcry, although the head of the Jewish Anti-Defamation League observed that it was “ludicrous to judge a 56 year old person by his associations as a 10 year old.†After the White House was forced to withdraw the nomination of Koehler under pressure from the Left, it was clear that "Are you now or have you ever been"- even for a month when you were ten years old- is a question that is out of bounds in the political debate only if what you are or were or might have been was a Communist.
It is obviously not the political methods of McCarthyism that arouse the indignation of those who invoke its specter today, but the political ideas with which McCarthy was associated, specifically his anti-Communism. This is admitted with disarming frankness by New Left professor Ellen Schrecker in No Ivory Tower, a tendentious book about the effects of McCarthyism on the university: "After all, what made McCarthy a McCarthyite was not his bluster but his anti-Communist mission......†To dismiss the senator's real malevolence as mere "bluster" may seem fatuous to those familiar with the history of the Fifties, but there is a reason for the use of this term. What Schrecker and others on the Left who have integrated McCarthy into their ideology are saying is that the problem was not the man's methods but what he believed; not his demagogic lack of scruples, nor the psychological demons that sent him careening out of control, but the objectives of his perverse crusade. For them, just as much as for the tiny band of zealots who gather every year at his grave on the anniversary of his death, Joseph McCarthy is a representative American. Yet they summon his ghost not to underscore the importance of civil liberties in a democracy but as part of a morality play about the dangers of anti-Communism. To accuse someone of being a McCarthyite, therefore, has become a way of embargoing ideas that the Left dislikes and invoking cloture on debates that it doesn't want to have.
Horowitz and Collier were certainly no apologists for Joe McCarthy:
This is not to say, of course, that McCarthy's response to Communism was not destructive. In his hands, the struggle against this fifth column was perverted first into a weapon aimed at the Democrats and ultimately into a scattergun aimed at his own party, at America, and finally at himself. His reckless demagoguery did damage to innocent people, and the atmosphere created by his success cast a pall over the political arena. It imperiled the democratic process, and it destroyed the credibility of anti-Communism itself. Robert Lamphere, the head of the FBI counterintelligence team that caught the Rosenbergs, has since said, "Senator McCarthy's crusade, which was to last for the next several years, was always anathema to me. McCarthy's approach and tactics hurt the anti-Communist cause and turned many liberals against legitimate efforts to curtail Communist activities in the United States." Whittaker Chambers saw the problem with McCarthy at the time the problem was unfolding: "All of us, to one degree or another, have come to question his judgement and to fear acutely that his flair for the sensational, his inaccuracies and distortions ... will lead him and us into trouble. In fact, it is no exaggeration to say that we live in terror that Senator McCarthy will one day make some blunder which will play directly into the hands of our common enemy and discredit the whole anti-Communist effort for a long while to come."
So what was a discussion of McCarthyism doing in a book about the 60's? The authors get to that...
The disappearance of the term "McCarthyism" in the Sixties cannot be ascribed, either, to a lack of "subversive" activity, which in fact exceeded anything like it in the past. Nor can it be attributed to the absence of an anti-Communist Right, which was in fact gathering momentum through the Goldwater wing of the Republican Party. The absence of a "McCarthyist" threat from the Right in the Sixties lies in the temporarily changed nature of the political Left.By a coincidence of fate, in 1957, the same year that Joe McCarthy died in disgrace, the Old Left disintegrated under the pressure of Khrushchev's revelations concerning the crimes of Stalin and the Soviets' brutal invasion of Hungary. A New Left, impressed by the debacle and anxious not to be involved in its repetition, soon appeared. This New Left had many faults, but lack of candor was not one of them. Where Old Leftists had pretended to be Progressives and liberals and patriotic Americans, New Leftists insisted on being recognized as Marxists and revolutionaries, pro-Fidel and pro-Vietcong, up against the wall and tear the mother down. It would have caused terminal embarrassment to Sixties Leftists to be accused of concealing their radical agendas inside liberalism or, even worse, to be mistaken for liberals themselves.
The New Left did not want to patiently infiltrate institutions in the American mainstream with whose purposes they were openly at war and whose ends they intended to subvert; they wanted to create their own institutions and to make "a revolution in the streets." It was redundant, as government agencies soon discovered, to interrogate New Left radicals about who they were, because they made no effort to dissemble. Whereas Old Leftists had donned the cloak of the liberal martyr who takes the Fifth only to protect the Constitution, and who is ruefully silent before his inquisitors out of shame for the offense they commit against liberty itself, New Leftists dragged those who threatened to investigate them into their own theater of the absurd. Thus Jerry Rubin's appearance in knee breeches and tricornered hat- American Revolutionary drag- before the decrepit and obsolete HUAC. When asked about his subversive agenda, he said he was a revolutionary and proud of it. And that was that. When the witch says he's a witch, there is no hunt. Thus the "inquisition" of the Fifties ended in the Sixties not as tragedy but as farce.
(reprinted from Destructive Generation without permission from the authors or publishers, from my long since scanned and digitized version of this chapter. I hope DH cuts me some slack. I'm just trying to move some books for him - DW)
Posted by dan at January 8, 2006 3:46 PM