Fishkill, N.Y.: McCarthyism was a tragic era in our history. Bullying and lies intimidated the normally responsible Republican leaders into silence. The Second Red Scare’s fever broke when Joseph McCarthy’s ugly tactics became obvious to the general public as they watched, in horror, the televised Army-McCarthy hearings.
A striking paradox of the history of the left is that it is full of self-defeat. From the bitter divisions between statist and anti-statist socialists in the nineteenth century to the vicious rivalries between Communists and Socialists in the 1930s, followed by many more episodes of destructive sectarianism and flawed strategy up to the present,