The McCarthy Legacy

Back in the early 1950’s America was haunted by a witch-hunter named Joseph McCarthy. He was a mainly a one man show who managed to work up an anti-communist frenzy across the country which resulted in a lot of professional lives left in ruin and a national paranoia the likes of which has not been seen in America until the election of our first black President and the subsequent rise of the Tea Party movement. I remember the McCarthy hearings well, for they were the first day time television I had witnessed as a child growing up among what would be called moderate Republicans today.
Ever since the Obama election liberals have been the proverbial frogs in the kettle of water. In these times, there are numerous voices heating up the witch-hunt, fueling the fire that heats the water that eventually will boil the frogs unless they have the wisdom to simply stop sitting there pretending they can take the heat of the conservatives’ cauldron when in fact the temperature is near the boiling point. These heat-generating irrational voices come from Fox News, talk radio, the House of Representatives, the Senate: in short, they are a siren-like chorus that enchants and infuriates the public to such a degree that the bricks and spit have already begun to fly. Guns and grenades may be just around the corner. Enough of taking the heat.
Meanwhile, the national conversation has shifted to such a conservative extreme that what was once moderate Republican thinking is now labeled socialist or liberal. For example, the health care bill that the House just passed is a mere shadow of what Nixon proposed in the 1970’s. What used to be Republican thinking is now labeled socialist, and what is now Republican thinking is simply anti-governmental or the party of NO.
Most of the Tea Party types are losers. They think like losers and act like losers. That’s what happens when you think only defensively, only reductively, only negatively. You define your existence by what you are against, not for. You score no points because you are too busy trying to prevent the other side from scoring any. It is a strategy that goes nowhere but down.
The Democratic Party seized the middle of the political spectrum in the last election and has slowly but carefully maintained a centrist course, much to the chagrin of true liberals, who would much rather have seen an expanded Medicare program come out of congress than this 30 million new accounts cornucopia for the insurance industry.
However, the new McCarthy-ites are not having any of it, even if the bill is mostly derived from old Republican ideas. They want less government, or even no government, because they have nowhere to go philosophically except further right into some wild new frontier of libertarian nihilism, the middle ground having been occupied by the Democrats because the middle ground was vacated by the right as they looked for higher ground from which to look down on the land they relinquished. They sooner or later will find that the soil is rather thin the higher you go. So they are left with nothing but denial: No nothing. No. Just say no.
The problem in America is that the true liberal has been left behind, disenfranchised, by the Democratic Party shift to the middle. You would never know it as a problem because the extreme right holds most of the apparent microphones and megaphones. In fact, actual liberal views are buried beneath whatever ground is being managed by the party in power namely, the Democrats.
The good news is that as long as the Tea Party folks have sway over the Republicans, the Democrats can rest assured that the Republicans will be a long time in trying to reclaim that very fertile middle ground.