... but the meaning is the same: today is the 60th anniversary of the beginning of an era: "1950: McCarthy Launches Anti-Red Crusade," on the helpful BBC site "On This Day."
Actually, the red scare had already gotten underway, but Senator Joe McCarthy simply capitalized on the hysteria. After needlessly ruining several careers among the State Department's Foreign Service, he was eventually censured by the Senate, but not before the greatest reproach to McCarthy was uttered by Joseph Welch, counsel for the US Army: "Have you no sense of decency?"
How convenient, this McCarthyite anniversary, while we consider this past weekend's populist fest, the Tea Party convention. For you can't have demagogues without populists, and that's what Tea-Partyism is, our latest outburst of populism.
Dictators, Democracy, and American Public Culture by Benjamin L. Alpers (2002, UNC Press) reminds us that
The American populist tradition divides the world into "us" and "them." It typically imagines the great, virtuous mass of hardworking people arrayed against a small group of distant elites, bankers, bureaucrats, and the like.
If "virtuous" and "hardworking" sound innocuous enough, Alpers then cites the kind of "us and them" that went on under populist demagogue Father (yes, a Catholic priest) Charles Coughlin, an anti-Semitic rabble-rouser in the 20s and 30s.
Now we have the likes of Sarah Palin and Rush Limbaugh, who dangerously hark back to the "us and them" theme, and yearn for the days when "us" took no lessons from "them." Their targets may be different - Muslims, Latin immigrants, Democrats - but they thrive on division, exclusion. Dangerous daydreaming in the world of 2010, when not only the world has changed - just check the "Made in China" labels on everything from undershirts to the national debt - but the US has too. The Palins, Tancredos, and Limbaughs are in denial.
Ms. Palin poked fun at the "hopey changey thing" that inspired people to vote for President Obama, but the truth is that her kind of populism is changeless, and hopeless. Father Coughlin's rants about Jews were drowned out by repeated re-elections of FDR, the man he called a "betrayer and a liar." Twenty years later, Senator McCarthy's hounding of some of the same "them" victims was shown for what it was, and he left the public scene in disgrace.
Demagogues and populists. Can't have one without the other.