I wonder if the term 'McCarthyist' as an insult was something that was propagated by the Soviets.
Sore point with me. McCarthy was wayyyy overzealous and abusive of civil rights to be sure, and as a result, the then-legitimate search for "fifth column" communist elements became a subject of ridicule.
Worse, the actual honest-to-gosh communists started to use less pejorative terms to describe themselves, such as "progressives," and the blacklisting of highly creative people became a national embarrassment.
If McCarthy had restrained himself to a sober and earnest investigation of genuine Communist influences in government and the armed Services such that these influences could merely have been brought out in the open for consideration by the voting public, we would have been much better off, in my opinion.
But no. The Senator's self-importance got so inflated that he went shamefully overboard, resulting in a kind of "sympathy" for those "accused of" (rather than merely "exposed as") having Communist leanings or actual Party Membership.
"Have you no shame, Senator McCarthy*?" became the catchword of the day.
And we no longer refer to Communists as Communists. That, after all, would be politically incorrect. So now we have the Socialist Party on our ballots. Sounds much more semantically benign, doesn't it?
That's the way I see it, and I'm old enough to have watched the Army-McCarthy hearings on our 12" black and white TV with my brother.
Terry, 230RN
* Paraquoted
