McCarthyism appears in these episodes less as a bounded historical episode than as a recurring pattern in American politics: fabricated alarmism, coerced conformity, and the willingness of institutions to go along with a demagogue. The three guests who touch on it — Jonathan Rauch, Thaddeus Russell and Ned Foley — each place it differently: as a censorship regime that swept up gay Americans, as one totalitarian moment among many in American history, and as the closest historical analogue to the refusal to accept the 2020 presidential election result.
Rauch: McCarthyism and the gay purge
Jonathan Rauch raises McCarthyism in the context of gay rights and free speech. He describes Frank Kameny being fired from his government job in the US Army Map Service because he was gay, at a time when, in Rauch’s account, gay people could not work for the federal government and were considered deviants and perverts. Rauch then makes the claim that anchors the episode’s treatment of the topic: it is not a widely known fact, he says, but McCarthyism went after far more gay people than it did communists Jonathan Rauch on the New Attacks on Free Thought (2015).
Rauch sets this against the Supreme Court case One, Inc. v. Olesen, which he says freed gay people to speak, and which he dates to 1958 — the same time as Kameny’s firing. Before that decision, in his telling, gay people were censored and considered obscene. Kameny, unlike many others who had been fired, decided to fight: he protested his firing through the executive branch, protested in Congress, and filed the very first lawsuit to go to the Supreme Court. The court declined to hear him, but Rauch calls the brief he wrote brilliant. Over three decades, Rauch says, Kameny became an outspoken public critic of the ideas oppressing gay people, and others followed him into the 1960s and 1970s.
The mechanism Rauch emphasizes is speech: as he and others of his generation joined in criticizing and ridiculing the hateful ideas — that gay people were recruiting, threatening or seducing children, undermining society, medically unfit, or untrustworthy in government work — those beliefs tumbled. He connects this to the gay marriage movement and to his broader argument that public argument distinguishes truth from hate better than a speech commission on a university campus will.
Russell: authoritarianism, totalitarianism and the 1950s
Thaddeus Russell offers a terminological distinction rather than a history. For him, authoritarianism is blunt coercive rule, the use of often physically violent power, while totalitarianism is the convincing of the people that they are responsible for society — getting them to psychologically invest in the nation-state Thaddeus Russell on Renegades vs. Conformists (2018). He applies the second term to McCarthyism directly: the New Deal was a pretty totalitarian era, he says, and McCarthyism in the 1950s was fairly totalitarian. He does not claim the United States has ever been a truly totalitarian society, but says there have been moments when it was pretty close.
Russell roots that tendency in American culture rather than in the Cold War. He points to the Puritans as the founders of the culture, to moral guardians who were religious, Christian and evangelical for the first 200 years or so of America, and to ministers, pastors, evangelicals and missionaries travelling the country in the First and Second Great Awakenings telling Americans they were sinners. He also lists the rise of professional police and firefighters, asylums for wayward women and children, and prisons in which prisoners were monitored, watched and listened to rather than simply put in a hole. Democracy, in his account, shifted the culture further: Americans began to identify with the country as “me” or “I” or “us” and became more willing to volunteer for wars, though he says most Americans did not buy into it and that the Revolution relied on conscription almost immediately.
The episode’s later discussion of conscription and the draft is not framed as McCarthyism, but it extends Russell’s argument about state coercion. He calls the draft enslavement — temporary enslavement, the only argument he allows — and says every major war in American history except the Iraq War had one. Bob Zadek notes that during the Revolution and the Civil War a drafted man could hire a substitute, which he says made the Civil War a poor person’s war and caused riots; Russell agrees but adds that a significant number of middle- and upper-class men still volunteered, and that 600,000 died and perhaps twice as many came home missing a limb or an eye. Zadek credits Milton Friedman as probably the leading thinker who helped get rid of the draft; Russell says Friedman called it the worst thing a state can do and agrees it is enslavement.
Foley: McCarthyism applied to vote counting
Ned Foley invokes McCarthyism as the closest analogue to a present danger. The guardrail under threat, he says, is the willingness to accept defeat when defeat happens: every election has to have a loser, and the unwillingness to accept a demonstrable defeat is the single most serious problem Enhancing Trust in Democracy (2022). Bob Zadek pushes back, suggesting this is a problem of candidate character rather than of voters; Foley disagrees, arguing that if it were only a candidate problem, other professional politicians and the voters would police it and declare the renegade candidate irrelevant.
What surfaced in the 2020 presidential election, Foley says, was not one candidate insisting he won when he did not, but other members of his own party filing amicus briefs with no basis trying to get the Supreme Court to overturn the result, many members of the US House of Representatives signing on to claims his own Attorney General told him had no basis, those same members repudiating electoral votes predicated on certified outcomes, and some senators doing the same. He adds that public opinion polls to this day show upwards of 70% of self-identified Republican voters believe the election was subverted and stolen from President Trump.
Foley calls this a pathology analogous to the McCarthy era Red Scare, and stresses that it is new. He cites Richard Hofstadter’s phrase, the paranoid style of American politics, coined to refer to McCarthyism and the Red Scare, and describes that phenomenon as fabricated alarmism: there may have been reason to be concerned about communism in the 1950s during the Cold War, but what was dangerous about McCarthyism was claiming to have a list of communists in the State Department when the list was made up. It was demagoguery not based on reality, he says, yet successful for four years because of Senator McCarthy’s charisma and his connection with his base, and because other professional politicians who realized he was a huckster and a charlatan refused to confront him until four years later. Hofstadter’s point, Foley notes, was that the phenomenon was not new — it pops up from time to time, including the Salem witch trials in colonial times and the Know-Nothing movement in the 19th century.
Foley’s contribution is the combination: to his knowledge, that kind of McCarthyism-like behavior had never been applied to counting votes before. Earlier vote-counting disputes, whether hanging chads in Bush v. Gore or any other episode, were fact-based and evidence-based, with genuine disputes over who really won. What is new and particularly dangerous, given the centrality of voting to self-government, is combining a McCarthyism-like attack not based in reality with the counting of votes. He also notes that contested election outcomes go back to James Madison and the founders, and cites the Hayes-Tilden election of 1876 during Reconstruction, drawing on research for his book Ballot Battles.
Across episodes: no shared development
The three episodes do not argue the same question across time so much as apply the term to different subjects: Rauch treats McCarthyism as a censorship regime whose gay victims outnumbered its communist ones, Russell treats it as one fairly totalitarian moment in a culture with deep totalitarian tendencies, and Foley treats it as the historical analogue for a fabricated attack on vote counting. No excerpt shows one guest responding to another, and the excerpts show no development of a shared argument between the earlier and later treatments.
What the sources do not cover
The excerpts do not give McCarthyism’s dates, the name of the senator’s committee or any statute, the number of people fired or investigated, or the outcome of the Army-McCarthy hearings. They do not state what One, Inc. v. Olesen held or which amendment it turned on, nor what Bush v. Gore held. Kameny’s title, the name of the brief he wrote, and the fate of his lawsuit beyond the court’s refusal to hear it are likewise absent.