6 Reasons the Tea Party Is More Dangerous Than McCarthyism

The power of the Tea Partiers, who refused to raise the US government's debt ceiling this past week despite the pleading of Republican pundits and the powerful, echoes the 1950s when Sen. Joe McCarthy, Fighting Joe, went after those who thought themselves his masters.

It's true; the right-wing lobbies Club for Growth and FreedomWorks both cheered on the 25 or so Tea Partiers who sabotaged an already reactionary bill from passing in the House.

Conservative journalists tell us South Carolina Sen. Jim DeMint flexed his Tea Party cred and convinced the South Carolina House delegation to buck House Leader John Boehner and his bill.

But all of this strum and drang had other bankrollers of the Tea Party takeover like the US Chamber of Commerce unhappy. A House aide described the Tea Party freshman as "buckets of crazy" to conservative Washington Post columnist Jennifer Rubin.

All this reminds me of 1952.

Back then, Maine Sen. Margaret Chase Smith's Declaration of Conscience against Joe McCarthy, signed onto by a few other prominent Republicans in 1950, had faded feebly away. McCarthy had proved himself an able attack dog, and his party put him first on the podium of their Republican convention, then on the campaign trail with General Eisenhower, their presidential candidate. Wealthy Republicans paid for him to go on television to attack the Democratic presidential candidate. In the famous speech, he said, "Tonight I shall give you the history of the Democrat candidate ... who endorses and would continue the suicidal Kremlin-shaped policies of this nation."

McCarthy painted establishment Americans as agents of the Soviet threat. As Richard Rovere wrote in his masterful biography from that era, "Nothing about it was more distressing than the fact that this flagon of poison was bought by men of power in the country and recommended for consumption by the party that was about to win control of the government; that and the fact that poison could be made of such ingredients." Republicans saw McCarthy as the ticket back to power and they used it. Sen. Robert Taft of Ohio tucked him away on the government operations committee "where he can't do any harm," then watched as McCarthy continued to concoct conspirators and Communists in the Republican-controlled government before finally being toppled when he attacked the US Army in 1954. (In one of his first forays, he went after the president's old comrade Brig. Gen. Ralph Zwicker, "You are a disgrace to the uniform. You're shielding Communist conspirators. You're not fit to be an officer. You are ignorant.")

McCarthy rose to power as the United States (through the fig leaf of the United Nations) was really at war with communists, in North Korea. He rode and wrestled with the patriotic fervor of war, directing it at nonexistent enemies like Zwicker.

Today's Tea Party rises as the United States government pretends it doesn't need to raise taxes on the wealthy and corporations to fund its obligations. But they wrestle their fear of the collapse of the U.S. government under debt into a crisis that would itself challenge the creditworthiness of their beloved country.

To help him understand McCarthyism and the far right, historian Richard Hofstadter first formulated the idea of right-wing populism driven by status anxiety among a sector of the middle class losing influence.

Chip Berlet, my former colleague at Political Research Associates, defines right-wing populism today as a white supremacist middle-class movement that challenges elites above them while scapegoating immigrants and blacks as the cause of the problem below them.

Certainly some of that is in play.

There are interesting differences between now and the 1950s, of course. In the 1950s, McCarthy's core supporters in local Republican parties included old-line Republicans who refused to accept the basic logic of the New Deal and were defeated by the moderate and liberal Republicans in the establishment who believed the party's survival depended on that. William F. Buckley was prominently among them. Today, in pockets across the country, the Tea Party Republicans are the newcomers who took over local parties in Idaho or New Jersey or Nevada from already right-wing conservatives they sometimes deemed, wildly, as Communists, or at best RINOs (Republican in Name Only).