https://vimeo.com/449474445

Joe McCarthy's anti-communist campaign was aimed at destroying progressive unions and the American left. McCarthyism is the model for Trumpism. Larry Tye, the author of "Demagogue', joins Paul Jay on theAnalysis.news podcast.

Transcript

Paul JayWelcome to the theAnalysis.news podcast. I'm Paul Jay.The book, "Demagogue", Larry Tye's biography of Senator Joseph McCarthy has been hailed as the definitive take on the life of a man whose name has become synonymous with witch hunts and abuse of power, with the objective of creating an ideological terror campaign against political foes.Tye likens McCarthy with President Trump, another in a long line of such bullies. Now joining us to talk about Joe McCarthy and his book is Larry Tye. He's an author and journalist known for his biographies of Americans, including Edward Bernays, Satchel Paige, Robert F. Kennedy, and, of course, Joseph McCarthy. Thanks for joining us. Larry.

Larry TyeGreat to be on with you.

Paul JaySo before we get into who Joseph McCarthy was and what McCarthyism was all about and linking it to Trump and so on, I think it's important to get to some underlying assumptions a lot of people have about McCarthyism, about anticommunism. And my take is that the beginnings of this anticommunism and the kind of Red Scare, is long before there ever was a Soviet Union, it's really late 19th century with the development in the United States of a revolutionary workers movement. General strikes, a militancy of the working class United States getting organized, very influenced by socialist ideas of various kinds, including Marx.So in terms of understanding McCarthyism and the House of un-American Activities Committee, I think it's important to distinguish between a legitimate domestic revolutionary movement that had every right for workers to get organized, to form unions, to become Marxist communists, socialists, whatever they wanted if one believes the U.S. Constitution protects the right to get organized and the right to free speech. All of this was more than legitimate activity and including the opposition to the First World War, which the left progressive socialists, communists, and so on, including Eugene Debs, waged a big campaign against the United States joining the First World War. And that gave a lot of impetus to sections of the elites and the political elites wanting to crush this movement.So the idea that communism was always the sort of Soviet organized conspiracy and not primarily, not only but not primarily, a domestic social-political development that comes out of the political consciousness and the growth of the American workers and American intelligentsia. I think that gets lost in this discussion. And it's kind of an underlying assumption, "Oh, communism bad. Even if McCarthy went too far, the underlying objectives weren't so bad".So I don't know if you agree with me or not, but let's talk about that because I think to understand this phenomenon, I think that needs to be the starting place.

Larry TyeSo I think that you're right that McCarthyism ends up sweeping up a lot more of a movement than actually Joe McCarthy represented in the anti-communist movement in America, was sweeping in a way that seemed to me in many ways un-American that. So I want to say a couple of things about the fight to uncover communists in the government goes back at least to 1938 in the formation of the House un-American Activities Committee and for a dozen years before Joe McCarthy, members of Congress, were out there looking for alleged Soviet spies buried in the US government. And they did a whole lot more careful looking while they swept too many people along with this, and lots of careers and lives were ruined by McCarthy standards, they were responsible.