while the Communists ignored the treaty, conquered thenally, and defeated the United States for the iirst time in itsnhistory. He did not embark on foreign and defense policiesnthat permitted the most savage and aggressive tyranny innworld history to become the equal of the United States innstrategic weapons and pronounce it a step toward a generationnof peace. Perhaps most of all, McCarthy did not, in thenwake of Alger Hiss, the Amerasia case, the Rosenbergs, andnother lesser treasons, ignore, ridicule, scorn, and worknagainst those Americans who knew the extent of Communistninfiltration in the Federal government and obstructnmost substantial measures to expose it and bring it to annend.nJoe McCarthy did not do any of these things, which werenusually done or authorized or approved or supported bynmany of the persons and institutions he attacked, and they,nlike much of what McCarthy did, were also evil, among thenmost evil things in our history, and most of us havenforgotten them and even wonder if they really happened ornif anyone really did them. The evil that never happened,nthat other men didn’t do, died with them and lies interrednwith the bones of its victims—not hundreds or thousandsnbut rhillions—whose ghosts are never invoked and whonhave largely disappeared from human memory; but if therenis a Bar of Justice beyond this world and beyond humannmemory, I would rather stand before it and answer for thenevil that Joe McCarthy did than for the evil that he didn’tndo.nThe real reason for the hatred borne by the name of JoenMcCarthy has little to do with the evil that is attributed tonhim or with his uncompromising anti-Communism butnrather with what he discovered and what he said publiclynabout the forces (the people, ideas, and institutions) that byn1950 had come to dominate American government andnpublic discourse. McCarthy not only claimed that a Communistnpresence had entered into the Federal governmentnbut also that non-Communist or ostensibly anti-Communistnelements in the government and more broadly in thennational elite were in some sense “soft” on or sympatheticnto Communism and, consequently, that they lacked thenresolution to extirpate the internal Communist presencenand deal effectively with Communism abroad. Even more,nhe suggested that the connection between the elite and thenforces of subversion and aggression was in itself an indictmentnof the elite, regardless of whether its members werenformally affiliated with Communism, whether they hadnactually committed espionage or treason in a legal sense, ornwhether they verbally espoused opposition to Communism.nMcCarthy, in other words, was not principally concernednwith the issue of Communism in government but with thenrelationship between Communism and the elite or establishment,nand because his concern necessarily involved anmilitant challenge to that elite, it prompted a massivenpolitical and verbal counterattack upon him, crushed himnand the movement he created, and transformed him intonthe demonic embodiment of evil that moves among us evenntoday.nMcCarthy’s contention about the dominant forces innAmerican society was, of course, never presented explicitiynor in general terms and was usually expressed in hyperbolenand ad hominem. It is quite true that McCarthy oftennexaggerated and overdramatized the connections betweennthe establishment and the more clearly subversive forces,nbut it was precisely that dramatization that enabled largennumbers of Americans to perceive the connection at all. Itnis probably also true that McCarthy himself did not think ofnhis rhetoric as a device for political and didactic purposesnbut that he accepted his own dramatization as literal truth.nTaken literally, however, much of what McCarthy habituallynsaid was absurd. His notorious attack on AdlainStevenson—“Alger, I mean Adlai”—linked two men whonhad little real association and who were quite distinct on anliteral level. Yet it was the point of his attack that Adlai andnAlger did share some important things in common besidesntheir stuffiness. The great virtue of McCarthy consistednprecisely in his ability to communicate to the averagenAmerican what the bonds were that connected establishmentnliberals like Stevenson and crypto-Communists likenHiss. McCarthy’s rhetoric pointed directiy to what theynshared, isolated it, and held it up, squirming and screaming,nfor all the American nation to see. And what the nationnsaw, it did not like.nBetween approximately 1930 and 1950 the United Statesnexperienced a social and political revolution in which onenelite was largely displaced from power by another. The newnelite, entrenching itself in the management of large corporationsnand unions, the Federal bureaucracy, and thencenters of culture, education, and communication, articulatednan ideology that expressed its interests and defended itsndominance under the label of “liberalism.” Althoughnliberalism formally defines itself in opposition to Communism,nin fact it retains and incorporates some of the basicnpremises of Marxist doctrine—in particular, the idea thatnhuman beings are the products of their social environmentnand that by rationalistic management of the environment itnis possible to perfect or ameliorate significantiy the humanncondition and indeed man himself The environmentalistnand ultimately Utopian premises of liberalism are thenjustification for the expansion of state and bureaucracy, thenregulation of the economy, the redistribution of wealth, andnthe imposition of progressive education and egalitariannexperiments on traditional institutions and communities bynliberal agencies and policies.nIn foreign affairs, the premises of liberalism hold out thenprospect of an “end to war” through the transcendence ofnnationalism and international rivalry and the evolution ornconscious design of a cosmopolitan world order in whichnwar, empire, sovereignty, and significant differentiationsnamong peoples have disappeared. It so happens that thenideology of liberalism, for all its contempt for “specialninterests,” coincides very conveniently with the political,neconomic, and professional interests of the bureaucrats,nsocial engineers, managers, and intellectuals who believe innit and who are most zealous in pressing for its agenda.nWithout liberalism or some such formula under anothernname, these groups cannot easily explain or justify thenpower, prestige, and rewards that they hold. By the laten1940’s, due to the crises and power vacuums created by thenGreat Depression, two world wars, and the advance ofntechnical knowledge and skill, this complex of specialninterests and its ideology had secured an essentially dominant,nthough not exclusive, influence in the strategic powernnnSEPTEMBER 1986 / 17n