With the election of Donald Trump and his various appointments of hard line right wingers, people like Rebecca Schuman are wondering if the dark days of the McCarthy era might make a comeback. According to my research, it’s absolutely impossible.
Because McCarthyism never went away.
In 2005, Russell Jacoby listed some of the organizations keeping watch on professors: Campus Watch, Academic Bias, and Students for Academic Freedom were a few. The American Council of Trustees and Alumni, founded in 1995, has long scrutinized universities. It has occasionally listed individual professors to watch out for, such as some who criticized George Bush’s Iraq War. And in 2006, the Bruin Alumni Association went so far as to name little yours truly, not to the actual “Dirty Thirty” left-wing faculty faculty members it claimed to expose at UCLA, but to what could be called the Dirty JV–people who expressed left-wing views, but were somehow not as obnoxious as the Thirty themselves.
So McCarthyism hasn’t gone away. But it hasn’t recently had much of a hearing. ACTA retracted its list after an outcry that it was McCarthyistic, and the Bruin Alumni Association vanished with speed. The National Association of Scholars, yet another right wing watch group (but with more scholarly respectability) now couples general denunciations of newer (post-1968) trends in the humanities with a strangely intense commitment to fossil fuels. Most of the others have been crying in the wilderness, waiting for an opportunity.
Do they have one now?
Today’s situation shows two big differences with the McCarthy era. First, Marxism was not merely a set of ideas, or even a set of ideas that (in Marx’s words) had “gripped the masses” in various countries. It was, and presented itself as, the ideology of a large and disciplined group already in control of several national governments. This, of course, was false; even in those days, there were plenty of Marxists who were not followers of the Moscow line. But a very powerful apparatus said otherwise: that all true Marxists follow Soviet principles.
The idea that there was a single mass movement of Marxists was thus put forth by Marxists themselves. The current chaos in the Muslim world, with for example Sunni and Shia Muslims fighting one another far more bitterly than the Brezhnevites ever fought the Maoists, does not exhibit that sort of frightening unity.
Second, Karl Marx was steeped in the Western philosophical tradition. Indeed, as he himself argued, there is no way out of Hegel except through him—and as many (including me) have argued, no way out of Kant except through Hegel. So Western philosophy either has to pass through Marx or stay with Kantian or pre-Kantian modes of philosophy (as American philosophers so often do).
Of course, the fact is that Islamic philosophy, like Marxism, is absolutely integral to the western philosophical tradition. The great Islamic philosophers are just as much forbears of contemporary European thought as Augustine and Maimonides. If the neo-McCarthyites ever figure this out, they will have a new brush with which to tar us all.
In any case, they’re coming. In a future post, I’ll tell you what to watch for.