I read "The Crucible" in a high school English class and it significantly affected my political outlook, but having learned more of the history of that era (much of it not public knowledge when I first read it and certainly not when it was written) it's no longer clear to me that it still works as allegory.
From the article: "McCarthy—brash and ill-mannered but to many authentic and true—boiled it all down to what anyone could understand: we had “lost China” and would soon lose Europe as well, because the State Department—staffed, of course, under Democratic Presidents—was full of treasonous pro-Soviet intellectuals. It was as simple as that."
Well, as the Venona project cables declassified in 1995 show, the State Department didn't just contain intellectuals that were pro-Soviet: it contained actual Soviet agents in contact with the USSR. This was by no means restricted to the State Department, but also included the Treasury, OSS (pre-CIA), and even the White House. See here: https://web.archive.org/web/20110514040131/http://www.access....
In addition, it is now known that the CIA ran an operation, at the request of Allen Dulles, to feed McCarthy false information about who in the government were Soviet spies with the deliberate purpose of discrediting him: https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/48603/did-the-c....
Maybe this calls for a remake of "The Crucible", not as tragedy, but as supernatural horror.
For years, on the infrequent occasions when the subject of "The Crucible" would come up I would tell people, "But there were no witches in Salem."
That's the difference.
Undoubtedly, McCarthy was an odious individual in many ways. That has nothing to do with there being communists in Hollywood, the State Department, and wherever else.
Stay tuned. History doesn't repeat itself, but it does rhyme.
The issue is that being a communist isn't - and shouldn't be - a crime.
Collaborating with a hostile foreign power is - and should be - a crime.
McCarthy made no distinction between these two ends of the spectrum. Collaboration requires intent, which McCarthy often failed to provide evidence of. In those failures, he discredited himself and his enterprise.
In the past I've thought that the trouble with "McCarthyism" was its lack of respect for freedom of expression and freedom of conscience, as well as some of the dynamics of "moral panic". That doesn't mean that McCarthy was literally personally wrong about all of his claims, and as you point out, some of them have subsequently been vindicated. It also doesn't mean that the anti-Communist or anti-Soviet cause was unimportant.
I guess this raises a big question for me: what does liberalism look like in a cold war (or a hot war)? The illiberalism of the cold war as well as other things that were done to prosecute it (including the exaltation of espionage and the seemingly irreversible boom in spy agencies and the classified world) are deeply upsetting to me even though they responded to a real and, I would agree, grave threat.
Freedom has a fundamental asymmetry: it's much easier to give it up than to get it back. Imagine a society where it's possible to sell yourself into slavery -- you start out free, but in a moment of desperation you lose it forever.
Enemies of a free state use the state's freedom against it by exploiting this asymmetry. A moment of naivety by a voter or someone in power, or a traitor/spy, can dramatically undermine freedom.
The only solution is vigilence, which is hard to keep up forever. The Bill of Rights helps, but at some point we need to reject the politicians that are too naive to defend freedom.
EDIT: The socialist movement in the U.S. is of grave concern. Especially the Bernie Sanders brand, where he's a nice guy but somehow can't even recognize a failing socialist state a few years before it fails (Venezuela).
The problem is not the healthcare, but the power that the government is asking for, and the foolishness in thinking that the power grab will stop at some reasonable point.
If Vermont decided to have socialized medicine, I don't really care. But implementing it across the entire US is not going to work out well.
I'm not a fan of socialized medicine, but let's say you want to do it. The first thing to do if you want it to be successful is start with a medium-small state, and then take over a part of the system (e.g. emergency care). Show us all how great that is, and slowly expand. Administrators would gain experience, mistakes would be fixable, hard social questions get answered, etc., and if everything goes well maybe the whole country moves over.
A big bill for the whole country from someone who thought things in Venezuela were just peachy in 2011 is not a path for success.
For one thing, Sanders was not proposing a fully government-run healthcare system. Realistic options would be "a good-quality public option available at the federal level", or "single payer" healthcare where the government becomes the single main insurer, at least for basic preventative care and emergencies, or some other policy that ensures there is a "social safety net" in place that includes access to modern healthcare.
Sanders misjudgment about Venezuela is a valid criticism, but let's stop with the Red Scare rhetoric about socializing things. If we were going to socialize something, we would be talking about directly worker-owned enterprises. Ironically, that might actually be much better than just having the government run everything.
Also, you have deluded yourself if somehow you don't already think the US government is an abusive beast that exists in large part to create and maintain power for itself. Is healthcare really the straw that broke the camel's back? Is the government really that much worse than a private corporation that has almost no exposure to market forces? I can't exactly vote for the CEO of Aetna.
I think many people would be open to something other than "medicare for all", but so far that is the only serious public proposal that achieves the goal of ensuring access to modern, humane healthcare for all Americans.
This argument is similar to Karl Popper's Paradox of Tolerance [1], where authoritarians can use freedoms given to them by a society to remove those freedoms from others.
However, the statement insisting that Bernie Sanders will somehow turn the USA into Venezuela sounds more like dogmatic rhetoric more than something that is based on concrete fact.
Similar policies to those proposed in America by progressive Democrats, which the American Republican party frequently refers to as being socialist, have been implemented in some countries (see the Nordic Model [2]) without it turning into a disaster.
If socialist policies are going to be implemented successfully in the U.S., they need to be implemented by people who can tell the difference between Denmark and Venezuela. Sen. Sanders, while otherwise seemingly intelligent, cannot.
> Well, as the Venona project cables declassified in 1995 show, the State Department didn't just contain intellectuals that were pro-Soviet: it contained actual Soviet agents in contact with the USSR.
A stopped clock is correct twice a day.
1) Communist didn't automatically mean spy. And spy didn't automatically mean communist. In fact, most of our worst breaches weren't "communists".
2) The problem isn't just saying: "We have spies." It's finding real evidence on them.
The primary problem is finding real spies--and McCarthy had absolutely zero useful evidence to that end. If anything, he made it easier for the spies by kicking up so much cover.
So, McCarthy destroyed a lot of people ... destroyed civil liberties across the board ... and provided nothing useful to actually root out the real threats.
And this assumes that McCarthy was doing this to find actual spies and not for political gain. An assumption which I do not at all credit McCarthy with.
The threat of communism is different than environmental destruction, but for those looking for historical precedent to illuminate today's problems, I recommend Bury The Chains by Adam Hochschild. It's on British abolitionism, especially Thomas Clarkson, also William Wilberforce and Granville Sharp, in the late 1700s and early 1800s.
It seems from some of the comments that some of HN thinks it's ok for the federal or state government to treat Americans who are communists or socialists differently from those who are not. I hope this is a minority view.
Why are they targeting the influencers and not the advertisers? Because that's the only target of opportunity. They'd target the advertisers, eg like the dump Rush campaigns of old, if they could.
Except they choose to destroy people they disagree with rather than countering their arguments; it's a completely different phenomenon, aptly described in its 50s McCarthyite form in The Crucible, which has little relevance to consumer boycotts then or now, but describes contemporary Cancel Culture perfectly.
How does the counter information strategy work? Anti Limbaugh people have tried fact checking, mocking, discrediting, etc. The only thing that seems to have tempered his show is attacking his advertisers.
Imagine you really oppose Rachel Maddow or Alex Jones. How would you negate their influence?
I don't know any popular new style influencers on the left. So let's say Ben Shapiro and Carlos Masa (because I have no better idea). How would you bounce them?
The only angle of attack I can think of is a smear campaign.
The only successful campaign I know of is Milo. My take is the Mercers got sick of his schtick. So maybe attacking patrons, which are a different kind of advertisers, works too.
Ad-hominem attacks: the last refuge of those without actual arguments.
I note also that you know nothing about me; that sort of insult is normally used by those without much actual life experience.
This is because those who know the world is complicated and full of many types of people tend not to assume the background of those they disagree with, and certainly aren't normally arrogant enough to make claims about how hard life is on the other side, excepting perhaps, when they themselves are projecting somewhat.
Curious if you include right-wing personalities who try and get "progressives" or "liberals" fired from their jobs in the great group of Cancellers, you may be interested in the doctrine of the preferred first speaker.
And if the communists of the 50s ever got in positions of power they would have opened gulags and murdered millions.
The point is that we aught to trust our institutions to keep that from happening without acting like the people who we are supposedly saving society from.
Oh, there are undoubtedly bad actors on both sides, but I don't think there is reasonable doubt about where the vast majority of contemporary behaviour we are talking about - the pressure to obey the diktats of self-elected social arbiters at risk of career etc - comes from.
Anytime one starts to type the words "bad actors on both sides" it's time to step back and try to be more honest with oneself. One of the "sides" here has been trying to "cancel" the votes of 80 million Americans to install a permanent autocratic government. If Rosanne losing her tv show is equally concerning to you as that, again, time to step back and think a little more.
That kind of throwing up your hands and exclaiming "they're all corrupt" is a necessary step in the escalation of political violence and the ascendency of authoritarian regimes.
No. Not unless you absolutely need one authoritarian to fight another authoritarian, as we needed Stalin to fight Hitler. If you're not in that situation, though... darn right I oppose both Stalin and Hitler.
I don't think we needed Stalin to fight Hitler, in many ways the fact that they decided to (euphemistically) 'share a border' helped contribute to the start of WWII. The street combat that led to the NSDAP's seizure of power was closely tied to fear of foreign communist influences. I really don't know how you would argue humanity needed either of them... even one in opposition to the other (with the added caveat, I know, that the Eastern Front was where the substantial proportion of German casualties occurred -- how much is Stalin? Impossible to say, futile to guess in my view).
We didn't need Stalin to fight Hitler in 1936. Maybe not even in 1938. By 1941, we sure did. (If we had stood up to Hitler in 1936, the world would have been a lot better off.)
Back to the larger argument. Declaring "they're both corrupt" is appropriate if, in fact, they are both corrupt.
Are they both corrupt? As both mellosouls and throwaway9980 pointed out, the Democrats did their absolute best to cancel the results of the 2016 election. Can we say that both of those are bad? If not, why not?
And if you say that the Republicans are worse because, first, it's now, and second, because they're using more extreme methods, I would agree with you on both grounds. But are you against trying to overturn elections? Or are you against Republicans? Which is it?
I must admit I'm a little stymied by your claim that " the Democrats did their absolute best to cancel the results of the 2016 election." Their actions -- if they do indeed rise to the level of "cancel[ing] the results of the... election" pale in comparison to the shenanigans we're witnessing now. Can you please be more specific? I'm against any attempt at overturning elections, and I'm not aware of any such acts by any of the Democratic officials I voted for or follow closely. EDIT: hopefully you remember how quickly Clinton conceded, and how that still has not happened this year. There's evil to see anywhere you look hard enough, but it's a fairly simple task to weigh them.
Well, there was "he didn't legitimately win, because Hillary won the popular vote". That's just talk, though, not actual action, but it undermines the legitimacy of the election in peoples' minds. Then there was impeachment on, bluntly, very political grounds rather than legitimate reasons. It wasn't like the beginning of the movement to impeach Nixon during Watergate. This time was just looking for some chance, any chance, to accuse him of something, to try to remove him. That seems to me clearly to be "attempting to cancel the results of the 2016 election".
Yes, I remember that Clinton conceded quickly. Trump should have done so as well, at the latest three days after the election. It's over, it's been over, and it's going to stay over.
But Trump is absolutely making a fool of himself by continuing to fight, and in the process he is damaging the norms that keep this creaking democracy functioning. So far, he hasn't gotten anywhere because people (who nominally should be on his side) haven't gone along with his BS - from the governor of Georgia, to the Supreme Court justices he appointed.
I worry, though, that next time it will be worse - that people will be willing to go along. And I worry about that for the left, not just for the right. In fact, I worry about it somewhat more for the left. The right has (some) people who believe in the rule of law, and things like "originalism". The left has (some) people who believe in the "living" constitution, and judicial activism. I worry that if, say, President Harris tries to follow this same playbook in 2024, some on the left in positions of power will be more willing to go along than some on the right have been in 2020.
On the other hand, there are far too many people who are still following what I can only call a cult of personality around Trump. They worry me on the right. If they haven't come to their senses by 2024, and Trump runs again...
So, yeah. Trump is at the moment worse. I oppose his attempt to remain in power, and I am delighted at how others have refused to play along. But I worry about both the right and the left in the future. Within the next 20 years, I think it's likely that someone will try this again.
Biden has the chance, maybe, to strengthen our institutions and repair some of the damage. Or he has the chance to continue to try to make them more partisan, but in the opposite direction of the last four years. Will he be wise, or just political?
"it undermines the legitimacy of the election in peoples' minds"
In other words, the EC is sacrosanct and uncriticizable? This statement alone suggests to me that I should stop typing.
Impeachment was on the grounds of national security, not partisan poltics. At least one Republican Senator agreed. You can beg to differ.
Originalism is exclusively a fantasy based in the observer's desires and perceptions of what they think the Framer's would have wanted. It would be better if we prioritized the actual values of liberty, justice, etc, and the real outcomes of government policy we can all observe, instead of what we would like to believe people who have been dead for centuries may have believed. Wouldn't they likewise have worried more about solving the problems they faced in the present?
The Constitution is a living document whether we'd like to accept that or not. It is fundamentally not the same as it was in the beginning, and it is a changeable document. Originalism from, my perspective, is almost always leveraged to maintain institutional control in the hands of a small, wealthy, and white group. We'd only have white landowners voting, after all, if the Constitution never changed.
I'm curious if you think that letting the Senate stand as an unchanged institution, for example, without ever adding more states as we have in the past to resolve political impasses, will lead to less of a partisan divide or more. What will happen in 20 years, when government has continued to be paralyzed by an Upper House that will fundamentally not accept the legitimacy of its opposition, as I have seen personally under Mitch McConnell (let's be clear, they cannot be seen to negotiate with a black man, otherwise they will be primaried)?
You keep suggesting that Democrats are somehow going to turn into a different party than they are, while not producing evidence, all the while the GOP continues its slide into rank despotism. The House Minority leader himself signed onto the absurd Texas lawsuit. I have seen no evidence that voters who participate in the Democratic primary will tolerate any degree of the election disruption that GOP leadership repeatedly rams down our throats (again, to save their skins in their gerrymandered districts).
That kind of throwing up your hands and exclaiming my corrupt side is better than your corrupt side is a necessary step in the escalation of political violence and the ascendency of authoritarian regimes.
It's unfortunate that the article you linked leads with a headline citing vague "blue states" but then only talks about NY's (a single state) parochial, extremely outdated electoral system. If the author was trying to argue that both parties engage in voter suppression on the same scale, they did not provide nearly enough evidence to offset the rampant discrimination GOP state legislatures engage in every cycle.
Yes, NY should update its voting codes. So should nearly every red state (and blue states should get ahead of the curve and implement RCV or other similar measures)
So we’re told Trump was trying to take over the Supreme Court yet oddly all his appointments dismissed the fraud case. Odd how these monsters seem to have acted completely sanely. It’s almost like they’re judges and liberals are liable to catastrophizing like any human.
So, if someone says they want to be a tyrant and are unsuccessful, no one should talk about how the wannabe tried in the first place? I don't understand, because to me, the fact that we can speak out in the first place and make noise about it is one of the main reasons tyranny is not likely EDIT: it is as if the miner strikes the canary dead for chirping
I mean Obama invoked the WWI espionage act more than every president combined before him against journalists.
That’s tyranny too but liberals didn’t make as much noise as they do about Orange Hitler who’s led a pretty typical Republican presidency and managed to continuously piss off the war industry.
The same industry that’s kept us in a constant state of war for near 20 years because of their enormous sway over “respectable” presidents the liberal managerial class fawns over.
This is typical? Out of curiosity, how young are you? If you got an advanced degree, was it in STEM? I'm amazed you can say that. EDIT: to be clear, the Electoral College meets today, some states have to meet in secret because of threats of violence. That is unprecedented in modern history. Only a few nights ago, fascistic street gangs roamed the streets of the nation's capital, vandalizing African American churches and sparking random acts of violence. This is normal for you?
Are we talking Mussolini? Cause I think invoking fascism is debatable - at best it should be qualified. But the way you’re expressing it is sensational, as though you’re unable to critique your own viewpoint and leave the possibility that you’re wrong.
You did your very best to not address anything I said. The fact that we live in sensational times does not make factual descriptions of events sensationalized. This is not normal.
Trump sold $8bn of weapons to Saudi Arabia, in the face of huge opposition even from congress. Combine that with killing the Iran nuclear deal so the region is vastly less stable, war industry is doing just great.
Trump also allowed the Saudis to murder and dismember a US journalist with zero consequences.
> Trump also allowed the Saudis to murder and dismember a US journalist with zero consequences.
I mean the Saudis are linked to 9/11 and Bush chose to launch into forever war in Iraq and Afghanistan.
It’s a fundamental element of the populist scepticism that “respectable” politicians are competent at anything.
And something like one murder is precisely the type of sickening academic response about decency that somehow is supposed to shield the decades of foreign policy mishaps, atrocities and incompetence.
Great comment. There's a pervasive lack of self-awareness among the right, manifesting as a pathological inability to empathize with individuals in other groups. Introspection can be painful at times, but it's necessary to be a morally full and content person.
Yes and what’s described in the comment is what I wanted after the 2016 election! I thought the electoral college should have selected someone else, I thought Trump should not have been sworn in to office, and I wanted him removed on the first day. I honestly believed it might happen because it seemed like the only sensible thing.
This election fraud nonsense is payback. It’s awful that the right can’t see that this is terrible for everyone. It’s terrible that the left can’t admit that the same passions existed on their side after the 2016 election.
I don’t want to argue about which side is worse. I’m not trying to highlight hypocrisy. I’m simply saying that the eye for an eye mentality has us all stuck.
I’m hopeful that Biden does understand all of this. His demeanor throughout all of this inspires some hope. We need more people on both sides to follow his lead.
it's time to step back and try to be more honest with oneself
I'm a leftist fwiw, so please don't condescend to me about being honest with myself - today's problem is from my wing of the political spectrum. It's shameful.
One of the "sides" here has been trying to "cancel" the votes of 80 million Americans to install a permanent autocratic government.
And the other side has spent 4 years trying to cancel a President they don't like elected by people they don't like.
See how we can both do that?
I think that's a red herring attempt to drag the topic away from the original point of social and cultural persecution.
It's extraordinary the way some people will do everything they can to deny the obvious - that the worst representatives of the left today are doing exactly the same as the right wing McCarthyites of yore.
It's long past time for those of us on the left who genuinely claim liberal values to own it.
Gavin McInnes has described the Proud Boys as a "drinking club," one that happens to march around in specific colored shirts. McInnes literally modeled the Proud Boys on the early years of the Nazi party.
No not literal nazis. They're just fascist white supremacists. I don't understand why so many people dislike using "nazi" as a shorthand for "fascist white supremacists".
I'm reading the wiki on them (admittedly not the best or most unbiased source) and I don't really buy that they're white supremacists since among other things their leader is afro-cuban. But fascistic sure, I could see that.
Without playing the enlightened centrist card too strongly I don't see anything particularly more disturbing about the proud boys than I have from antifa. Of course antifa can't be accused of being fascistic since their name is literally "anti-fascism" and if you call yourself anti facist then obviously it is impossible to be a fascist.
What should disturb you is that there were far more deaths caused by right-wing terrorists than by left-wing terrorists in the past year, like, by a factor of 20 or 30.
So no, the violence is not equal on both sides. One side is, objectively, worse. White supremacy and neofascism are the biggest threats to the country right now. It's not Muslims and it's not immigrants. If letting Antifa have their music-festival autonomous zones is the price we must pay to stop nazis from running amok in America's streets, so be it.
Also, I hope Biden restructures the Supreme Court and they overturn Brandenburg v. Ohio, paving the way for criminalizing hate speech in America so law enforcement can finally crack down on these groups.
>...Also, I hope Biden restructures the Supreme Court and they overturn Brandenburg v. Ohio, paving the way for criminalizing hate speech in America so law enforcement can finally crack down on these groups.
There are many who would like to criminalize speech they don't like. What they don't realize is that the results likely wouldn't be what they were hoping for.
Brandenburg overturned cases like U.S. v. Schenck which involved whether Schenck could be convicted under the Espionage Act for the crime of writing and distributing a pamphlet that expressed his opposition to the draft. That is the dangerous idea that sent a person to prison.
The law enforcement have always had a weird relationship with white supremacy. For example, The Base is not classified as a terrorist group, despite the fact that their members travel abroad to Ukraine to fight in Donbass, and they explicitly state in captured Telegram(tm) communications that they are training with the paramilitaries so they can more efficiently commit acts of terror when they return to the U.S. Despite that, the FBI still does not designate them as terrorists. The FBI prefers to call them "racially motivated violent extremists" or RMVEs. Still, officially, the FBI considers RMVEs to be equivalent in threat to foreign terrorists, but this was only recently announced in 2019. Progress is slow, but it happens. The whole cyberwar with 8chan has been fascinating to watch and it has given me a lot of hope for the future. I highly recommend reading if you are uninformed.
White supremacist fascist terrorism in the U.S. is real hard to deal with, mostly because it is very well hidden and decentralized. Communications are primarily through private end-to-end encrypted messaging apps. Organizations are more like alliances of isolated autonomous cells rather than one unified structure. Symbols, names and logos are often changed to avoid any association with genocide or fascism. The people who actually commit terrorist acts, such as Patrick Crusius who killed 20 people in an El Paso Walmart, are not publicly associated with any specific group, despite being radicalized through public communication channels appropriated by such groups. The cryptic nature of white supremacist groups also grants them considerable immunity to information war. "Antifa" and "Black Lives Matter" are recognizable brands with icons, logos, flags, colors; anyone can download those symbols and use them to misrepresent and discredit the movement. This in my opinion was the greatest mistake that Black Lives Matter and Antifa made. They underestimated and continue to underestimate the power of the media misinformation machine which is currently targeting them. They still haven't accepted that we are post-truth, post-reality, operating on a purely emotional level. They will find great success when they learn how to use their messaging to connect with Americans on the heart level rather than trying to use shocking slogans to communicate complex high-level intellectual concepts to literal primates. For example, "DEFUND THE POLICE" was a terrible slogan almost perfectly designed to fail, despite the fact that I would not mind defunding the police if it meant we could offer better education to the 40% of American children currently failing school under social distancing.
The world now revolves around memes and emotions, not facts and science. Activism can only succeed if it is adapted to this new era of humanity.
Forgive me for not pitying the poor conservative, who has controlled the legislature for a decade, the White House for a term, and the Supreme Court for decades to come.
McCarthyism has little bearing on current political realities other than a passing resemblance.
I don't think we're quite there yet, but it conjures up modern-day videos of people being accused of white supremacy and told that the evidence for it is the fact that they don't see it. I wish I was joking. This[0] was posted recently on one of my hyper-progressive acquaintances Instagram. Does it not have a similar level of paranoia as when people chased witches or communists?
I think that's wrong in a way that's kind of subtle. It seems to equate the system being created by intentional minds with the system being an intentionally-created one. But intentional people can still be non-intentional participants in emergent phenomena.
Tweaking it brings up an important point that's made in debates here on HN about privacy, censorship, etc., in relation to developer ethics. That is, if you are an intelligent and intentional participant in building something, and you're not thinking about second-order effects, the system you're building will still have them.
The intention in making Facebook more "engaging" probably wasn't to have radicalizing isolated communities. But Facebook was intentionally developed toward more engagement, and that was the result. Ask people who worked on the project and they'll almost certainly tell you they had no intention of worsening the situation in Myanmar. But the system that led there was still intentionally created.
Not that it necessarily addresses your actual point, but regarding Facebook, engagement is the malicious intention. Claiming that Facebook developers didn't intend to spread memetic plagues, only to increase engagement, is like claiming that armed robbers didn't intend to shoot people, only to steal their money.
You say this as if "socialism" and "communism" aren't routinely deployed as scare words against everyone to the left of Mitt Romney. That paranoia is still present — it just goes unnoticed because the censorship campaign was largely successful.
This is "whataboutism." Rather than relate to validity (or invalidity) of my point, you are re-framing the argument ("You say this as if") in a way that suggests I need to defend someone else doing something else.
It’s not whataboutism — I'm disputing your implication that censorship is an illiberal exception to the norm. You would have the reader believe that there is a unique and notable paranoia surrounding accusations of white supremacy, when in fact it's a fairly typical manifestation of the proud American tradition of suppressing "problematic" viewpoints.
FWIW, I read the parent as agreeing with your overall claim, but pointing out that the situation is actually even worse than you implied. (Namely, that the communist witch hunt never really stopped, and is ongoing concurrently with the white supremacist witch hunt.)
From the article: "McCarthy—brash and ill-mannered but to many authentic and true—boiled it all down to what anyone could understand: we had “lost China” and would soon lose Europe as well, because the State Department—staffed, of course, under Democratic Presidents—was full of treasonous pro-Soviet intellectuals. It was as simple as that."
Well, as the Venona project cables declassified in 1995 show, the State Department didn't just contain intellectuals that were pro-Soviet: it contained actual Soviet agents in contact with the USSR. This was by no means restricted to the State Department, but also included the Treasury, OSS (pre-CIA), and even the White House. See here: https://web.archive.org/web/20110514040131/http://www.access....
In addition, it is now known that the CIA ran an operation, at the request of Allen Dulles, to feed McCarthy false information about who in the government were Soviet spies with the deliberate purpose of discrediting him: https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/48603/did-the-c....
Maybe this calls for a remake of "The Crucible", not as tragedy, but as supernatural horror.