The Ominous Legacy of Joseph McCarthy for America Today

The sense of alarm and outrage toward communism abroad and the welfare state at home expressed by Senator Capehart during the early years of the Cold War has uncanny parallels to the current situation in the United States. The deadly attacks of September 11, 2001 and the subsequent invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq remind us that the past is prologue to the present. Relentless American expansion in the half century after 1945 has been replete with irony, paradox, and contradiction. The brutal process of global domination, including control over critical economic markets, runs roughshod over longstanding ideals of democracy, human rights, the rule of law, and international cooperation. With the pivotal election of Ronald Reagan to the presidency in 1980, the right wing instituted not only a renewed reaction against New Deal programs, but an effort to contain the social and cultural transformation of the 1960s and 1970s, including the momentous opposition to the Vietnam War