Something really irritates me in all this taking sides on Russian influence in American politics.
The current wave of online discourse accusations of Russians influence things is not McCarthyism. McCarthyism is about punching down communism, while the current Russian stuff is solely about American exceptionalism by amplifying the xenophobia of interacting with people internationally online. There isn’t a side that says “Russian interference is cool,” which is what McCathyism requires, the debate is on the magnitude. It doesn’t help that there have been popular journalists that took up the McCathyite banner (and who also helped Fake News become so popular) because they are pushing their influence onto social media for their personal benefit.
McCarthyism would be the anti-leftist memes about how many people died to socialism/communism, because it’s a mostly false twisting of history to paint anyone who questions capitalism as siding with a murdering menace. It’s the general assumptions of how North Korea is going to execute their Olympians that don’t win medals. Even the fear of China becoming the largest economy are rooted in McCarthyist communism fear-mongering. People still believe in communism as a political idea, people feel the world is the aggressor to North Korea, and people feel China’s strong economy has been a global positive. The attack is to label those people as traitors to America, because McCarthyism is a Nationalist purity test.
So McCarthyism never went away, but just lumping it onto the USA’s xenophobia does an extreme disservice to dissecting the xenophobia, jingoism, (racial and political) nationalism, and general ignorance that has always been the roots of toxic political discourse in this country. Trying to dissect all of them at once will always fail, you need to speak clearly on every issue separately - especially in really complicated issues like Russia’s propaganda campaigns in the United States.
I’m with Chomsky on this one.
The leftist use of “neo-McCarthyism” is based in the idea that it’s actually both.
It’s a toxic mix of ideological, local and global politics. The original McCarthy era had as much to do with suppressing US workers and maintaining patriarchal white supremacy as it did with opposing the USSR. It was primarily an attack on the anti-racist pro-socialism wing of the union movement.
Although modern Russia is very much non-communist, the rhetoric from establishment Dem partisans routinely (and often deliberately) blurs that distinction.
Notice the glee with which accusations are thrown at Bernie/Stein/BLM/The Intercept/etc of being Russian (and sometimes “Soviet”) pawns. Note how all of the establishment Dem mockery of Trump’s parade referenced the USSR or DPRK instead of Nazi Germany. Check out what Hollywood is producing lately (not just Red Sparrow; Black Panther apparently has a plot based in suppressing global pseudo-Maoist revolution).
The red-baiting echoes in all of that are not coincidental. Some of it is just unconscious/systemic cultural influence, but some is the establishment Dems actively attempting to counter the rising popularity of socialism.
Also: although it is not the entire motivation, there is a connection between the CorpDems’ enthusiasm for Russiagate and the donor classes’ and security state’s interest in Ukraine/Iran/Syria. Oil, oil and oil.
Reminder of my general perspective on the Russia stuff: