[EL] "Electoral McCarthyism"

[Kogan, Vladimir]

Ned rightly notes some striking parallels between Trump’s influence today and the Red Scare. One reason elites (both Democratic and Republican) did not want to take on McCarthy was because they worried about the electoral costs of doing so. Several prominent members of congress who spoke out against him – Sen. Milliard Tydings of Maryland, who led a commission that largely debunked McCarthy’s claims about communist infiltration of the State Department, and Sen. William Benton of Connecticut, who introduced a resolution to expel McCarthy form the Senate, were targeted by McCarthy and lost their reelection bids in 1950 and 1952, respectively. The New York Times ran a front page story after the elections, trumpeting McCarthy’s potent electoral threat:

[Title: McCarthy Senate Power Now Deeply Etrenched - Description: "Senator's Political Influence Shown in Campaign Gives Him New Prestige"  "And the Senate now knows what it then suspected: Senator McCarthy is a very bad man to cross politically."]
[cid:image005.jpg at 01D7819B.7142B4B0]

In his classic Congress: The Electoral Connection, David Mayhew would later write: “Nothing is more important in Capital Hill politics than a shared conviction that election returns have proven a point. Thus the 1950 returns were read not only as a rejection of health insurance but as a ratification of McCarthyism.”

Stewart Alsop’s book The Center recounts a scene in the Senate when Sen. Herbert Lehman of New York stood up to challenge McCarthy, who snarled, “Go back to your seat, old man!” Alsop writes:
“Lehman looked all around the chamber, appealing for support. He was met with silence and lowered eyes. Slowly, he turned and walked [back to his seat]. The silence of the Senate that evening was a measure of the fear which McCarthy inspired in almost all politicians. … Old Sen. Lehman’s back, waddling off in retreat, seemed to symbolize the final defeat of decency.”

Interestingly, Adam Berinsky and Gabe Lenz have an outstanding paper<https://academic.oup.com/poq/article/78/2/369/2270249?casa_token=EVpuhS4tIgEAAAAA:liRrUXVYvwCu4VOvv6zecmvZAElm9iB0lX6Ux_ChZqCO6f9i5TBhvcU1HCmplfGHaC4dibxrYWTt> from a few years ago revisiting the claim that McCarthy was popular and that standing up to him caused public officials to pay an electoral price. They reanalyze all of the congressional elections from those years and actually find no electoral cost to being targeted by McCarthy – it just happened to be the case that 1950 and 1952 were two big Republican wave elections (hurting Democrats that were in McCarthy’s crosshairs and those who weren’t equally). The conventional wisdom at the time, which fueled the fear and McCarthy’s power, turned out to be misguided.

I think there is an important lesson here – it is far too easy to infer meaning from election outcomes when many possible alternative interpretations exist. And it’s hard to know whether public support drives political influence or vice versa. For example, are Republican elites correctly worried about criticizing Trump because of his popularity among Republican voters—or is popularity among Republican voters the result of lack of unified elite condemnation from other party leaders, which would likely affect his popularity?

All of which brings me back to Ned’s post: “The 1950s Red Scare lasted as long as it did, from my understanding of the history, because the public was willing to be duped by the mendacity of Joe McCarthy and there wasn’t sufficient pushback from Republicans opposed to McCarthy…” If one believes Berinsky and Lenz, it doesn’t seem like the public was really duped – and sufficient pushback from Republican elites earlier than it eventually came would have certainly affected those dynamics.

Vlad

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