We have heard teabaggers and the right wing attack President Obama as a socialist, communist, facist and a Nazi. We have also heard the birthers level blatantly racist attacks that President Obama was born in Kenya and is a Muslim. A recent poll showed that 30 percent of Republicans support the impeachment of President Obama.
More broadly, we have seen efforts at the State level to attack gay marriage and efforts to create paranoia among conservatives that the Federal Government is going to take away everyone's guns. These trends have been whipped into a frenzy by multi-billion dollar media moguls like Rupert Murdoch who runs Fox News. The question, as so-called Democrats on DU attack President Obama and the Democratic Party is are we ignoring the growing threat from the right?
If you look back at the history of McCarthyusm is that it did not begin with Joe McCarthy, but gradually grew. Are we on the cusp of Red Scare III?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McCarthyism
McCarthyism is the politically motivated practice of making accusations of disloyalty, subversion, or treason without proper regard for evidence. The term specifically describes activities associated with the period in the United States known as the Second Red Scare, lasting roughly from the late 1940s to the late 1950s and characterized by heightened fears of communist influence on American institutions and espionage by Soviet agents. Originally coined to criticize the anti-communist pursuits of U.S. Senator Joseph McCarthy, "McCarthyism" soon took on a broader meaning, describing the excesses of similar efforts. The term is also now used more generally to describe reckless, unsubstantiated accusations, as well as demagogic attacks on the character or patriotism of political adversaries.
During the post–World War II era of McCarthyism, many thousands of Americans were accused of being Communists or communist sympathizers and became the subject of aggressive investigations and questioning before government or private-industry panels, committees and agencies. The primary targets of such suspicions were government employees, those in the entertainment industry, educators and union activists. Suspicions were often given credence despite inconclusive or questionable evidence, and the level of threat posed by a person's real or supposed leftist associations or beliefs was often greatly exaggerated. Many people suffered loss of employment, destruction of their careers, and even imprisonment. Most of these punishments came about through trial verdicts later overturned,<1> laws that would be declared unconstitutional,<2> dismissals for reasons later declared illegal<3> or actionable,<4> or extra-legal procedures that would come into general disrepute.
The most famous examples of McCarthyism include the speeches, investigations, and hearings of Senator McCarthy himself; the Hollywood blacklist, associated with hearings conducted by the House Committee on Un-American Activities; and the various anti-communist activities of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) under Director J. Edgar Hoover. McCarthyism was a widespread social and cultural phenomenon that affected all levels of society and was the source of a great deal of debate and conflict in the United States.
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The historical period that came to be known as the McCarthy era began well before Joseph McCarthy's own involvement in it. Many factors contributed to McCarthyism, some of them extending back to the years of the First Red Scare (1917–20), inspired by Communism's emergence as a recognized political force. Thanks in part to its success in organizing labor unions and its early opposition to fascism, the Communist Party of the United States (CPUSA) increased its membership through the 1930s, reaching a peak of about 75,000 members in 1940–41.<5> While the United States was engaged in World War II and allied with the Soviet Union, the issue of anti-communism was largely muted. With the end of World War II, the Cold War began almost immediately, as the Soviet Union installed repressive Communist puppet régimes across Central and Eastern Europe.
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There were also more subtle forces encouraging the rise of McCarthyism. It had long been a practice of more conservative politicians to refer to liberal reforms such as child labor laws and women's suffrage as "Communist" or "Red plots."<6> This tendency increased in the 1930s in reaction to the New Deal policies of President Franklin D. Roosevelt. Many conservatives equated the New Deal with socialism or Communism, and saw its policies as evidence that the government had been heavily influenced by Communist policy-makers in the Roosevelt administration.<7> In general, the vaguely defined danger of "Communist influence" was a more common theme in the rhetoric of anti-Communist politicians than was espionage or any other specific activity.
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