Why I Wrote “The Crucible” (1996)

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.

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.

> 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 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.

Have you anything you can share about it?

What makes you think that HN readers agree with McCarthyism?

Well, witches are/were real. The magical powers part may be up for debate.

He specifically addresses this in the article.

So therefore it follows that blatant disregard for civil liberties is justified? I thought you guys were against "cancel culture."

...for he rails at Communism, when the land is almost lost in Capitalism; and would cry Fire! Fire! in Noah's flood.

Many of them were also imaginary, as history has made clear.

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.

There's not much of an equivalence between some professor saying something illiberal and the apparatus of state power doing something illiberal.

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.