Comment by virissimo | Hacker News Reader

Comment by virissimo | Hacker News Reader

I read "The Crucible" in a high school English class and it significantly affected my political outlook, but having learned more of the history of that era (much of it not public knowledge when I first read it and certainly not when it was written) it's no longer clear to me that it still works as allegory.

From the article: "McCarthy—brash and ill-mannered but to many authentic and true—boiled it all down to what anyone could understand: we had “lost China” and would soon lose Europe as well, because the State Department—staffed, of course, under Democratic Presidents—was full of treasonous pro-Soviet intellectuals. It was as simple as that."

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. This was by no means restricted to the State Department, but also included the Treasury, OSS (pre-CIA), and even the White House. See here: https://web.archive.org/web/20110514040131/http://www.access....

In addition, it is now known that the CIA ran an operation, at the request of Allen Dulles, to feed McCarthy false information about who in the government were Soviet spies with the deliberate purpose of discrediting him: https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/48603/did-the-c....

Maybe this calls for a remake of "The Crucible", not as tragedy, but as supernatural horror.

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.

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.

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.

Freedom has a fundamental asymmetry: it's much easier to give it up than to get it back. Imagine a society where it's possible to sell yourself into slavery -- you start out free, but in a moment of desperation you lose it forever.

Enemies of a free state use the state's freedom against it by exploiting this asymmetry. A moment of naivety by a voter or someone in power, or a traitor/spy, can dramatically undermine freedom.

The only solution is vigilence, which is hard to keep up forever. The Bill of Rights helps, but at some point we need to reject the politicians that are too naive to defend freedom.

EDIT: The socialist movement in the U.S. is of grave concern. Especially the Bernie Sanders brand, where he's a nice guy but somehow can't even recognize a failing socialist state a few years before it fails (Venezuela).

This argument is similar to Karl Popper's Paradox of Tolerance [1], where authoritarians can use freedoms given to them by a society to remove those freedoms from others.

However, the statement insisting that Bernie Sanders will somehow turn the USA into Venezuela sounds more like dogmatic rhetoric more than something that is based on concrete fact.

Similar policies to those proposed in America by progressive Democrats, which the American Republican party frequently refers to as being socialist, have been implemented in some countries (see the Nordic Model [2]) without it turning into a disaster.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nordic_model

If socialist policies are going to be implemented successfully in the U.S., they need to be implemented by people who can tell the difference between Denmark and Venezuela. Sen. Sanders, while otherwise seemingly intelligent, cannot.

https://www.sanders.senate.gov/newsroom/must-read/close-the-...

Is the idea that all people should have access to healthcare and education really "of grave concern"?

The problem is not the healthcare, but the power that the government is asking for, and the foolishness in thinking that the power grab will stop at some reasonable point.

If Vermont decided to have socialized medicine, I don't really care. But implementing it across the entire US is not going to work out well.

I'm not a fan of socialized medicine, but let's say you want to do it. The first thing to do if you want it to be successful is start with a medium-small state, and then take over a part of the system (e.g. emergency care). Show us all how great that is, and slowly expand. Administrators would gain experience, mistakes would be fixable, hard social questions get answered, etc., and if everything goes well maybe the whole country moves over.

A big bill for the whole country from someone who thought things in Venezuela were just peachy in 2011 is not a path for success.

For one thing, Sanders was not proposing a fully government-run healthcare system. Realistic options would be "a good-quality public option available at the federal level", or "single payer" healthcare where the government becomes the single main insurer, at least for basic preventative care and emergencies, or some other policy that ensures there is a "social safety net" in place that includes access to modern healthcare.

Sanders misjudgment about Venezuela is a valid criticism, but let's stop with the Red Scare rhetoric about socializing things. If we were going to socialize something, we would be talking about directly worker-owned enterprises. Ironically, that might actually be much better than just having the government run everything.

Also, you have deluded yourself if somehow you don't already think the US government is an abusive beast that exists in large part to create and maintain power for itself. Is healthcare really the straw that broke the camel's back? Is the government really that much worse than a private corporation that has almost no exposure to market forces? I can't exactly vote for the CEO of Aetna.

I think many people would be open to something other than "medicare for all", but so far that is the only serious public proposal that achieves the goal of ensuring access to modern, humane healthcare for all Americans.

> 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.

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