Regardless of how McCarthyism is antagonized under post Cold War era, it is not at all clear to me that such crackdowns wouldn't have been essential in ensuring the culture war is not lost to the Soviet Union.
How about you check out the rest of the western world, where each single democracy had their own pickings with communist tendecies. And most of them handled that in the common sense way of giving workers basic protections and ensuring their share of wealth so they don't feel the need to go to the communists.
Worked pretty well for most European countries.
Although, once communism was gone, the ideology of neolibral economic thinking took over and thus all benefits to workers were seen as unnecessary expenses. Leading to the current rise in nationalism and fascism nearly everywhere.
It is pretty simple: If you want all people to carry a system, all people need to feel like they profit from its existence. Once the mask slips and people realize they aren't profiting, they will be unwilling to hold up their side of the social contract. This is what is happening right now.
Yup, and the response to from the owner class is not to uphold the social contract, but to renegotiate it.
"the whole structure of society will be up for debate and reconfiguration." - Sam Altman
I mean I am actually impressed by the sizeable part of the population media moguls managed to convince into a cultish devotion to lie to themselves against their own naterial interests. This is bad everywhere, but the current US has a propaganda machine that is truly astonishing, in a scary way.
The problem with that is that authoritarians have no incentive to figure out the real roots of a problem. Like a doctor that always blames it on some devil, demon, or whatnot when you go to them an authoritarian will not solve the problem, because every (real) crisis is a chance to blame the (fictional) enemy.
Has it though? It appears most of Europe is by and large a failed state collapsing under such communist-adjacent policies plus unbounded immigration. I would not want to be Europe today, so yeah, to the extent McCarthyism has been a protection against that, kudos.
To most europeans there are more important things than money, especially those working in tech who likely earn enough to have a great quality of life. Also lots of them have been to the US and made their own minds up.
https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/happiest-...
Ignore the US; keep believing that Sweden is happier than Spain :)
They should really call it something like "World ESG Index."