Similar version of MaCarthyism possible?

(Hopefully the title is not misleading or redundant. I couldn't find another post like this in the search)

During a conversation I had with a few of my friends and my one friend's parents, it was brought into the conversation that I do not like Bush. His mom turned to me and saids " A good conservative boy like you doesn't like Bush." (This was not a sarcastic statement but made by one who's beliefs are very different from mine and is very "pro-conservative"/"anti-liberal")

I managed to get that conversation to die rather quickly, but it did intrigue me. Never, had i considered myself "conservative" or "liberal" for that matter. I never liked labeling people to one group or another.

However, as I was walking back from class a couple days later my mind went back to that phrase and I ended up with a curious question; Could the difference between those who are considered "Liberals" and those considered "Conservative" spiral out of control to the point where we have another MaCarthy like situation.

At one point in time I didn't believe it could. The fact that MaCarthy's time was a time of nuclear paranoia. But look now we have a similar level of paranoia to the point where we went to war over WMD's.

We have a situation of extreme polarization in politics, much like the cold war except this one seperates the country itself, rather than two different countries. It is still torn between two directions the country should go. You see it even on these forums, with political bashing back and forth.

Now this point might be seen as nothing to most, I find it to be one of the most intriguing. We no longer consider politics by parties. You are no longer a Democrat or Republican. You are Liberal or Conservative. Even ther term independant is hard to maintain. To me they have the same ring to them as Communist and Democratic. Two different veiws on the way a country should be governed and the label for them.

We have people who are against the war, college professors who have veiws against practices of our government, wether their opinon being right or wrong, being proclaimed traitors or unpatriotic and slammed by news outlets, such as FOX (I don't have any transcripts or tapes of when it was said but I remeber watching O'Reily as he called Mr. Churchill a traitor) and other "conservatives" in power. Now "Liberals" aren't gonna get off the hook here either. They do the same thing right back, with their political josting. Just look and what happened with Dan Rather who was to quick with a story for his own good. ABC (I think thats the station he worked for and i believe they are a little to the "liberal" side but i rarely watch anything but basketball on there.) reported a false story to try and bring down a major political figure.

I know the country and the world is in a different state than the cold war, and personally all I know is what I learned about the period in school. Yet, there seems to be enough instablity and hostility between the two groups. Now religion is being pulled in, most government branches have a power shift to the "conservative" side.

So I pose a nonbiased question;
Could the polarization between what are considered "liberal" and "conservative" persons result in classification blacklisting in the US(not to the point of execution like in MaCarthy's era but perhaps jail time)?


Note: sorry if the post is kind of long. I was just trying to give equal time to both sides and try to put the into context the reason I began to question this. Also, the reason i use quotation marks around conservative and liberal is because as I have said I never labeled myself, and would not want to label anyone else. Our veiws should be our own, formed by the truth we have discovered for ourselves.

Well its definitely not impossible. I'd like to think its unlikely but the fact is no one knows for sure what the future holds. A few more examples of "excesses" from either side could spark a major event in this false divide plagueing America.

Basically what your talking about seems to be a backlash directed against the defeated political group in our country. Who or what this political group is comprised of will be defined by the political "victors" in the future. The severity of the backlash depends upon the circumstances surrounding the defeat of the loser. It could be minor or it could be like the scenario you describe where even being associated with the losing group is grounds for social destruction.

Like I said before though no one knows what will happen for certain so lets all hope for the best and try to be civil to each other. It would be horrible if we lost sight of the big picture of what America is supposed to be about over partisan bickering.

Honestly, even though I abhor both forms of conservatism as frothing, foaming at the mouth fanboy wanking or the feverish Jesus Jones backslapping society, the chances of another McCarthyism are pretty slim.

As I say slim, I won't rule out the possibility, as long as first class nutters like Ann Coulter rewrite the history depicting Joseph McCarthy as anything other than the paranoid, manic depressive, alcoholic opportunist who ruined more lives than herpes. Or Michelle Malkin, an Asian American who is a major proponent and apologist for the Japanese internment camps, is allowed continued acceptance.

That being said, we live in a nation of 300 million people, and Bill O'Reilly has about two and a half million hardcore nightly fans. If those were UPN numbers, he'd be canceled after a week. To put this into perspective, at the hieght of the Dan Rather lynching, he still nearly doubled the number of viewers that O'Reilly had. Professional Wrestling still tops O"Reilly by nearly a million people.

One of the many reasons for this, and the reason for Joe Scarborough's recent fundementalist turn (Which, by the way, his hand ringing the other night was laughable..."God have mercy on us all..."), is that there is a glass ceiling for potential conservative viewers. They eached the top of their bubble, and now all these same conservative commentators are fighting for market share. Because they're fighting for market share, they each try to be more outlandish than the next. It's the same old story, OP ED are simply the 21rst century's soap operas.

THe only problem is that we've reached our threshold for shock. Eventually, you wake up the following morning after a party, and ask, "What the hell did I do last night?"

The thing is, and people often times forget this, is that Americans are actually decent and good people. For all the base, hatred proposed by the facilitators of shock politics, we live in a country of good neighbors. One recent example of this is Terry Sciavo, and while I pray that this thread doesn't turn into ANOTHER vegetable toss, the fact still remains that nearly 80% of Americans agree on the issue. This crosses all racial, cultural, and economic lines. Even a majority of Evangelicals agree.

Yet, MSNBC still runs TS promos with the tag, "America divided". Well, America is not divided at all. And that's sort of the point, McCarthyism most likely could not happan again, because as bad the rhetoric can be, Americans still have a weird kinship with each other.

At the end of the day, the question you have to ask yourself, as every American should ask themself, "If my neighbor needs help, will I help them?". Whether that neighor be gay or black or christian or liberal or conservative, I would bet you all the money in my pockets that they would.

All we have to do is ignore the fanatical 10 percent, 5 percent on either side of any issue

I'm not sure the populace as a whole is as polarized as the "mediasphere" is, at least I hope not. I think the increasingly media-centered nature of our civilization is affecting how we prioritize data, to put it simply: the loudest, most attention-getting voices are on the extremes. In a crowd, the person who starts yelling first gets the attention. The victory of the loudmouths, if you will.

This is old school definitions of McCarthyism. I have read both the KGB papers on spies in the U.S. and the recently declassified CIA documents on McCarthy.

If you are at this site, you dig conspiracy theories, right?

Suppose I tell you, that you are both wrong and right?

That many liberals did in fact become that way because of what they are taught about McCarthy.

And that everyting they know about him is wrong? Everything.

Let me put it this way- the CIA does not call this era the witch hunt era, the red scare era. They openly call it the CIA- McCARTHY WARS. That is a big hint.

If there is any interest in this topic, I'll post a thread on it.

Hey, everything I knew about the era turned out to be wrong, and I could handle it. Can you?

Notice it is always conservatives that give us these paranoia episodes in the United States. Conservatives enjoy stomping on civil liberties such as in the McCarthyism period and even before then. The problem with the civil liberties being stomped on is that there are always the Keitel's in government that continue to do evil knowingly because they are loyal to their oath.