David Everitt shows that no one political faction has a monopoly on the urge to stifle the opposition. He addresses the question: Is there an echo of the old McCarthy era blacklists? The sad thing is that we have so many examples like this, and so few of the “I disagree with what you say, but defend your right to say it” type.
With the kind of demagoguery found in both periods comes an eagerness to stifle the opposition, sometimes successful, sometimes not, but always managing to inject intolerance into the public square. During the 1950s, the most damage done to political adversaries, and civil liberties in general, was perpetrated by right-wing zealots when they took advantage of the furor over the Korean War and installed a media purge. Leftists couldn’t match the right’s efforts – but not for lack of trying. During World War II, they had supported the Roosevelt administration’s sedition trials and the suppression of publications considered pro-Axis. Later, as the Cold War began, the National Council of American-Soviet Friendship demanded that an anti-Soviet film, The Iron Curtain, be banned, and the Voice of Freedom Committee attacked anti-Communist radio commentators by organizing protest campaigns against their sponsors, employing techniques that presaged the methods used later by Red hunters to instigate the blacklist. A similar tendency would even be embraced by avowed free-speech champion John Henry Faulk. Just three years after striking a blow for tolerance and fair play in his historic 1962 libel trial, he adopted the tactical thinking of his old enemies by urging the John Lindsay mayoral campaign to publicize the past political affiliations of rival candidate William F. Buckley in order to “shut him up.”
In our own times, the readiness to silence the opposition continues to crop up. While the right tried to derail the careers of Danny Glover and the Dixie Chicks, the left attempted to do the same for radio psychologist Laura Schlesinger and, just recently, proposed a bill to reinstate the Fairness Doctrine in an effort to undermine the influence of conservative talk radio. On the broader political scene, this habit has been accompanied by extremist rhetoric and paranoid conspiracy-mongering, also reminiscent of the blacklist period. Some on the left have characterized Dick Cheney as a Nazi, just as Secretary of State Dean Acheson was once branded the “Red Dean.” Many have recently fulminated over a Zionist, neo-conservative cabal that secretly controls the Bush administration, just as right-wingers once denounced an insidious group of Ivy League pinkos manipulating foreign policy in the early Cold War (while leftists simultaneously insisted that Truman was the puppet of Wall Street warmongers).