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Yes, another top level comment about The Origins of Woke from me, in the same thread on the same week. But this is about something else. I had an epiphany while reading the book.
I've wondered for many years why Marxism is more socially acceptable than racism when it's responsible for even more deaths than the Holocaust. It's because companies are (de facto) legally required to fire racists, but they're not required to fire Marxists. In fact, firing a Marxist for merely being Marxist would be illegal in California.
California has a state law against firing people for their political beliefs, but it didn't protect James Damore, who was fired in compliance with the law against creating a hostile work environment for protected groups.
It all adds up.
The relationship between McCarthyism and The Crucible is more complex than this, in a way which explains why 1950's anti-communism is as thoroughly discredited as it is.
The Crucible begins with allegations, backed by evidence, that a group of young women including Betty Parris and Abigail Williams were dancing naked in the trees (which was clearly illegal and considered dangerous in Puritan Salem, even if we moderns don't see it that way), that Tituba appeared to be casting spells on them (something everyone in 17th century Salem agreed was possible and dangerous, even though it isn't), and that they suffered strange symptoms as a result (which we now believe to be ergotism caused by rotten grain, but nobody knew that at the time). So the first batch of witchcraft allegations are serious and true in-universe. It then moves on to random accusations against low-status easy targets as Tituba and Abigail try to deflect blame (we don't know who most of the women called out are, but we are later told that Goody Good and Goody Osburn were dubiously sane old maids and that Goody Osburn had been homeless at one point). And then in the second act we get the bad-faith accusations against respectable middle-class Salemites. Miller is deliberately vague as to whether these are motivated by factional politics (there was an ongoing feud between the Putnams and the Nurses in real Salem, and Miller's Giles Corey thinks the whole thing is a plot by the Putnams to steal his land), personal beefs (like Abigail being butthurt after Proctor dumped her), or attempts to silence opposition (like the arrest of Proctor).
This is supposed to mirror the decline and fall of 50's anti-communism. McCarthy starts out by going after actual communists like the Rosenbergs, moves on to people on the left who are a bit weird, acquires a reputation for using bad-faith accusations of communist sympathy to silence opposition, and eventually ends up using bad-faith accusations of communist sympathy to pursue personal beefs. Remember the reason that McCarthy ultimately fell is that he dishonestly denounced various army officers who refused to give his lawyer's catamite a cushy job.
So the message Miller is trying to present is twofold:
Although his first targets are now known to be guilty, there is zero doubt that by the end McCarthy was spamming dishonest allegations of communist sympathy as a political tool, and that the anti-communist movement in the country fully supported him in doing so. This should have, and did, discredit anti-communism, and boost anti-anti-communism as an organising principle for the radical left - with the unfortunate side effect of partially rehabilitating communist fellow travellers. If McCarthy didn't want that to happen, then he should have admitted that George Marshall was a patriot and that Peress' promotion was routine based on the number of years since he graduated dental school.
Although anti-fascist movements spamming allegations of "fascist" against non-fascists are a dime a dozen on the anti-establishment left, they never had an HUAC/SSCI-sized platform until the Great Awokening (I also think they were idiots spamming "fascist" against almost everyone, rather than using it as a calculated tool against political opponents the way McCarthy did with "communist" or the ADL increasingly do with "Hate"). We are already seeing the consequences - organised anti-fascism is seen as a bad joke on the anti-establishment right, and the anti-establishment right is increasingly losing its desire to avoid looking fascist. In Italy, we have an actual fascist Prime Minister, in the sense that Fratelli d'Italia's predecessor party claimed spiritual continuity with Mussolini's Fascist Party and received the endorsement of the Mussolini family on that basis. We are also starting to see the pro-establishment right treat organised anti-fascism as a partisan grift, although they are still afraid of it. We are even starting to see (so far unsuccessful) attempts by the pro-establishment left to neuter woke-stupid the way the Army neutered anti-communism in the Army-McCarthy hearings.
If woke-stupid and dishonest anti-fascism fail, then even the good anti-fascism is going to be caught in the collateral damage, and there will be some inevitable (and unfortunate) rehabilitation of fascism and fascist fellow travellers, and Planet of Cops will have the same kind of reputation that The Crucible does now.
I expect that azov will be the first fascist fellow-travelers rehabilitated.
I'd say they already have been, but for a very different reason. Even Joseph Stalin could be rehabilitated if baddies invaded his country. Churchill's position (and I hope we can agree that he was not squishy in his anti-communism) on the enemy of my enemy was "If Hitler invaded Hell, I would make at least a favourable reference of the Devil in the House of Commons."
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I have yet to see a leftist use the term "McCarthyism" to mean "catching real threats at the start but going too far".The implication is always that Communist infiltrators didn't exist any more than actual witches.
I am British, and as Miller points out to the preface of The Crucible the British are better than most countries at avoiding this kind of political witch-hunt, but in the UK "McCarthyism" means using bad-faith allegations of communism as a political tool, and the people calling it out are entirely agnostic as to whether all the victims are innocent or just most of them. My school history textbook strongly implied that the anti-communist movement had already gone bad by the time McCarthy took over leadership from the HUAC. A quick check of Wikipedia suggests this is correct - the most dangerous communists were the Klaus Fuchs (caught based on the then-classified Venona decrypts), the Rosenbergs (caught by rolling up Fuchs' contacts), and Alger Hiss (found out by the HUAC before McCarthy delivered the "Enemies Within" speech and became a famous anti-communist).
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