6
movements and democratic institutions. Beginning almost simultaneously with
McCarthy’s censure in l954, accounts of McCarthyism forged new assessments of
populism. The contributors to The New American Right (1955) offered variations in their
assessments of the causes of McCarthyism but all concluded that the phenomenon had its
origins in historically unstable forces in American political culture of which populism
was the major previous manifestation. Several contributors complained about the loss of
New Deal politics based upon “material aims and needs” and formulated in “highly
programmatic” terms through “concrete legislation” (1955, 44, 167-68).
Now politics
had a “dense irrationality” about it that was a reflection of a “serious and restless
dissatisfaction” with contemporary life. While the personality of McCarthy himself
received attention, his supporters, defined as arriviste blue-collar workers and small
business people, were extensively examined. These were, Lipset remarked, the same
people who supported Mussolini in Italy, Hitler in Germany and Peron in Argentina. The
“pseudo-conservatism” of the lower classes was for Hofstadter the result of an “enormous
hostility to authority, which could not be admitted to consciousness.” These men and
women enjoyed seeing “outstanding generals, distinguished secretaries of state, and
prominent scholars browbeaten and humiliated” by an upstart like McCarthy.
These analyses were followed by renewed defenses after the 1960s. Michael Paul
Rogin (1967) blamed the dominant interpretation of McCarthyism as a manifestation of
populist culture on the fears of “pluralist” intellectuals. Writers like Lipset and Hofstadter
derived their theory from a longing for an autonomous responsible elite that they saw as a
bulwark against radical populist protest. According to Rogin, McCarthyism was not a
mass movement at all but the result of a partisan strategy to gain political power. All
Convention