One of the most difficult things for a conservative to write about is McCarthyism. Oh, I don’t mean “difficult” in the Oprah Book Club sense of difficult. It’s not painful, or heart-wrenching, or cathartic. I mean it is technically challenging to write about it with clarity and precision. The problem is simple: McCarthyism has come to mean anything liberals or leftists consider to be unfair, unjust, un-nice. It’s simply another example of the general phenomenon described by George Orwell when he wrote in “Politics and the English Language” that “The word Fascism has now no meaning except in so far as it signifies ‘something not desirable.’” (See “Orwell’s Orphans.”)
What makes McCarthyism so hard to discuss is that McCarthy behaved like a jerk, but he was also right. Every movement has its jerks, the Left included — but liberals are unwilling to elevate these people to villain status or to make their tactics into a full-blown “ism.” Jesse Jackson or Al Sharpton are perfectly willing to accuse any Tom, Dick, or Harry of racism without regard to the damage this might do their careers. But we don’t talk about “Jacksonism” or “Sharptonism,” even though being labeled a racist is the modern equivalent of being labeled a Communist. Indeed, being a prick has become something of a badge of honor on the Left. Alan Dershowitz is brilliant and eloquent. He is also one of the most obnoxious people in public life. Michael Moore is by all accounts so ugsome, so selfish, so noisome (yes, noisome), and so unlikable that if he’d been a conservative, the New York Times would have stepped on him and wiped its shoe on the curb. Feminists, gay activists, and other champions of social change even wear their nastiness on their sleeves. Just look at the bitch cult among feminists. There are any number of books dedicated to the glories of being a “bitch”: Bitch: In Praise of Difficult Women, Getting in Touch With Your Inner Bitch, and so on. Elizabeth Wurtzel, a feminist priestess of bitchdom, has explained that “bitch” is a sexist label for difficult, strong women. So, she argues that women should reclaim the word “bitch” in the same way as homosexuals reclaimed “queer.”
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