McCarthy Down
When the Watkins Committee recommended that Senator Joseph McCarthy should be censured by the United States Senate on two of the five counts that they investigated, and condemned his behaviour on two others, they made a decision whose importance for other countries besides the United States should not be missed. A few months ago it was fashionable here in Britain to represent McCarthyism as the dominant factor in American politics and to prophesy that it would gain in power. At that time the Spectator was practically alone in the British Press in saying that Americans, through their own democratic machinery, would deal faithfully with this cancer in their midst. Now that they are manifestly doing it, our own anti-Americans are perhaps. a little more cautious about repre- senting their own bias as objective analysis of the American situation; but there is still little enough inclination to give the Americans credit for knowing their own business best. The fact that the confused and discreditable emotions to which McCarthy appeals go deep and spread wide in America is now being represented as a reason for still being anti-American even though McCarthy is cornered. What a miserable and contemptible thing this anti-Americanism is. Of course McCarthyism has numerous American supporters. Cf course it will take years to get rid of McCarthy himself. Although down, he is not out. But the important point is that opponents of McCarthy are more numerous, more sensible and more powerful than his followers. And they will win—the good Americans, the decent citizens who distrust both Communism itself and also this particularly vicious and dangerous way of dealing with it. They have nothing to learn from our own pseudo-intellectuals who, knowing nothing about America and caring nothing about Anglo-American good-will, forget the advancing Communist menace in order to pursue the retreating and discredited junior Senator from Wisconsin.
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