'We Need to Do McCarthyism to the Tenth Power'

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/2026/03/joseph-mccarthy-revivalism-trump/686258/

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https://archive.li/YLSvH

For decades, Senator Joseph R. McCarthy’s name has been used as shorthand for the opposite of the aspirational ideal of civilized American politics. In the way that Kleenex has become interchangeable with tissue, McCarthyism, for many, is an eponym for the unjust, reprehensible use of political power. Indicating that anything resembled the tactics and smears of the late senator from Wisconsin has been enough to suggest that such behavior was out of bounds, with no rightful place in our modern politics. But now comes a small, influential group of hard-line right-wingers who believe that, in the words of one popular meme in such circles, McCarthy was right.

McCarthyite revivalism has flitted around the edges of American conservatism since the senator fell from grace during his conspiratorial anti-Communist campaign in the 1950s. In 1954, the conservative patron saint William F. Buckley Jr. and his friend and fellow conservative thinker L. Brent Bozell Jr. defended the senator in their book, McCarthy and His Enemies, as a sometimes-misguided figure unfairly maligned for his justified quest to root out Communist influence in government. Buckley called himself a “critic friendly to McCarthy” in 1959 and continued to defend the senator for decades.

The conservative media personality Ann Coulter, in her 2003 book, Treason, made the case that McCarthy had been right that the government was crawling with Communists, and that the greater problem was that Democrats “didn’t give a damn” about Soviet infiltration. Steve Bannon, a former senior adviser to Donald Trump and a MAGA-world podcaster, has been making the case for McCarthy’s rehabilitation since at least 2013 and remains fixated on the cause. When I recently raised the matter with him, he told me that “McCarthy is a hero to me” and explained that he had tried to buy the North Carolina home of McCarthy’s most famous target, General George C. Marshall. (Bannon said he ended up buying a home nearby.) More recently, the idea that “McCarthy was right” has been embraced by other influential voices around Trump—who learned some of his own hardball tactics from McCarthy’s chief counsel, Roy Cohn—though not, apparently, by the president himself. Some of his only searchable public utterances about the senator have been negative: In separate posts on X in 2018 and 2019, he cited a “Joseph McCarthy style Witch Hunt” and “modern day McCarthyism” in decrying the special-counsel investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election.

The case for McCarthy’s rehabilitation centers on the contention that the senator has been unfairly maligned and was correct in his choices of both his enemies and his tactics—and that, if anything, he didn’t go far enough, limited as he was by the relative decorum of the times. (The tide of public opinion turned against McCarthy when he was challenged by the U.S. Army’s chief counsel Joseph Welch with the famous question “Have you no sense of decency, sir?”—a rocket at the time that by today’s standards of political discourse could be considered something of a softball.)

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