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So the Democrats Were Surprised by the Republican Attack on Their Morality?

by P.M. Carpenter

Mr. Carpenter is a writer and historian.

In reading the lamentations of today’s Democratic strategists, I am convinced that not one of them has ever cracked a history book. The recent correlation between the electorate’s winning-edge support of nebulous “moral values” and voting Republican has gripped the Dems with overnight frenzy. Those clever Republicans. They employed some kind of stealth strategy. They caught us off guard. It’s all so new, this demagogic morality thing.

Yes, it’s new – as new as Joseph McCarthy.

In 1950 the Wisconsin senator gave a little speech in Wheeling, West Virginia. With respect to defining moments of twentieth-century demagoguery, the profound distinction of his talk was that it sharply brought into focus the Right’s almost volcanic, mid-century shift in political message. Given the phenomenal yet unexpected public attention the speech garnered, McCarthy had, somewhat unwittingly, spearheaded the Republican Party’s detour from defending secular capitalism to stumping for Christian morality. In coming decades the Right increasingly would hold itself up as the sole political exponent of “moral values” against those whom it claimed sought to destroy them – the Liberal Elite. Encapsulated by McCarthy in the course of an hour was this element of the party’s evolving stock advocacy which Barry Goldwater, the New Right, Ronald Reagan and the Reagan revolutionists and now George W. Bush would further exploit.

McCarthy’s Wheeling speech is most remembered as a deranged political rant – a wholly unfounded, opportunistic diatribe against the Truman administration’s ghastly tolerance of in-house communists. But at its core it was much more: It was a meticulously packaged sermon, a call to moral sensibilities, a damnation of American infidels. There was his injunction that “Karl Marx … expelled people from his Communist Party for mentioning such things as ... morality.” There was his reminder of “the great difference between our western Christian world and the atheistic Communist world.” There were his apocalyptic comments on the “final, all-out battle between communistic atheism and Christianity”; that “one or the other must triumph in the end”; that “this is the time for the show-down between the democratic Christian world and the Communist atheistic world.” There was his ultranationalism wrapped in a Christian framework, that we were “the strongest nation on earth and, at least potentially, the most powerful ... morally.” There was, above all, his injunction that we suffered because of a “lack of moral uprising on the part of the … American people”; that we were, simply, committing a “moral lapse.”

Yet salvation awaited, and none other than internal enemies – those who had rooted themselves deeply into the Democratic administration – had shown the way. A “pompous diplomat [Dean Acheson] in striped pants, with a phony British accent” had “proclaimed to the American people that Christ on the Mount endorsed communism,” and this had “lighted the spark which is resulting in a moral uprising.”

Thus did McCarthy launch what would become modern conservatism’s modus operandi. Of critical importance was that he chiefly did so not against international communism, but as a partisan vanguard against domestic liberalism. “The moral uprising” McCarthy outlined would “end only when the whole sorry mess of twisted, warped thinkers are swept from the national scene so that we may have a new birth of national honesty and decency in government.” The enemy wasn’t Joe Stalin. It was the Democratic Party.

McCarthy, of course, buried himself by committing that most unpardonable of American political sins: He dissed the U.S. military. But a few years later a simpatico partisan, Barry Goldwater, resurrected McCarthy’s theme of lapsed national morality in a desperate demagogic ploy to revive a flatlining presidential campaign. Then came the theme’s re-resurrection in the collective personage of the New Right, a morally apoplectic bunch inspired by Goldwater’s 1964 foray into tribal self-righteousness; then came the political Moral Majority and Ronald Reagan’s cynical Goldwateresque venture into morality-peddling; then the Christian Coalition in lockstep with the Gingrich Gang; and finally – or, rather, most recently – came the famously pure George W. Bush.

It doesn’t take a crack student of American history to see this long political thread, yet it seems to have come as something of a revelation to Democratic strategists on November 3, 2004. Now they’re huddling to grapple with the puzzling development – fifty-four years after Joseph McCarthy debuted it.

With this group in strategic charge, care to wager on the 2008 election?

Mr. Carpenter's column is published weekly by History News Network and buzzflash.com.