Are Liberals to Blame for the New McCarthyism?

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The Trump administration is carrying out a brazen crackdown on academic freedom: deporting students for writing op-eds, withholding funds from colleges that defy his control, and justifying it all as a response to anti-Semitism. Who is to blame for this? According to one popular theory on the left, the answer is liberals who have consistently supported free speech and opposed Donald Trump.
The logic of this diagnosis has a certain superficial appeal. Many of President Trump's authoritarian moves have been justified in terms of arguments that originated on the center-left. Liberals condemned the far left for fostering an intolerant atmosphere in academia. They criticized the message and methods of some pro-Palestinian demonstrators. Trump has seized on these complaints as a pretext to extort universities and target student demonstrators for deportation.
According to many left-wing critics, this sequence of events shows that, as David Klion writes in The Nation, 'erstwhile free speech champions' have 'helped lay the groundwork for Trump's second term.' An April article in Liberal Currents directs contempt toward 'the infamous Harper's letter,' an open letter defending free speech from threats on the left and the right, and blames mainstream Democrats for having 'laid the groundwork for where we are now.' These are just two examples of a very well-developed genre.
[Caitlin Flanagan: America's fire sale: get some free speech while you can]
The implication of these arguments is that Trump would not have won, or would now be having a harder time carrying out his neo-McCarthyite campaign of repression, if liberals had only refrained from denouncing left-wing cancel culture and the excesses of the post–October 7 protests. But to the extent that these events are connected, the responsibility runs the other way. It was the left's tactics and rhetoric that helped enable Trump's return to power as well as his abuse of it. The liberal critics of those tactics deserve credit for anticipating the backlash and trying to stop it.
A similar dynamic is playing out now, as liberals warn about the danger of violent infiltrators disrupting immigration protests while some leftists demand unconditional solidarity with the movement. The debate, as ever, is whether the left is discredited by its own excesses or by criticism of those excesses.
The bitter divide between liberals and leftists over Trump's neo-McCarthyism has deep historical roots. The two camps fought over the same set of ideas, making many of the same arguments, in response to the original McCarthyism of the 1950s. The lessons of that period, properly understood, offer helpful guidance for defeating the Trumpian iteration.
What made liberals vulnerable to McCarthyism was the fact that some communists really did insinuate themselves into the government during the New Deal. Communists accounted for a tiny share of the population, but they had a visible presence among intellectuals, artists, and political activists. The American Communist Party enthusiastically cooperated with Moscow. It managed to plant Soviet spies in the State Department, the Manhattan Project, and other important government institutions. The 1950 perjury trial of Alger Hiss, a high-ranking diplomat who spied on Roosevelt's administration for the Soviet Union, was a national spectacle vividly illustrating the Soviet spy network's reach. (Many American leftists maintained Hiss's innocence for decades, until the opening of the Soviet archives conclusively proved his guilt.)
In the face of this espionage threat, most liberals severed all ties with American communists. The AFL-CIO expelled communists from its ranks. 'I have never seen any reason to admire men who, under the pretense of liberalism, continued to justify and whitewash the realities of Soviet Communism,' the prominent intellectual Arthur Schlesinger Jr. wrote at the time.
The synthesis these liberal anti-communists arrived at was to oppose McCarthyism and communism simultaneously. They would defend the free-speech rights of accused communists (though not their right to hold sensitive government jobs) while denouncing communist ideas.
But they found themselves squeezed in a vise. The right was trying to use communist espionage to discredit the entire New Deal. Many leftists, meanwhile, bitterly castigated their former allies for their betrayal, and adopted a posture of anti-anti-communism—not endorsing communism per se, but instead directing all their criticism at the excesses of anti-communism, so as to avoid a rupture on the left. Still, as difficult as their position might have seemed, liberals managed to beat back McCarthyism and retain public confidence in their ability to handle the Cold War.
Many on the American left never surrendered their resentment of the center-left's anti-communist posture. In their eyes, liberals empowered McCarthy by validating the notion that communists were an enemy in the first place. And now they see the same thing happening again. By denouncing the illiberal left, they argue, the center-left has opened the door to right-wing repression.
[Clay Risen: When America persecutes its teachers]
To be fair, some free-speech advocates who criticized the left for shutting down debate have revealed themselves to be hypocritical when it comes to anti-Israel speech. An especially ugly episode transpired in late 2023, when the presidents of Harvard, Penn, and MIT refused to crack down broadly on anti-Zionist speech on campus, only for members of Congress in both parties to smear them as anti-Semitic. But the complaints on the left are not limited to liberals who betray their commitment to free-speech norms. Their critique is aimed at liberals who uphold those values. And that is because they oppose liberal values themselves.
When the Harvard psychologist and Harper's-letter signatory Steven Pinker wrote a long New York Times essay assailing the Trump administration's campaign against academic freedom, online leftists castigated him for having supposedly cleared the way for Trump by critiquing groupthink in the academy. 'Lot of good push back here from Pinker but at the same time his critiques of higher ed helped open the door for the attacks on the university he now dreads, and especially those directed at where he works,' wrote Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins, a social-studies professor at Wesleyan. Pinker has never endorsed Trump or Trumpism. But the mere fact of his having opposed left-wing illiberalism supposedly makes him complicit in the right-wing version.
Likewise, many leftists consider it self-evident that criticizing campus protesters' use of violent pro-Hamas messages, such as 'Globalize the Intifada,' was akin to fascism. Liberals of course had good reason to worry about violent, apocalyptic rhetoric, and the ideas inspiring it, which more recently has contributed to a spate of terror attacks on domestic Jewish targets. But to some leftist critics, raising those concerns was functionally a vote for Trump.
'Even those [Democrats] issuing mild statements of concern can't help but front-load their polite chiding of the White House with pointless, preening condemnations of the target of Trump's arrests and harassment regime,' Adam Johnson and Sarah Lazare write in the left-wing In These Times. Jeet Heer, writing in The Nation, likewise argues, 'Biden's slander of pro-Palestinian activists helped splinter the Democratic coalition during the 2024 election' and, yes, 'laid the groundwork for the current crackdown on dissent.'
The left is not alone in seeking to erase the liberal middle ground between the political extremes. The dynamic is identical to that of the 1950s, when the right tried to paint all opponents of McCarthyism as communists (just as the left wished to paint all anti-communists as McCarthyists). Trump's allies are attacking pro-free-speech liberals for having supposedly enabled radicalism. When Harvard faculty signed a letter denouncing Trump's threats against academic freedom, conservatives sneered that professors had only themselves to blame. 'Many of these signatories have been entirely silent for years as departments purged their ranks of conservatives to create one of the most perfectly sealed-off echo chambers in all of higher education,' wrote the pro-Trump law professor Jonathan Turley.
Both the far right and far left have a good reason to erase the liberal center: If the only alternative to their position is an equally extreme alternative, then their argument doesn't look so out-there. The liberal answer is to resist this pressure from both sides.
A decade ago, illiberal discourse norms around race and gender began to dominate progressive spaces, leaving a pockmarked landscape of cancellations and social-media-driven panics. Even as many skeptics on the left insisted that no such phenomenon was occurring—or that it was merely the harmless antics of college students—those norms quickly spread into progressive politics and the Democratic Party.
The 2020 Democratic presidential campaign took place in an atmosphere in which staffers, progressive organizations, journalists, and even the candidates themselves feared that speaking out against unpopular or impractical ideas would cause them to be labeled racist or sexist. That was the identity-obsessed climate in which Joe Biden first promised to nominate a female vice president, and then committed to specifically choosing a Black one. This set of overlapping criteria narrowed the field of candidates who had the traditional qualification of holding statewide office to a single choice whose own campaign had collapsed under the weight of a string of promises to left-wing groups who were out of touch with the constituencies they claimed to represent, as well as her limited political instincts. Kamala Harris herself was cornered into endorsing taxpayer-financed gender-reassignment surgery for prisoners and detained migrants, a promise that Trump blared on endless loop in 2024. Her own ad firm found that Trump's ad moved 2.7 percent of voters who watched it toward Trump, more than enough to swing the outcome by itself.
Trump's election had many causes. One of them was very clearly a backlash against social-justice fads, and the Democratic ecosystem's failure, under fear of cancellation, to resist those fads. If either party to this internal debate should be apologizing, it's not the liberals who presciently warned that the left risked going off the rails and enabling Trump to win.
[Thomas Chatterton Williams: What the left keeps getting wrong]
The political gravity of the campus debate after October 7 tilts in the same direction. Some progressives decided that the plight of Palestinians was so urgent and singular as to blot out every other political cause. The effect was to elevate the salience of an issue that split the Democratic coalition: Both the most pro-Israel constituents and the most anti-Israel constituents in the Democratic coalition moved heavily toward Trump's camp. Many pro-Palestine activists openly argued that the stakes were high enough to justify risking Trump's election. That is precisely the direction in which their actions pushed.
Trump's election, and his subsequent campaign to crush demonstrations, is precisely the scenario that liberal critics warned would occur. That this outcome is being used to discredit those same liberals is perverse, yet oddly familiar.
Article originally published at The Atlantic