page_title: History of conservatism in the United States
section_title: McCarthyism: 1950–1954
hierarchical_section_title: History of conservatism in the United States / 1945–1951 / McCarthyism: 1950–1954
caption_attribution_description: Cover to the propaganda comic book "Is This Tomorrow"'
context_page_description: Except briefly in the 1860s–1870s, there has never been a national political party in the United States called the Conservative Party. All major American political parties support republicanism and the basic classical liberal ideals on which the country was founded in 1776, emphasizing liberty, the pursuit of happiness, the rule of law, the consent of the governed, opposition to aristocracy and fear of corruption, coupled with equal rights before the law. Political divisions inside the United States often seemed minor or trivial to Europeans, where the divide between the Left and the Right led to violent political polarization, starting with the French Revolution.
  No American party has advocated European ideals of conservatism such as a monarchy, an established church, or a hereditary aristocracy. American conservatism is best characterized as a reaction against utopian ideas of progress. Although the laissez-faire policy goals of American conservatives have never been popular, historian Patrick Allitt expresses the difference between conservative and liberal in terms not of policy but of attitude.
context_section_description: When anxiety over Communism in Korea and China reached a fever pitch, an otherwise obscure Senator, Joe McCarthy of Wisconsin, launched extremely high-visibility investigations into the alleged network of communist spies in the government. Irish Catholics (including Buckley and the Kennedy Family) were intensely anti-communist and supported McCarthy (a fellow Irish Catholic). Paterfamilias Joseph Kennedy (1888–1969), a leading conservative Democrat, was an ardent supporter of McCarthy, and got his son Robert F. Kennedy a job with McCarthy. McCarthy's careless tactics, however, allowed his opponents to effectively counterattack. McCarthy talked of "twenty years of treason" (i.e. since Roosevelt's election in 1932). In 1953, he started talking of "21 years of treason" and launched a major attack on the Army for promoting a communist dentist in the medical corps; this was too much for Eisenhower, who encouraged Republicans to censure McCarthy formally in 1954. The Senator's power collapsed overnight. Senator John F. Kennedy did not vote for censure.
  Arthur Herman states that "McCarthy was always a more important figure to American liberals than to conservatives", because he defined the liberal target, and made liberals look like innocent victims. However, in recent years conservatives have not so much defended McCarthy's rough tactics as argued, chiefly based on espionage work done under the Venona project, that communist spies were really present in the government, and some of the Left at the time were indeed covering up those communist networks.
caption: A 1947 booklet published by the Catholic Catechetical Guild Educational Society raising the specter of a Communist takeover
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