Reviewing Red Scare: Blacklists, McCarthyism, and the Making of Modern America (August 2025)

Clay Risen, New York Times reporter and historian, in his new book argues that the hard right of 2025 America is a direct descendant of the hard right of the 1950s McCarthy era. While he does not invoke the term ‘extremist,’ over the course of the book, it becomes clear enough that for him the politics of the hard right are extreme. (This is ironic, because for McCarthyites, Communists were considered the extremists of the Left.) For Risen, the anti-Communist, anti-New Deal and anti-Warren Court political views of the McCarthy era conform genealogically to the anti-progressivism and nativism of modern America, although he does not go back and forth between the 1950s and the 2020s to identify and expand upon the similarities. He maintains that his book is “a work of history, and as such it is not concerned with drawing parallels between the past and the present.” Risen is mostly careful to eschew polemics, making but a single reference, and that in the Preface, to Trumpism and the MAGA movement. Nevertheless, he seems confident that the history of the Red Scare and the McCarthy era will speak for itself, and he has already committed himself to the assertion that “there was a throughline to be found running from the era of the Red Scare to our current political moment.”(1)

Though written 30 years later than Griffin Fariello’s oral history of the Red Scare (Red Scare: Memories of the American Inquisition, 1995), Risen’s history shares the belief that the McCarthy era was in large part a conservative reaction to the New Deal of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR), the stirring of the civil rights movement and the threat of an emerging alternative to capitalism. Republicans having been out of the White House since 1932 feared forever losing the good old days, hence, the intensity of McCarthyites. Of these, Risen writes that, “there were many Americans who felt that the New Deal had in fact forgotten them: the small-town middle class, the religious fundamentalists, the avowed white supremacists who continued to insist that America was a country founded by and for Northern Europeans.”

In addition to domestic issues, both authors acknowledge that geopolitics had taken a abrupt turn after World War II. The U.S. and the U.S.S.R. were the dominant great powers—the British and French empires were in decline and China was re-engaged in a long-running civil war. The U.S.S.R. was perceived to be a threat as its form of government was incompatible with democratic governments in the West insofar as the alternative political economy of state control in the U.S.S.R. conflicted sharply with limited government and free enterprise in America. The Truman Doctrine declared war— a Cold War—on the U.S.S.R. Republicans and Democrats(2) were aligned on foreign policy vis-à-vis the U.S.S.R. And, as both authors note, both major parties were concerned about the domestic threat of Communism. President Truman, a Democrat, and President Eisenhower, a Republican, each had lists of subversive organizations with their respective Attorneys General, and both established loyalty programs to ensure that Communists were not infiltrating American institutions.

According to Risen, the confluence of “two powerful impulses coursing through American society”—the conflict between conservative and progressive philosophies and the new danger of nuclear war—“unleashed an unprecedented period of political hysteria.”

By the early 1950s, Risen observes,

Tens of thousands of American soldiers were dying in Korea, Communists controlled China, the Soviets had detonated an atomic bomb, and millions feared another global conflagration was at hand. Fathers dug bomb shelters in their backyards. Teachers drilled their students on how to take cover under their desks in the event of a surprise Soviet attack, not just in big cities but in thousands of small towns across Middle America. Hollywood churned out movies like I Married a Communist, I Was a Communist for the FBI, and Big Jim McLain, in which John Wayne played a HUAC investigator hunting reds in Hawaii. Syndicated columnists like George Sokolsky and Westbrook Pegler, read by millions every week, made militant anti-Communism their signature story.

Risen does not deny that there were American spies whose sympathies lay with the Communist Party. Based on the decrypted Venona files(3), he admits that there is,

[C]ompelling proof that figures like [Alger] Hiss and the Rosenbergs [Julius and Ethel] and the leadership of the American Communist Party had, in fact, worked for the Soviet Union and against the United States. There was substance to concerns about Soviet infiltration. But it remained clear that the response, in the form of blacklists and congressional investigations and book bans and loyalty tests, went so far beyond what was necessary that something else was in the mix. Explaining that “something else” became a driving force for this book.

That ‘something else’ is in part related to what has already been mentioned, viz., the anti-progressivism of the hard right that rejected FDR’s New Deal, was opposed to upsetting the racial imbalance in America and feared the emergence of a competing ideology to American capitalism. But this ‘something else’ also refers to the means by which this political shift was effected. The curtailment and even abrogation of civil liberties was repeated over and over again from the Truman years through McCarthy years. The Bill of Rights’ protections of free speech, free association and due process were ostensibly sacrificed in the interest of national security. However, the agenda of the hard right was simultaneously advanced and not just as a fortuitous outcome. In other words, the hard right conspired to use the alleged Communist conspiracy to violently overthrow the government of the U.S. in order to reverse the gains made by progressives during the FDR administrations from 1932-1945. Risen makes two references to the “deep state” of modern American politics and demonstrates that he is, in fact, unable to avoid drawing parallels between the 1950s and contemporary America. The Communist penetration of American government during the Red Scare, real but exaggerated, would correspond to what today is considered the “deep state.”

Risen does not buy into the “deep state” conspiracy. He sees something quite different from an incipient Bolshevik-like coup.

On the surface, America in the early 1950s was I Love Lucy and Levittown and bowling leagues and bobby socks. Underneath it was seething, fearful, angry. Those who wanted more change—feminists, civil rights activists, antiwar organizers, gay people—were not just out of tune with the times; they were, of a sudden, considered dangerous to the commonweal. . . . The country was going feral.

He sees a large body of disaffected Americans looking for something different from what they found in their modern world. They yearned for a return to a more comfortable time and place, and McCarthyism obligingly appeared on stage at the just the ‘right’ moment in history.

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