THE NEW MCCARTHYISM: Mediate: The Democrats’ Crusade Against ‘Un-American’ Activities.

The moral righteousness of resistance to Sen. Joe McCarthy (R-WI) and his House Un-American Activities Committee remains vibrant in the imaginations of modern progressives. McCarthy’s myopic campaign to expose communists in high-profile areas of American life was opposed by liberal dissenters who viewed his investigation as an infringement on their rights of free association, speech, and even thought.

The modern progressive movement admires their predecessors’ stand against McCarthy so deeply that references to that inauspicious period of American history are regularly deployed in liberal publications and media outlets.

Those noble principles apparently go right out the window when Democrats face what increasingly appears to be a catastrophic political landscape heading into the 2014 midterm election cycle. Political handicappers beginning to suggest Republicans have better than even odds of recapturing the upper chamber of Congress in November as Democratic officeholders struggle to defend the political millstone that has become of the Affordable Care Act. Rather than surrender to their fates, Democrats have taken to identifying their own shadowy boogeyman wrecking America from within: the libertarian billionaire brothers Charles and David Koch. . . .

That strategy came alive on February 26, when Sen. Harry Reid (D-NV) was driven to rhetorical excess arguably unseen since U.S. Army Counsel Joseph Welch pointedly asked McCarthy whether he had “left no sense of decency.”

Taking to the floor of the U.S. Senate, Reid called these two private American citizens “un-American” for exercising their constitutionally protected rights of free expression. . . .

The modern Democratic Party’s origin myth is so closely tied up in their opposition to McCarthyism, they may not be able to objectively view how these actions reflect on them. If they could look objectively in a mirror, they might see that they are becoming precisely what they once opposed.

I think they only opposed it then because it was hurting their party. I don’t think they ever really minded the tactic.