And the Spanish Inquisition was just trying to protect Spain from the Moors. Absent the normative judgements about communism, the enlightening but not terribly productive discussion we could have about the difference between Bolshevism and Communism, and the conflation of an economic ideology with loyalty to a foreign power, the issue with McCarthy was and is his tactics.

McCarthy practiced a politics of insinuation, shame, and panic using public fears of a Soviet cabal of spies to paint political enemies and, as he began to amass political power, nearly anyone handy, as traitors who were under some obligation to explain themselves, under oath, before the United States Congress.

The result of McCarthy's programs was the creation of blacklists in which people completely innocent of wrongdoing were denied employment and effectively run out of their life's work on little more than the openly spoken suspicions.

Among those targeted as "unamerican" by McCarthy and the systems he set in place were Lucielle Ball (of I Love Lucy), Charlie Chaplain, Albert Einstein, J. Robert Oppenheimer (father of the Atomic Bomb who lost his security clearance), and a veritable who's-who of the mid-twentyith century art, academic, and culture scene.

McCarthy's investigations made illegal -- not by virtue of laws passed, trials held, or convictions earned -- the constitutionally protected political act of joining or even sympathizing with a political party. By using his subpoena powers, by dragging people before the House Un-American Affairs Committee, by demanding that Congress exercise oversight of the private, personal, political actions of American citizens, McCarthy created an atmosphere of suppression, paranoia, and terror that pervaded much of 1940s American politics.

Perhaps the most iconic moment of McCarthy's career came in a speech to the Republican Women's Club of Wheeling, West Virginia in which he stated "I have here in my hand a list of 205—a list of names that were made known to the Secretary of State as being members of the Communist Party and who nevertheless are still working and shaping policy in the State Department."

Imagine such a statement made by a Congressman today. Imagine Maxine Waters -- by way of example -- giving a speech in which she brandishes a list of 205 people in the Trump administration provided to her by Secretary of State Rex Tillerson which list out people on Vladimir Putin's payroll who are nonetheless shaping American policy. Imagine the uproar that would cause. Imagine how Americans today -- who are a great deal less paranoid about Russia than Americans were in the late 1940s -- would react to that news. It is the political equivalent of yelling "fire" in a crowded theater, made all the worse by there being absolutely no evidence of a fire -- ie, there were no names and certainly no actual evidence to support them.

What McCarthy sought to do was not to "protect America from communists" but rather to use American fears of communism to ruin the lives of hundreds of innocents in order to make himself more powerful.

Edit: Spelling. There's a reason I'm not flared for medieval Europe.