Witness: Cold War Classics

Disputes between progressives and conservatives have been a regular feature of American politics. Conservatives have traditionally favored a limited federal government that leaves the bulk of governing to state and local authorities, whom they argue are more closely attuned to the interests and character of the surrounding populace. From this perspective, federal guidelines issued by Washington, DC, relied on abstract and uniform principles that often flew in the face of local traditions. Conservative sensibilities also tended to oppose interventionist foreign policy, which served to enhance federal power, and preferred practical knowledge and traditional wisdom over abstract principles.

World War II scrambled these categories, especially after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. It now seemed impossible for a major political figure to profess indifference to the outside world, much less to deny the critical role of the federal government in detecting and combating threats to the US. The dangers posed by Imperial Japan and Nazi Germany were sufficiently broad as to unite American liberals and conservatives. Conservatives accepted an alliance with the Soviet Union as necessary to defeat Hitler, and liberals accepted the US’s continued support of British imperialism for the same reason.

At the end of the war, the Soviet Union dominated half of Europe, while the British and other colonial empires teetered on the brink of collapse. Many conservatives were eager to bring American soldiers back home, and many liberals held out hope for continued cooperation with the Soviet government. Regardless, the threat of Communist expansion proved intolerable for the US: the only world power with the resources and influence to curb the rapid incursion of Communist power across Eastern Europe, Asia, and beyond. A “Cold War consensus” took hold, where both sides of the political spectrum accepted the need to contain Communism and support the US’s democratic allies. This resulted in the American president being granted wide (and largely unchecked) authority in exercising a newly expanded national security apparatus.

Whittaker Chambers’s testimony against Alger Hiss in 1948 infused the Cold War with a more partisan cast. The notion that an elite American official, Hiss—who had once advised FDR at Yalta, and was the sitting president of the Carnegie Fund for International Peace—could be a Communist double-agent was appalling. It also gave longstanding conservative suspicions a concrete face and a name to target. Conservatives had long sought the destruction of the Democratic establishment that had ruled Washington for the better part of two decades, and they had been trying to reverse New Deal policies from the moment FDR implemented them. As someone who had been personally associated with the New Deal, Hiss was a brilliant rhetorical and political foil.

In the years that followed the Hiss case, China and Cuba would fall to Communism, the Soviet Union would detonate a nuclear device years ahead of Western predictions, and North Korea would launch a brazen invasion of the South. All of this fed American conservatives’ suspicions that liberals were either blind to the Communist threat or actively seeking to aid it. Ironically, some conservatives concluded that the severity of the Communist menace required a federal government strong enough to purge itself of its enemies, sponsor a nationwide anti-Communism culture, and extinguish Communist sentiments in any corner of the globe where they appeared. All of this required a radical departure from conservatism’s original goal: shrinking the US federal government.

The sentiments and policies that fueled this shift in conservative thought are collectively termed the Second Red Scare (the first followed a wave of post-World War I anarchist and radical terrorist attacks). The Second Red Scare culminated in Senator Joseph McCarthy’s wide-ranging probe for Communists in the American government. In pursuit of his increasingly extreme ends, McCarthy weaponized not only the White House but also the FBI. Conservatives like McCarthy came to accept federal power to the extent that it checked Communism—or, eventually, anyone they perceived as a liberal apologist. This expression of the new conservative movement found its voice in National Review, a periodical whose founder, William F. Buckley, was an ardent defender of McCarthy. Chambers later joined the staff of National Review, confirming his heroic status within the movement.