I have never liked this conception of the “Left” and the “Right”, and I think we should start to move past the French revolution on this. If we are all supposed to be free-thinkers, then I don’t see why we can’t be anti-communists. That doesn’t mean we break the law or commit witch-hunts, but it also doesn’t mean we praise the Soviet Union or defend the gulags. There’s an awful lot of space between the Communist party and McCarthy.

The point of the essay seems to be that the Red-hunt cleansed the universities of the “Left” and because of that progressive economics has been killed in this country. But that doesn’t seem clear to me at all. The peak of the Red scare was followed by the peak of income mobility and the lowest score on the Gini coefficient the country has had since industrialization and possibly since the founding of the country.

There’s another equally plausible argument, and that is that the defeat of segregation and civil rights created a backlash against progressive economics because of underlying racism. My recollection is that there are even studies that show that support for social welfare programs goes down as the perceived heterogeneity of a population goes up.

I think the people who did nothing during the red-hunt do have something to answer for. But I think Communists do as well. After all, if causing death and destruction in the pursuit of a noble goal is fine in retrospect, then you can’t have a problem with the neoconservatives.

Of more general interest, I’ve just posted a fourth piece by Professor Davis: “The Purge”. This is more of a history than the two exhortations referenced by John Holbo, and fills in many details.

And no, I’m not related to Professor Davis. Given how poor a math major I was, I would have broken his heart.