Fifty years ago, I had the misfortune to spend an entire semester as a college student with a fellow scholar who could only be described as an aggressive bore. Even though the seminar’s subject was literature, my pedantic classmate treated every topic that came up as a historical parallel to the McCarthy Era, the Vietnam War, and Watergate. (Nowadays, the trifecta has been updated to Charlottesville. January 6 and all things Russian.)

I was reminded of the penchant some people have for making facile historical analogies when I attended a book talk at the public library here in Kansas City a few months ago. The author/speaker was Clay Risen, a New York Times journalist, who was promoting his book, “Red Scare: Blacklists, McCarthyism, and the Making of Modern America.”

Looking out over the audience of senescent boomers and silent generation members, two hundred strong, I wondered if by chance any of those present besides myself were the same people who came out to hear leftist martyr Alger Hiss give essentially the same speech at a local university in 1976—the year of Mr. Risen’s birth!

The message was unchanged from five decades ago, a bedtime story for adults. Like most fairy tales, it had its scary parts, but not too scary for the audience to handle. Those listening could be secure in the knowledge that the Ogre was defeated in the end, and the good little liberal girls and boys would get home safely.

Back then, the Ogre was Richard Nixon, and the blameless victim was Alger Hiss. Nowadays, of course, the Ogre is Donald Trump and the Holy Innocents are whichever leftists the Orange Man is tangling with at the moment.

This latter-day Manichean heresy has many applications. The first is that the world is divided between the Progressive Forces of Light and the Reactionary Forces of Darkness. There is no in-between, no middle ground in such a struggle.

Who, exactly, were the contending parties? On one hand, you had everything and everyone good and decent in American life. These were the cosmopolitan, educated Americans who believed in the common man, diversity, and a positive, forward-looking vision for the future, all of which was embodied in the New Deal.

Who was attacking them? The backwards-looking believers in a racial and gender hierarchy, who were “overtly religious” (as opposed to “covertly religious?”), were nativists, revanchists, and antisemitic. They were unwilling to share in the promise of America.

Life® as only social legislation drafted by experts, and egalitarian economic measures could provide. They were trying to return to an imagined golden age of laissez-faire economics and religious fundamentalism, ruled over by a rigid patriarchy that denied the agency of women, blacks, and other marginalized peoples. These forces, who did not understand the new definition of patriotism “which transcended borders,” were personified by such monsters in human form as radio priest Charles Coughlin, isolationist Charles Lindbergh, and House Un-American Activities Committee Chair Martin Dies.

This caricature of the political divide in the U.S. as of 1946, the year Risen says the Red Scare started, he claims, was reflective of a broader culture war, which was rekindled by the Right for its own selfish political purposes at the end of World War II.

Closely related to this absolutist view of politics is the notion that your opponents’ disagreement with you can be traced to a mental illness. This has been a favorite liberal trope over the years.

Greatest hits include the Frankfurt School’s Theodor Adorno’s “The Authoritarian Personality.” More recently, we’re told that workers whose jobs are outsourced overseas are upset because of “status anxiety,” not because they’re unemployed!

Risen glibly suggests that paranoia and conspiracy theories are continuing elements in the American psyche. (Who can forget the Salem witch trials of the 1690s and the anti-Catholic Know Nothings of the 1850s?) He goes on to argue that in postwar America, there was widespread fear and insecurity, and these were the psychological ingredients that tipped the country into anti-communist hysteria. So pervasive was this mental disorder, Risen argues with a straight face, that “anti-communist hysteria was the defining characteristic of American culture” for over a decade, i.e., from 1946 to 1957.

First of all, can you attribute the mood or feelings of an individual human being—fear, insecurity, paranoia, hysteria—to a nation of 140 million people?

The only support for his contention that the American Red Scare was the result of a mood shift in the nation as a whole, he can cite is the movie “The Best Years of Our Lives.” William Wyler’s classic of 1946.

A very powerful depiction of veterans returning home after WWII, there is no simple message that a viewer, now or then, could take away. To reduce the film to a convenient ideological talking point is offensive.

The plot takes three veterans returning to their quintessential Midwestern community and shows how they and their families struggle with their reentry into their old lives.

While the anxiety that the film portrayed was real, other emotions were also prevalent. I read a piece last week by a writer who had actually witnessed the VJ celebrations eighty years ago as a child. He described the mood as euphoria that loved ones would be coming home. He also said there was pride and a sense of accomplishment from a difficult job well done, and a resulting sense of national unity. Above all, Americans felt a profound sense of relief and gratitude. Complicated mixture that it was, it was a far cry from the national malaise that Risen blames for helping plunge the country into hysteria and paranoia for over a decade.

The next fallacy that the author indulged in was best summed up by the literary critic Leslie Fiedler. He described what he called “the implicit dogma of American liberalism, i.e., the inflexible drama in which the liberal per se is the hero.” Speaking of the Alger Hiss case, Feidler said that for liberals admitting Hiss’s guilt also meant admitting that “mere liberal principle is not in itself a guarantee against evil; that the wrongdoer is not always the other—‘they’ and not ‘us’; that there is no magic in the words ‘left’ or ‘progressive’ or ‘socialist’ that can prevent deceit and abuse of power.” Leslie Fiedler, “Hiss, Chambers, and the Age of Innocence,” Commentary (August 1951).

Risen displays this mindset in trying to rehabilitate three controversial figures, each a supposed hero of the Red Scare: longshoremen’s union leader Harry Bridges, screenwriter Dalton Trumbo, and New Deal official Alger Hiss.

Risen went on at great length to argue that all three were wrongly branded as Communists. That they all had faithfully parroted the ever-changing party line and were clearly acting under strict party discipline was ignored. Even more reprehensible is Risen’s failure to mention the Kremlin archives and decoded Soviet cables (“the Venona Project”), whose discovery in recent years conclusively proves the trio’s membership in the Communist Party. (Think of 60 Minutes’ use of forged documents alleged to be from George W. Bush’s Vietnam-era draft board. Liberals like Dan Rather and Robert Redford still adamantly insist the documents were authentic, even though they were claimed to have been typed in 1969, but turn out to have been prepared on a word processor not invented until 1996. They may not have been “true” in a literal sense, but speak to a “Higher Truth!”)

The other hero Risen spoke of in glowing terms is the supposedly courageous television journalist, Edward R. Murrow. Risen lauds Murrow for his role in the downfall of Senator Joseph McCarthy.

The problem is that Murrow’s documentary hatchet job on McCarthy was only broadcast in 1954, fully four years after McCarthy had risen to national prominence. In fact, it was shown just months before the Wisconsin senator was censured by his colleagues, and his nemesis was complete.

Murrow should get no praise for kicking someone when they’re down. This applies equally to Howard K. Smith, another one of “Murrow’s boys” at CBS. Smith produced “The Political Obituary of Richard Nixon,” a similarly vicious hit job that aired after Nixon’s comeback bid as governor of California failed in 1962 and his career seemed finished.

This is the Jake Tapper School of Journalism, demonstrated most recently by Tapper’s belated exposé of Joe Biden’s mental decline in office. No one should be congratulated for journalistic valor for piling on a politician who has already gone down to a humiliating defeat.

Lest there be any doubt about what author Risen’s message was, he repeatedly said that we are going through a similar time to the Red Scare right now in the U.S. He closed his prepared remarks with a quote from Albert Camus’ novel, “The Plague.”

Risen argues that while the bacillus of fascism may seemingly disappear, it still lurks in secret places, awaiting a chance to return, just like a plague or pandemic, i.e., Donald Trump is Joe McCarthy reborn. The takeaway is that unless we are constantly on guard against the authoritarian right, history will repeat itself. (Thus Saith The Lord, a.k.a. Barack Obama, as told to Evan Thomas and Chris Mathews.)

As disingenuous as Risen’s prepared remarks were, his real mendacity was on display during the question-and-answer period.

He told a Black woman that anti-Black racism was such an essential feature of the Red Scare that no progress on civil rights took place between 1946 and 1957. Apparently, he doesn’t know that in 1948, the U.S. military was integrated by presidential order, the Supreme Court struck down racially restrictive covenants in real estate deeds, and the Democratic Party added a strong civil rights plank to its platform. He must also have missed the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision and the integration of Little Rock schools in 1957, as well as the passage of a Federal Civil Rights Act that same year, the first such legislation since Reconstruction.

Risen told a gay man that the era was marked by right-wing homophobia, i.e., there was a “Lavender Scare,” in addition to the “Red Scare.” He didn’t mention attempts by Alger Hiss’s lawyers to smear his accuser, Whittaker Chambers, as gay. Nor was there any recognition of the repeated attempts by liberal muckraking columnist Drew Pearson to prove that Joe McCarthy was a homosexual or the innuendo about members of McCarthy’s staff.

Risen told a Jewish man that there were viciously antisemitic attacks on Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, implying that antisemitism was an important part of the Red Scare.

This is an interesting take since the trial court judge who heard the case, Irving Kaufman, was Jewish. The two prosecutors who won the case, Irving Saypol and Roy Cohn, were Jewish, as was the appellate judge, Jerome Frank, who affirmed the Rosenbergs’ conviction for treason.

There was no outbreak of antisemitism in the country in response to the Rosenberg case. In fact, powerful organizations like the Anti-Defamation League and the American Jewish Committee, which existed to fight antisemitism, endorsed the case’s prosecution and outcome.

The issue of antisemitism (as opposed to actual antisemitic acts) was raised very late in the proceedings. It came up only because of a last-minute P.R. campaign by leftists trying to mislead the public and cast doubt on the cases’ legitimacy. “Antisemitism” and the Rosenberg case, Lucy Dawidowicz, Commentary, July 1952.

Interestingly, even the consummate bleeding-heart liberal Eleanor Roosevelt disavowed anyone using her name in such a propaganda ploy. She publicly stated that the case against the Rosenbergs was justified by the law and the evidence.

I can’t believe that Mr. Risen was not aware of the actual historical record on all these issues. I’m also skeptical that he, as a graduate of the Edmund Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown, didn’t know that Father Walsh, its founder, was a well-known opponent of totalitarianism (e.g., an observer at the Nuremberg trial) and was also the person who had urged the newly elected Senator McCarthy to make it his mission to uncover Communist subversion in the U.S. Government.

I personally asked Risen about Walter Duranty, his fellow New York Times writer. Duranty was the paper’s Moscow correspondent in the 1930s, who helped cover up the death of millions at the hands of Stalin in famine and purges. Duranty was paid under the table by the Soviets for his role in concealing genocide and, as a bonus, received the Pulitzer Prize for his dishonest reporting.

At first, Risen would only say that Duranty wrote “very favorable things” about the Soviet Union. When I pressed him, Risen conceded that Duranty actively sought to hide Stalin’s mass murders. However, he laughed when he described how the Times tried to give the award back, but the Pulitzer Board wouldn’t take it! Some joke, some journalist, some newspaper.

Sam Harris, a left-wing “ethicist” (sic), said not long ago that the contents of Hunter Biden’s laptop had to be suppressed even if they had revealed images of murdered children. (The phrase “necessary lie” comes to mind, akin to Auden’s “necessary murder.”) After all, anything that advances the cause of the Left is just and right and good, even if it is demonstrably false as a statement of fact.

Decades ago, an observer noted that a Communist argument was based on factually incorrect assertions. “Yes,” a Communist replied, “but they are politically correct!”

This cynically amoral approach Risen and his newspaper employ to this day, i.e., Russian collusion, is the source of yet another undeserved Pulitzer. This is also the best explanation of the bodyguard of lies paraded before the gullible here recently.