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Former Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy is something of a political ghost, a memory of a particular style of legislative representation, full of demagoguery and deception, that has since seen few equals. Two UW-Madison history professors, in recent columns, resurrect the ghost – although they disagree on how closely Gov. Scott Walker’s politics compare to Wisconsin’s most notorious of politicians.

joseph mccarthy

Professor William Cronon, in a New York Times op-ed earlier this week, says bluntly, “Scott Walker is not Joe McCarthy. Their political convictions and the two moments in history are quite different.” But there are parallels, he says. “There is something about the style of the two men – their aggressiveness, their self-certainty, their seeming indifference to contrary views – that may help explain the extreme partisan reactions they triggered.”

Wisconsin is divided over Walker’s efforts to curtail both state and local government spending and severely limit the collective bargaining rights of public employees. According to Cronon, “Walker’s conduct has provoked a level of divisiveness and bitter partisan hostility the likes of which have not been seen in this state since at least the Vietnam War.”

McCarthy suffered a severe backlash. He was censured by the U.S. Senate in 1954 and died three years later at the age of 48 from hepatitis. His death was likely hastened by alcoholism.

Professor Jeremi Suri makes a more strident argument on his blog: Where McCarthy targeted suspected Communist and Soviet sympathizers, intellectuals and celebrities, Walker targets public employees. “He has done this because the public workers are an easy target for people around the state who feel someone must shoulder the blame for their recent economic difficulties,” Suri writes.

Cronon says this approach would likely take politicians of bygone eras by surprise: “The demonizing of government at all levels that has become such a reflexive impulse for conservatives in the early 21st Century would have mystified most elected officials in Wisconsin just a few decades ago.”

Suri describes McCarthyism as “a rebellion against a modern, globalizing America” that exploited Middle America’s distrust of things urban, elite or centralized. “Walker has gone farther than any other elected politician since Joseph McCarthy in applying this agenda,” he says.

On her blog, Ann Althouse, a UW-Madison law professor, responds to Cronon’s contention that Walker and other Republicans have adopted McCarthy’s slanderous, rock-em-sock-em style. It’s the supporters of Democrats, she contends, who are making a mockery of “civil discourse.”

“Legislators ran to another state and hid out to obstruct the majority, and the protestors have been chanting unneighborly chants and carrying outrageous signs, depicting Scott Walker as Hitler, etc., for a month,” she writes.

Althouse says Walker is closer to Reagan, also known for his uncompromising style when serving as governor of California, than McCarthy. “Walker always comes across as a nice person, making tough decisions and doing what he thinks needs to be done,” she writes.

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