Enemies from Within Speech

McCarthy’s anti-intellectualism is evident in the way he distills the complexities of the world into the simple oppositions of good and evil. This dualistic framework extends into the social sphere, where McCarthy pits an idealized “common people” against an equally fanciful image of sinister elites and intellectuals. McCarthy offers a portrait of the intellectual as a subversive who uses his powerful connections and his knowledge of political theory to betray the nation’s interests.

McCarthy bemoans the tendency he sees in the American people to avoid conflict after years of war. For McCarthy, this is not a time for reflection but a time for action, and he is trying to rouse his audience toward a proverbial “showdown fight” (929). The Cold War is framed as a rough-and-tumble Biblical struggle, and McCarthy’s pugilistic rhetoric is ingrained with a morally righteous version of American patriotism. As he declares in the “Enemies from Within” speech, the primary distinction between Christian democracy and atheistic Communism is “not political….it is moral” (829). In McCarthy’s view of that moral conflict, one side is unambiguously right and the other unambiguously wrong. McCarthy is hostile to those who do not adhere to the stark dualism of his Cold War logic, and he considers even those in the democratic establishment to be subversive, and by extension Communist, or at least sympathetic allies of Communism. In his anti-intellectual worldview, any consideration of the complexity of global politics represents a betrayal.

In the “Enemies from Within” speech, McCarthy claims that the United States is losing the Cold War “on every front” (83) and the argument that follows is supported with a list of grievances couched in anti-intellectual tropes. When McCarthy claims that the nation has been rendered impotent by the traitorous activities of the most privileged people, who maintain the advantage of living in the “wealthiest Nation,” he is implicating the elites, those with the financial means and social connections to attend the “finest” (830) universities. Like many populist demagogues, he begins by noting a genuine social problem—in this case, that the most powerful jobs in both government and business often go to graduates of a small number of elite universities, which in turn draw their student bodies disproportionately from among the nation’s wealthiest and most powerful families. Having observed this structural inequality, he then exaggerates and simplifies until he has painted a picture of a shadowy cabal bent on preserving its own power at the expense of the “real” American people.

McCarthy describes the “bright young men” in the State Department as those “who are born with silver spoons in their mouths” (830). This depiction is infantilizing, which is important because to rhetorically infantilize one’s opponent is to drain him of masculinity. The implication is that the intellectual is also effeminate. While McCarthy denigrates the “bright young men” in the State Department, his ire is more specifically directed at Dean Acheson, the Secretary of State. McCarthy’s disparaging nickname for Acheson was the Red Dean of Fashion. Thus, the accusation of Communist affiliation, symbolized by the color red, is combined with the suggestion that Acheson is not properly masculine. In fact, he is a sort of dandy. In the last sentences of McCarthy’s speech he offers further denigration of Acheson as a “pompous diplomat in striped pants….with a phony British accent” (832). In addition to Acheson’s attire, which betrays an effeminate disposition, McCarthy suggests that he is un-American as evidenced from the feigned accent. But McCarthy’s mocking tones turn vicious in the final lines of the speech. McCarthy concludes that Acheson’s political treachery will ignite the spark of an American uprising that will “end only when the whole sorry mess of twisted, warped thinkers are swept from the national scene” (832). Of course, the twisted and warped thinkers are the intellectuals and the subversives, terms that McCarthy uses interchangeably.