HUAC: Record and Appraisal

The Liberal needs his “-enemy to the Right,” just as he needs his “opening to the Left,” to establish his self-image. The Enemy has taken a thousand forms—from Wall Street and the Economic Royalists to Joe McCarthy and the John Birchers—but always he has been there, the incarnation of absolute evil, and always heistobe found at the Right. So necessary is he to the Liberal that, were there nothing at the Right to demonize, the Liberal imagination would have to invent its reactionary devil, as indeed it has often done.

The most durable of these devils has been the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC). For a generation now, from the days of the old Dies Committee, it has been operating as a kind of conditioned reflex stimulus, needing only to be mentioned to arouse a well-patterned reaction of disgust, repugnance and horror from all right-minded denizens of the Liberal Left—just as it has tended to set off automatic reactions of approval, applause and passionate defense on the part of a conservative Right.

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Will Herberg

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William F. Buckley Jr.

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The Liberal needs his “-enemy to the Right,” just as he needs his “opening to the Left,” to establish his self-image. The Enemy has taken a thousand forms—from Wall Street and the Economic Royalists to Joe McCarthy and the John Birchers—but always he has been there, the incarnation of absolute evil, and always heistobe found at the Right. So necessary is he to the Liberal that, were there nothing at the Right to demonize, the Liberal imagination would have to invent its reactionary devil, as indeed it has often done.

The most durable of these devils has been the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC). For a generation now, from the days of the old Dies Committee, it has been operating as a kind of conditioned reflex stimulus, needing only to be mentioned to arouse a well-patterned reaction of disgust, repugnance and horror from all right-minded denizens of the Liberal Left—just as it has tended to set off automatic reactions of approval, applause and passionate defense on the part of a conservative Right.