From McCarthyism to the Tea Party: Interpreting Anti-Leftist Forms of US Populism in Comparative Perspective

Abstract

This article presents an analysis of McCarthyite and Tea Party political discourse and explores the possibilities of utilizing populism as an analytic construct for making comparisons between the political and economic projects envisaged by these two conservative movements. Relying on a definition of populism as a universal discursive formation, this article argues that there is a similar structure to the discourses of McCarthyism and the Tea Party, which relies on the construction of a “left-oriented enemy,” posed as a threat to the American values of freedom and independence historically tied to the nation's “founding moment.” With this comparative discursive structure established, the article then explores the ideological differences between the movements and attempts to interpret them within a historical framework. This article concludes by asserting that cases of populism in the immediate postwar period such as McCarthyism were short lived compared to new cases of populism such as the Tea Party, insofar as the universal discursive structure of populism, which once proved to be an exceptional phenomenon within modern forms of political rule, is now becoming part of the institutionalized structure of democratic politics, evidenced by a number of cases taken in comparative-historical perspective.