McCarthyism? No, Historic U.S. Nativism : Exploiting fears is an old tradition, amplified today by TV tabloids and the religious right.

The other day, I had a call from an Italian journalist asking whether the United States was in for another bout of McCarthyism.

My initial thought was not at all. In the first place, these days there’s a communist shortage, and the red menace, after all, was the predicate of McCarthyism.

Also, the term McCarthyism has been carelessly bandied about ever since the early 1950s when it was used to describe a social pathology that most serious Cold War scholars would now agree commenced long before the senator from Wisconsin arrived on the national scene.

And besides, what did such discredited old practices as guilt by association, shoddy methods (“I disapprove of his methods but not his goals”), anonymous accusers and all the rest have to do with the current situation? Even the most troubling conservative initiative--the proposal that prayer be permitted in public schools--would involve amending the Constitution rather than ignoring it, as did so many Fifth Amendment-bashers and First Amendment-ignorers of old.

I asked my Italian interrogator what prompted his question. It seems that Robert Redford had been quoted in La Stampa, the influential Italian daily, as predicting a new wave of McCarthyism; did I have any comment? My comment, arrogantly assuming that the Italian press was more interested in the star than the story, was to say somewhat patronizingly that I could see why an actor-director like Redford might be worried. After all, there was talk of cutting back, if not abolishing, the National Endowment for the Arts and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

But on further reflection, it occurs to me that artists are almost always the first targets in times of trouble, so why shouldn’t we take them seriously as a political Distant Early Warning line? Why shouldn’t a man like Redford, who starred with Barbra Streisand in “The Way We Were,” one of Hollywood’s more ambitious attempts to comment on McCarthyism, and who played investigative reporter Bob Woodward in “All the President’s Men,” be sensitive to the difference between the sort of orderly impeachment proceedings triggered by the constitutional crisis of Watergate and the Whitewater hearings so demagogically threatened by the newly empowered junior senator from New York, Alphonse D’Amato? It was probably no accident, as they used to say, that the about-to-be-anointed chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Jesse Helms, landed on an NEA-sponsored avant-garde artist like the late Robert Mapplethorpe as his way of making the front pages.

Perhaps what those in the arts intuitively understand is that McCarthyism was not about the senator’s slipshod methods in combatting the red menace. Whatever the Russians might have intended internationally, as any Hollywood blacklist survivor could attest, there was no internal red menace of the sort irresponsibly charged by McCarthy, Richard Nixon, J. Edgar Hoover and other red-hunters. Even the House Un-American Activities Committee gave up the search for communist propaganda in the movies. The so-called red menace was merely the scapegoat of the moment. The heart of McCarthyism had to do with exploiting our fear of the unknown, the old nativist impulse that goes all the way back to the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798, equating the foreign with the immoral and the radical.

Which, come to think of it, was what the controversy over the homoerotic themes of Mapplethorpe’s photographs was about; what the battle over Proposition 187, which scapegoated those foreign (and presumably immoral and radical) illegal immigrants, may be said to have been about and what Newt Gingrich’s pathetic attempt to blame a child-murdering mom on years of Democratic permissiveness was all about, not to mention his weird charge that “McGovernik” counterculturalist druggies have taken over the White House.

When one considers that the new nativism is accompanied by Rush Limbaugh-inspired know-nothingism, deeply rooted Christian-right fundamentalism and four or five, depending on how you count them, newly tabloidized television networks collectively poised to amplify all of the above, whether history ends up calling the post-election political culture McCarthyism II, Helmsism, D’Amatoism or Gingrichism . . . perhaps Redford is on to something and perhaps celebrity journalism, Italian style, has something to teach us.