I've seen in numerous lists/timelines/etc. in a world where the Nazis won the figure of Henry Wallace being used as a left-wing McCarthy as part of a "Brown scare" against fascists. While this is obviously a fun idea, turning the guy against the Cold War into its strongest advocate in an event of an ideological reversal, is it actually realistic? Did Wallace have the personality to lead such a movement in the event that the Cold War pitted the U.S. against victorious Nazis or right-wing Russians or some other rightist rival rather than the leftist USSR? Or would it be unrealistic for him to be such a person regardless of the ideology of America's rival?
 
Attitude problems aside, I got the sense that he always had way too many enemies within the Democratic Party to wield the kind of power that McCarthy had. There's also the question of how he'd get a similar position, since I don't recall him ever running for Congress IOTL.
 
There *was* a Brown Scare in OTL:

"Against such people, Roosevelt and other politicians helped to foment a 'Brown Scare" before and after Pearl Harbor.77 Although directed at different targets and practiced on a lesser scale, it resembled the Red Scares at the close of World War I and after World War II in its sloppy regard for civil liberties, affinity for conspiracy theories, manipulation of concerns for national security, and institutional machinery. Indeed, the Brown Scare was another act in the rehearsal for the Cold War, going far to generate the mentality and the apparatus mobilized against the left after World War II." Michael S. Sherry, *In the Shadow of War: The United States Since the 1930s, * p. 51 https://books.google.com/books?id=3VkST5a9Mo8C&pg=PA51

"Dark tales of fascist 'fifth columns' had abounded in progressive circles during the war, and even supposed civil libertarians like the Nation's Freda Kirchwey agreed that the 'American fascist press' had to be suppressed." Thomas W. Devine, *Henry Wallace's 1948 Presidential Campaign and the Future of Postwar Liberalism,* p. 42. https://books.google.com/books?id=oOaJCpyZFW8C&pg=PA42

Wallace didn't go quite so far as to accuse all enemies of FDR of being fascists but he did say that "The name Roosevelt is cursed only by Germans, Japs and certain American troglodytes." http://www.ibiblio.org/pha/policy/1944/1944-07-20d.html
 
Personally I think it would make more sense for a left-wing McCarthy type to be a member of the Frankfurt School who managed to get elected to Congress. Or at the very least they would make a good Roy Cohnesque supporter.

A large part of the Frankfurt School's postwar research was obsessed, understandably so, with trying to understand the root causes and manifestations of Fascism in culture. It's part of the reason there's a stereotype of the left accusing everyone and everything they disagree with as being fascist.
 
Personally I think it would make more sense for a left-wing McCarthy type to be a member of the Frankfurt School who managed to get elected to Congress. Or at the very least they would make a good Roy Cohnesque supporter.

A large part of the Frankfurt School's postwar research was obsessed, understandably so, with trying to understand the root causes and manifestations of Fascism in culture. It's part of the reason there's a stereotype of the left accusing everyone and everything they disagree with as being fascist.

Fredric Wertham and his anti-comics crusade were inspired by the Frankfurt school, though I suspect the ensuing congressional action was undertaken by people closer to a law-and-order agenda, with a sprinkling of social-welfare liberalism.

The problem with a Frankfurt scholar going into American politics is that he'd be so hostile to popular culture generally, he'd alienate almost the whole country. Horror and crime comics were probably pretty easy to vilify to paranoid middle-class parents in the 1950s, but once he turned against the Ed Sullivan show or cowboy movies, he'd be the one getting roasted alive as a threat to all things American.

The most I could imagine is a Frankfurt adherent getting elected to the council of a small college town, preferably one with an outsized faculty of psychoanalysis or social work. And even then, it would probably help if a few months prior to the election there had been a killing spree by some unhinged teenager hepped up Superman re-runs.
 
Personally I think it would make more sense for a left-wing McCarthy type to be a member of the Frankfurt School who managed to get elected to Congress. Or at the very least they would make a good Roy Cohnesque supporter.

A large part of the Frankfurt School's postwar research was obsessed, understandably so, with trying to understand the root causes and manifestations of Fascism in culture. It's part of the reason there's a stereotype of the left accusing everyone and everything they disagree with as being fascist.

The problem with a Frankfurt scholar going into American politics is that he'd be so hostile to popular culture generally, he'd alienate almost the whole country. Horror and crime comics were probably pretty easy to vilify to paranoid middle-class parents in the 1950s, but once he turned against the Ed Sullivan show or cowboy movies, he'd be the one getting roasted alive as a threat to all things American.

Extremely doubtful. The works of Adorno and Horkheimer were, by their very nature, anti-authoritarian and as sceptical of Stalinism as they were of fascism. While they were working on the roots of the rise of fascism on a sociological level, there is no way you can read authoritarian McCarthy-esque political actions into "Dialectic of Enlightenment".

A left-wing version of McCarthy would probably be closer to Stalinism.
 
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