Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?

McCarthyism. I learned about it in U.S. history class. The Second Red Scare. A ruthless, fanatical hunt for Communists who had allegedly infiltrated the echelons of Washington and Hollywood alike, spearheaded by the charismatic Senator Joseph McCarthy. Blithe accusations of treason and subversion. Ruthless grilling by the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), digging up dirt on possible Communist ties and sympathies. Government employees, finding their names on blacklists. Academics and activists, carted away in the dead of night. Stars of the silver screen, suddenly shorn of their lustre and plastered with disrepute. Tens of thousands lost their jobs and livelihoods.

And then it all stopped. As I understand it, McCarthy went after the Army in the spring of 1954. The Army-McCarthy hearings, nationally televised, went on for two months until Boston lawyer Joseph Welch, whom the Army hired as counsel, got fed up with McCarthy’s wanton attacks on his associates and uttered that immortal line, “Have you no sense of decency?” Somehow this ended McCarthy’s career overnight—he saw his popularity evaporate, was censured by the Senate in December, and died three years later. And just like that, McCarthyism was stopped cold in its tracks.

There are many strains of modern politics which I won’t name but which I like to imagine are overdue for their Have You No Sense Of Decency moments. Movements, surprisingly popular movements, running the gamut from those which started out as wacky conspiracy machines, blowing up a demented joke way too far, to those which may have started out with commendable ideals but have at some point crossed a line where they’re doing more harm than good. Where their commitment to the bit falls short of excusing the tremendous collateral damage they’ve left in their wake. Retributive politics, gleeful destruction, complete absence of remorse or any awareness that what they’ve wrought might even call for remorse. I await the day when some kindly lawyer or exhausted teacher or battered shopkeeper stands up to the Movement and says their magic “Have you no sense of decency?” line on national television, and the day three months later when the Movement is no more.

And then it occurs to me that that probably wouldn’t work. If it worked, then somebody would have tried it already, five or ten years ago. Probably many somebodies have tried it. Why haven’t they succeeded?

Is it because modern movements are immune to the line “Have you no sense of decency?” Like, viruses from decades ago aren’t going to work on them, because they’ve since been vaccinated? “What, silly, you think we’re McCarthyism? You think you can just Have-You-No-Sense-Of-Decency us and we’ll just … walk away?” Do we need to crack a new code and come up with a new magic line to fell them? But thousands of writers on Twitter have cranked out millions of soundbites and gotchas and they still haven’t cracked the code yet.

Is it because modern movements are just somehow more resilient, in some other way? That we’ve had seventy more years to perfect the social technology of creating nigh-invulnerable social movements, and so the ones around to-day are more effective in eliminating pathogens in their environment of ideas, having learned from the failure of McCarthyism and a hundred other movements?

Is it because we don’t have a single national television anymore? That the media landscape has become so fragmented that everybody only hears from the sources that she wants to hear, and maybe a thousand Have You No Sense Of Decencies have already been uttered, but it’s impossible to hear them from inside the movement?

Now there’s a lot that I don’t understand about the fall of McCarthyism.

How did it even work in the first place? Why did McCarthyism, ascendant and nation-gripping, just decide to … stop? Why did it only take one magic line for the whole edifice to come crashing down? That’s the sort of thing I expect would only happen in fairy tales and poorly written soapbox novels, not a modern sophisticated society like real-life 1954 America.

I imagine the actual reasons for the decline of McCarthyism, as recounted by historians and not school textbooks, would be a lot more complex and subtle. Was it already on the retreat by 1954, having accumulated enough bad karma through its false accusations and fallout that one dramatic moment on television was enough to turn public opinion against it? Was it a Common Knowledge sort of thing, where enough people in 1954 privately understood McCarthyism was a bad thing, but Joseph Welch’s delivery of the line on national television was an “All Clear” signal, empowering ordinary people to feel safe criticising it in public? Was it just a boring old realpolitik thing where McCarthy finally picked a fight with the wrong people, and the Army top brass had many devious and subtle PSYOP-y ways of clearing out the McCarthyism overgrowth, of which the Joseph Welch line was merely a very small part? I don’t know. It’s probably worth studying.

Okay, I’ll name one. In November 2022, Alex Jones, the InfoWars conspiracy theorist and provocateur, was ordered to pay hundreds of millions in punitive damages to the families affected in the 2012 Sandy Hook shooting. I don’t know the full story, but it would warm my heart if it turned out that somebody successfully pulled a Have You No Sense Of Decency on Alex Jones and stopped that movement dead in its tracks. Sometimes even fairy tales happen in real life.