In his speech on “the internal Communist menace,” what does McCarthy mean when he says: “When a great democracy is destroyed, it will not be because of enemies from without, but rather because of enemies from within”?
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The core point of McCarthy’s argument for the accusation and investigation into private citizens for their connections to the Communist party is that, through subversive techniques such as guiding policy in pro-communist directions, or through propaganda in the form of art, such as, perhaps, building sculpture that protests the American government, or a directing a sympathetic biopic of Vladimir Lenin. Interestingly enough, McCarthy refers to this quote as what “one of [America’s] outstanding historical figures once said”. There is no such quote, at least verbatim, of what McCarthy said. There is, however, an extremely similar quote made by Abraham Lincoln, which reads as follows:”America will never be destroyed from the outside. If we falter and lose our freedoms, it will be because we destroyed ourselves”, which was delivered as part of Lincoln’s “Lyceum Address” of 1838. McCarthy has twisted the words of a former president so as to suit his rhetoric, so that, while the phrasing of both quotes is extremely similar, the meaning is radically different. While Lincoln seems to indicate that in the case of the destruction of America the blame would be on all Americans for their failure to properly conduct and heed the American Experiment, McCarthy paints the picture of insidious American citizens turned Communist traitors, acting as a Trojan horse of glamour, power, and charm (in the case of the popular artists and public figures) all while slowly destroying the foundations of the democratic United States through propaganda and strategically sympathetic foreign policy.