3 ms·

Did they purge Tankies, Maoists, Trotskyist etc from universities? Because when O went to Uni half of social science department was some sort of -ist in the 90s

• Daishiman 6y ago
  McCarthy certainly did, I don't know if you're being facetious but that's exactly what happened. These sectors of the left didn't come to dominate some sectors of academia; they were driven out of everywhere else and that's the only area where their radical ideas were tolerated. Meanwhile the rest of society has been tolerating everything else in mainstream public institutions: the racist and regressive corporate bosses, the Evangelicals who considered anything that's not in agreement with their doctrine to be an affront to God, the gun nuts who consider walking around in public with an assault weapon to be a perfectly valid expression, and on it goes. American society is dramatically more tolerant of these extremist right wing positions, and that Overton window shift has always existed in the US. It is only because of the inflammatory discourse of Trump and his allies that people have decided that the fringe left is dramatically less dangerous and tolerant than these literal fascists.