Historians have long known that there were two sides to the Populist movement of the 1890s: a progressive side, embodying the protests of formers against big business, and a darker side, marked by a distrust of Easterners, immigrants, and intellectuals. In the 1950s, one school of U. S. social thinkers constructed a parallel between this dark side of Populism and the contemporary anti-Communist crusade spearheaded by Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy, which attacked liberalism, Eastern intellectuals, and civil liberties in general. To Seymour Martin Lipset, McCarthyism represented “the sour dregs of Populism”; to Edward Shils, McCarthyism, like Populism, exemplified “the ambiguous American impulse toward 4 direct democracy.
Nothing that McCarthyism and Populism had both found their strongest support in the agrarian Midwest,
Lipset argued that voters who backed agrarian protest movements during earlier economic crises had supported McCarthy in the post-World II period of prosperity. In the eyes of writers like Lipset, the appeal of McCarthyism extended beyond the agrarian base of Populism to include urban groups such as industrial workers. Lipset claimed that “the lower classes, especially the workers” had backed McCarthy. In a more sweeping fashion, Lewis Feuer claimed that “it was the American lower class...who gave their overwhelming support to the attacks in recent years in civil liberties.”
Writing a few years later, political scientist Michael Paul Rogin challenged these superficially plausible notions, contending that they merely embodied the writers, own assumptions about the supposed intolerance of lower class groups, rather than a valid interpretation of McCarthyism. Rogin critically examined their assertions by the simple method of testing them against the evidence. He tested Lipset’s claims about the continuity of McCarthyism and earlier agrarian protest movements by breaking down statewide voting statistics on a county-by-county basis. He found that Wisconsin counties that had voted strongly for Progressives before World War II did not support McCarthy ; McCarthy’s support was concentrated in his home region and in ethnic German areas that had been traditionally conservative. The old Progressive vote had in fact gone to McCarthy’s opponents, the Democrats.
To test Lipset’s generalizations about McCarthy’s support among class groups, Rogin attempted to determine whether industrial workers had, in fact, backed McCarthy. Correlating income and employment statistics with voting records, Rogin found that the greater the employment in industry in a given Wisconsin county, the lower was McCarthy’s share of the vote. Rogin concluded that the thesis of “McCarthyism as Populism” should be judged “not as the product of science but as a...venture into conservative political theory. ’’
1.The author would probably assert the Populism and McCarthyism（ ） .
2.It can be inferred that Rogin’ s most serious criticism of Lipset, Feuer, and Shils’ s methodology would probably be that they （ ） .
3.According to the passage, Rogin concluded that the writings of Lipset, Shils and Feuer （ ）.
4.The author is primarily concerned with （ ）.
