Democracy is a form of government that is ruled by the people, usually through elected
representatives. It epitomizes the concepts of freedom, justice, and equal opportunity by giving rights to
each citizen and by protecting those rights throughout a fair judiciary system. It stands at the top of the
ladder of government evolution and allows a nation to prosper and grow. However, it has a very powerful
and unreasonable foe: communism. Communism in the post world war two era is a form of government
in which the people are ruled, used, and controlled by a totalitarian government. Its true form would give
the power to the people as well as the ownership of all property, but true communism could not be realized
outside of a perfect world. Unfortunately, many sought to chase the dream of true communism, causing
its presence to appear in territories disrupted by the war. That a government ruled by power and blind to
justice was growing created a paranoid fear among nationalists that the world would be dominated by
totalitarians and dictators.
However, this paranoia created a new, very potent fear that took precedence
over foreign problems: that the United States of America, the flagship of democracy, had been infiltrated
and subversively abused by communist spies and sympathizers, and that they were spying on us from
within our national government. Joe McCarthy, to whom a decade of fear was named, amplified this fear
through his numerous and extravagant charges that there were communists in the U. S. government. The
people listened to him because of the implications of this problem and because they received comfort in
knowing that a great man rose up in a crusade to rid the government of an evil pestilence. However, his
allegations created only suffering and chaos. His victims were,