You seem to need it more. Let me help: "n. an adherent of fascism or similar right-wing authoritarian".

Sounds about right.

Mussolini said: "Fascism, sitting on the right, could also have sat on the mountain of the center ... These words in any case do not have a fixed and unchanged meaning: they do have a variable subject to location, time and spirit. We don't give a damn about these empty terminologies and we despise those who are terrorized by these words"

Quoting Robert Paxton's "The Anatomy of Fascism": facism is "... a form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation, or victimhood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy, and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion."

McCarthy was obsessed with "The Red Menace", and was willing to abandon just about any ethical or legal constraint to both cleanse the United States, and to spread his idea of Americanism.

He enlisted industry, traditional elites, and whatever political support he could find his obsessive pursuit of cleansing the US of communism (and homosexuality).

What's especially scary is that you write off his wholesale destruction of careers and lives as an ethically justified approach to the problems of the Cold War (and his problems with homosexuality), despite the tactics baring a striking similarity to the CCCP's enforcement of party politics through social, commercial, and direct governmental intimidation.

We're lucky that McCarthy was never truly unleashed on the Red Menace; your implied support of him and his tactics is abhorrent.

McCarthy did not abandon "just about any legal constraint", it is plainly untrue. There were no mass imprisonments of suspected communists without trial, no summary executions, no concentration camps for suspected communists - nothing of the sort that communists were actually implemented for years. Instead, people were called into legal proceedings - in which they could also have counsel if they wanted - and were asked if they were communists. And if they didn't want to answer that - they took the Fifth.

>>> He enlisted industry, traditional elites, and whatever political support he could find

Unlike any politician with the cause, which never ever uses industry, elites and other political support. I didn't know we are practically surrounded with fascists - our whole government is composed of fascists, almost everybody relies to support of the industry, elites and political groups affiliated with their causes! You opened my eyes!

>>> What's especially scary is that you write off his wholesale destruction of careers

I do not "write off" anything. I explain that if the person is a voluntary member of a totalitarian organisation headed by a violent dictator Joseph Stalin, organisation which murdered millions in its home country, drowned multiple countries in blood and caused uncountable deaths and suffering all over the globe, and currently is actively engaged in both hot and covert war with the US - I can understand if some people do not want to entrust sensitive positions to the judgement of such people. Either these people are not of the sound mind, or their personal goals are not aligned, mildly speaking, with something that the rest of Americans would want to happen. If you think not wishing to associate with such people is morally reprehensible, you may want to seek friendship with some KKK or White Pride or Westboro Baptist Church members, but my ethics says these are not the people I'd like to be anywhere near them.

>>> despite the tactics baring a striking similarity to the CCCP's enforcement of party politics

Surely, that's exactly how it happened in the USSR - if somebody was found working for foreign organisation bent on overthrowing communists, he was asked nicely if it is true, and after he refused to answer the worst could happen to him was losing his job, after which he would either just find another one or live off public assistance. This system is exactly what is widely known as GULAG. True story, bro.