I was a Senate page boy for a couple of summers in the early Eisenhower years. Joe McCarthy was in full cry. I would ride in the Senate elevator with him sometimes or sit near him in the toy monorail subway car that runs between the Capitol and the Senate Office Building. He had black smudges under his eyes and a hearty Elks Club way with the tourists he encountered in the halls of the Capitol. He wore rumpled dark-blue suits and gravy-catcher ties, and from time to time he would emit a mirthless chuckle (heh heh heh). If you got close, he gave off a whiff of last night’s whiskey. Years later, that smell—stale, heavy—merged in my mind with the moral odor of McCarthyism, a sour American memory. Saint Thérèse de Lisieux, the Carmelite known as “The Little Flower,” was said to have emitted a strong scent of roses at her death—“the odor of sanctity.” Joe McCarthy produced the opposite effect. So does the cancel culture, which is the 21st century’s equivalent of McCarthy’s marauding. The country’s myriad cancelers emit the odor not of sanctity but of sanctimony, and of something more ominous: the whiff of a society decomposing. What’s happening on the American left—with surreal rapidity, like the fall of France in 1940—is sinister. Wokeness and the cancel culture represent not idealism but virtue gone clinically insane. Look up the word hysteria: “a psychological disorder whose symptoms include . . . shallow, volatile emotions, and overdramatic or attention-seeking behavior.” The indignant woke, who imagine themselves to be righteously awake and laying the foundations for a more just and humane world, ought to pause

More From The Wall Street Journal (subscription required):