system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
I believe that the recent fixation of the western world with "terrorism" is a modern rebranding of McCarthyism and the red scare. CMV

In the 50's, the US dove headfirst into one of the greatest moral panics it has seen. the second red scare brought with it a mentality where leftism and communism were considered to be dangerous and anti-american patterns of thought. under the banner of preventing the domestic spread of communism, many unconstitutional acts of government went relatively unchallenged. right wing groups accused anyone who had philosophical disagreements with them of being evil and dangerous. certain groups such as actors and teachers were targeted in particular and risked a plethora of unconstitutional actions against them.  

i see parallels to many of these things in the anti terrorism actions of america today. the NSA is carrying out a blatantly unconstitutional mass surveillance project on the US population, people are being held in prison indefinitely without trial, our airports have a massive practice of security theatre, and anti middle eastern racism is rampant all in the name of preventing the ill defined and incorporeal "terrorist threat".  even on this very sub, there are several posts that show blatant political moral panic such as "I believe Islamic extremism is worse than other forms of religious extremism," "I believe, political and economic factors aside, Islam is fundamentally a religion that teaches violence," and "I believe that the US Government should have authority to see our files, tap our conversations" in the first couple of pages. 

it seems to me that the government has glorified the "terrorist threat" in order to circumvent constitutional limitations in the same way that it glorified the "communist threat" in the 50's for the same reason.
gpt
It's true that the US has had certain enemy groups over the year (Germans in WWI, Nazis and the Japanese during WWII, Communists during the Cold War, and Islamic terrorists today,) but this is not the same thing as McCarthyism.

Joseph McCarthy specifically targeted American political opponents as being communists. No political figure today is accusing their political opponents of secretly being a terrorist. Even when idiots like Donald Trump would accuse Obama of being a secret muslim or a foreigner, no politician was willing to publicly say that they thought he was a terrorist. 

During the Red Scare, people were worried that Americans would become communists and take over the US from the inside. Today, no one fears that American citizens will convert to Islam and become terrorists. McCarthyism was about fear of an internal, domestic threat. Terrorism is about fear of an external, foreign threat.

So while you are right that the word "terrorist" is being bandied about as a justification to reduce civil liberties, and there is somewhat of a moral panic, it is not the same as what happened during McCarthyism and the Red Scare.