I’ve been thinking about how much the past 3.5 years reminded me of the assent of the dangerous demagogue Senator Joseph McCarthy. This is why it is really important to know your history. I’ll be writing more about this when the site is fixed.
PBS’ “American Experience” documentary about Joe McCarthy is deeply disturbing — not just because of the senator’s outrageous lying, red-baiting and gay-baiting, but because of the parallels between what happened in the early 1950s and what’s happening today. “To me, there’s a resonance in the treatment of the press,” said Sharon Grimberg, the writer, director and producer of the documentary. “McCarthy was somebody who lied constantly, vociferously, and did it so often it was hard to fact check him.” Read HERE.
The Library of America recently put out a collection of writings by the Columbia University historian Richard Hofstadter. It includes two full-length studies published in the early nineteen-sixties: “Anti-Intellectualism in American Life” and “The Paranoid Style in American Politics.” Hofstadter was trying, in part, to understand right-wing leaders, such as Senators Joseph McCarthy and Barry Goldwater, and the prevalence of an antipathy toward expertise and an embrace of conspiracy theories that had been, he wrote, “catnip for cranks of all kinds.” Read HERE.