To his supporters, he could say and do no wrong

September 7, 2020 1:17 PM

"He lied all the time. He lied even when he didn’t need to lie... When he didn’t have any facts to embellish, he made them up. He found that, if he just kept on repeating himself, people would figure that he must be onto something. He was incapable of sticking to a script. He rambled and he blustered, and if things weren’t going his way he left the room. He was notoriously lazy, ignorant, and unprepared, and he had a reputation for following the advice of the last person he talked to. But he trusted his instincts. And he loved chaos. He knew that he had a much higher tolerance for it than most human beings do, and he used it to confuse, to distract, and to disrupt." Louis Menand reviews Joseph McCarthy and the Force of Political Falsehoods in the New Yorker, earlier this summer.
posted by RedOrGreen (7 comments total)

Who knew.
posted by infini at 1:44 PM on September 7, 2020

Couldn't happen these days, right?
posted by Splunge at 2:41 PM on September 7, 2020 [2 favorites]

Has anyone done more damage to our country than Roy Cohn?
posted by duoshao at 5:18 PM on September 7, 2020 [5 favorites]

Look who bought the myth, by jingo
posted by RobotVoodooPower at 5:32 PM on September 7, 2020 [4 favorites]

Menard doesn't make much of this, giving it only a single paragraph:

McCarthy had the support of a media conglomerate, the Hearst papers, which amplified everything he said, and he had cheerleaders in the commentariat, such as the columnists Westbrook Pegler and Walter Winchell, both of whom reached millions of readers in a time when relatively few households (in 1952, about a third) had a television set. He tried to block a hostile newspaper, the Milwaukee Journal, from his press conferences, and he egged on the crowds at his rallies to harass the reporters.

But I'm inclined to see it as one of the most crucial parallels with Trump and the key to both men's power; McCarthy had Hearst, and Trump has Murdoch.
posted by jamjam at 6:20 PM on September 7, 2020 [15 favorites]

But I'm inclined to see it as one of the most crucial parallels with Trump and the key to both men's power; McCarthy had Hearst, and Trump has Murdoch.

Yes. I honestly don't know what the answer should be (or even could be) but at some point we are going to have to reckon with the fact that bad actors are deliberately weaponizing our democratic values to attack democracy itself. What can be done about that such that the solution isn't worse than the problem?
posted by Nerd of the North at 7:00 PM on September 7, 2020 [8 favorites]

duoshao,

Sadly, yes. It has to say something that Roy Cohn, as epic a piece of excrement as he was, still pales next to Andrew Jackson, Andrew Johnson, William Randolph Hearst, Andrew Mellon, and a list of others that would take too long to compile for a simple response. You would think that if humans were capable of learning we would have learned from the experiences and consequences of having raised up asshats in the past. It is unfortunately a perennial lesson which apparently we must fail to learn with every new generation.
posted by Ignorantsavage at 11:24 PM on September 7, 2020 [1 favorite]