The tendency to explain the world in terms of conspiracies, conspiracies on a scale so immense as to dwarf any previous such ventures in the history of man, didn’t begin with McCarthyism. McCarthy as an individual was rather quickly discredited, and McCarthyism became a universal pejorative for false and hysterical and unfair accusation. Exaggerated fears of Communist subversion, however, lasted for the whole Cold War, letting modern Americans’ antisubversion fantasies take root and spread and grow as never before. The basic McCarthyist vision—a conviction that a powerful conspiracy of
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McCarthyism...the same then as now, the original "fake news".
