re: #260 Dr Lizardo

Thanks. Yes, that brought some memories back.

For all the lizards, here’s a link to the full text of the essay:

[Link: karws.gso.uri.edu…]

Fascinating reading, even though it’s over 50 years old. And uncannily accurate.

Hofstadter was right about almost everything in that essay. He was somewhat wrong about Barry Goldwater, who was a sane person and not the nut has was made out to be. The other error was more minor:

Important changes may also be traced to the effects of the mass media. The villains of the modern right are much more vivid than those of their paranoid predecessors, much better known to the public; the literature of the paranoid style is by the same token richer and more circumstantial in personal description and personal invective. For the vaguely delineated villains of the anti-Masons, for the obscure and disguised Jesuit agents, the little-known papal delegates of the anti-Catholics, for the shadowy international bankers of the monetary conspiracies, we may now substitute eminent public figures like Presidents Roosevelt, Truman, and Eisenhower., secretaries of State like Marshall, Acheson, and Dulles, Justices of the Supreme Court like Frankfurter and Warren, and the whole battery of lesser but still famous and vivid alleged conspirators headed by Alger Hiss.

Hofstadter had his reasons for doubting Hiss’s guilt, but as it happened he was wrong on that score. Alger Hiss was indeed a Soviet spy. But as I said its a minor point that a mind less pedantic than mine likely wouldn’t mention.