Pick your metaphor for the last eight years of American politics. Sewer or garbage truck? Practically every day a helpless nation watches a new scrap of official grift, crime, abuse of public trust revealed and tossed into the churning dumpster of history. Most of us identify this era with Donald Trump, who sailed down a golden escalator in the summer of 2015 and lit the dumpster fire. But in his bracing history of American conservative hustlers, The Longest Con, veteran political writer Joe Conason proposes that the American right has for more than a half century been increasingly OK with “politicized larceny.” After decades of professional fearmongers, scammers, and grifters chipped away at the line between right and wrong, the right was ready to support the idea, as Gordon Gekko put it, that greed is, actually, good. The ends always justify the means, if you can make bank on the way.
A crucial representative of this attitude, according to Conason, was Roy Cohn, the red-baiting Joe McCarthy aide, New York power broker, and Mafia lawyer whose “philosophy of impunity” was so successful that it shaped right-wing politics for decades to come. His most apt pupil was Donald Trump, whom he represented in his later years. Cohn taught the younger Donald that “it was not only possible but admirable to lie, cheat, swindle, fabricate, then deny, deny, deny—and get away with everything,” Conason writes. As a lawyer, Cohn’s motto was: Better to know the judge than to know the law. As a businessman, it was: Better to stiff creditors than pay bills; and always worthwhile to lie, bribe, steal, and swindle while never apologizing.
Conason devotes the first third of the book to some of the right-wing scammers “corroded to [the] core” like Cohn, who roamed the hinterlands of Cold War America preying on Red Scared hayseeds for personal profit. Unlike Cohn, many were nominal Christians, with names that sound like something straight out of Deliverance (Bundy, Smoot). They sold anti-Communism with Jesus. Oklahoman Billy James Hargis got rich off his radio ministry and as a fake doctor stumping churches and........