Joe McCarthy gave anti-Communism a bad name. The excesses of McCarthy's witch-hunts discredited the whole idea of a Communist menace. they were too easy to lampoon, and after a few years of over-estimating the Communist threat, America spent decades tending to under-estimate the Communist menace.
Not only did the Cold War shape U.S. foreign policy, it also had a profound effect on domestic affairs. Americans had long feared radical subversion. These fears could at times be overdrawn, and used to justify otherwise unacceptable political restrictions, but it also was true that individuals under Communist Party discipline and many "fellow traveler" hangers-on gave their political allegiance not to the United States, but to the international Communist movement, or, practically speaking, to Moscow.
