The Cold War never ended for the American right
Cliff Schecter posted the clip below last night and it’s a fine example of the conservative reflex for branding as communist everything and everybody they dislike. Three-plus decades after the end of the Cold War that they declared Saint Ronald of Reagan had won, they still can’t let it go. They’re still looking for commies in woodpiles and for Reds under their beds before they cower beneath the sheets.
Upon review, I was surprised to see that Ed Kilgore wrote in response to Donald Trump branding his opponents communists that he “hadn’t heard a Republican call a Democrat a commie since the high tide of McCarthyism.” Looking at the clip Cliff posted, where’s Ed been all this time?
Kilgore wrote in March 2022:
It’s not just Trump throwing the term around. One of his favorite Republican acolytes, Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, calls Democrats — all of them, not just some of them — communists all the time (most recently in her speech to a white-nationalist group, in which she referred to “Democrats, who are the Communist Party of the United States of America”). When Republicans lost two Senate seats and control of the upper chamber in Greene’s home state in January 2021, South Dakota governor Kristi Noem called the winning Democratic candidates communists. And another Republican member of Congress, Senator Tommy Tuberville of Alabama, betrayed a lack of understanding of communism just last month in explaining that the Russians were invading Ukraine because, as a communist, Vladimir Putin “couldn’t feed his people” and needed Ukraine’s farmland.
The willfully ignorant needed a refresher course. Kilgore presented one. But that’s beside the point.
Trump is reviving the Red Scare as part of his 2024 campaign, Amherst College political scientist, Austin Sarat, explained in Politico after Trump’s classified documents arraignment:
First, it is designed to appeal to older voters who remember the days when the phrase “Better Dead Than Red” signaled solidarity among white people in this country against a common enemy. Polls show that only 3 percent of people in their 70s and older have a favorable view of communism as opposed to 28 percent among Gen Z.
Second, it stirs up fears of China, today’s most prominent and powerful communist nation.
Finally, this language has special meaning in South Florida, where the former president is under federal indictment. It’s no accident that Trump reacted to his arraignment in the classified documents case on June 13 by waving the bloody flag of communism and describing the threat it allegedly poses.
“If the communists get away with this,” he said in a speech later that day, “it won’t stop with me. They will not hesitate to ramp up their persecution of Christians, pro-life activists, parents attending school board meetings, and even future Republican candidates.”
That it’s all BS doesn’t matter (see first post this a.m.).
PBS News Hour addressed this right-wing twitch in June also. Demonization and scare-mongering is the point:
Experts say there is a long history of U.S. politicians calling opponents Marxist or communist without evidence — perhaps most infamously Sen. Joseph McCarthy, who led efforts to blacklist accused communists in the 1950s.
In a country that has historically positioned itself against Marxism, “red-baiting is as American as apple pie in political communications,” said Tanner Mirrlees, an associate professor at Ontario Tech University in Canada who has researched political discourse about “cultural Marxism.”
The attacks are carefully constructed to hit voters emotionally, said Steve Israel, a former U.S. congressman from New York who studied political messaging as chair of the House Democratic Policy and Communications Committee.
“Democrats tend to message to the part of the brain that is about reason and empirical evidence,” he said. “Republicans message to the gut.”
Messaging to people’s heads is a reflex that left can’t let go.
I first wrote this about 2011 before posting here in 2014:
It took most of the 1990s, but with the former Soviet Pacific fleet rusting away at the docks in Vladivostok, even the Pentagon figured out communism wasn’t the Red Menace anymore. It took Russia less than a decade after the Wall fell to revert to the oligarchy it was before the Bolshevik Revolution – peasants and plutocrats. Which is where we’re headed, if you haven’t noticed.
If conservatives’ would-be leaders are so worried about the U.S. emulating the Roosskies, they might want to stop licking the boots of our domestic plutocrats. They might want to get their heads out of their anti-communism and join the rest of us in addressing the challenges of the twenty-first century.
But no. They’ll invoke the Cold War while embracing Russian dictator Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. Why? Because Putin’s “Russia is white, Christian and authoritarian so they consider it an ally.”
Also, as Tevye sang from the Pale, it’s a tradition.
