Red Scare

MAGA Resurrects the Threat of Communism

It’s a feature or bug of American conservatism that the movement must have a scary enemy. I leave it to neuroscientists to explain what in the right-wing brain demands a menacing foe. The phantasmic enemy shifts so that over the last half-century, first and for a long time, it was communism, then waves of moral panic about daycare pedophiles, feminazis, gays, then godless liberals. After 9/11, it looked like the bogeyman of “radical Islamic terror” would permanently satisfy the need. But everything old is new again inside the MAGA time machine. Somewhere around 2017, Americans time-traveled politically back to the 1950s.

Today’s MAGA warriors have resurrected the Commie to replace the waning threat of “radical Islamic terror” (although they do keep the sharia-law-is-coming-to-your-town talking points handy for photo ops at the southern border). In a state of anachronistic paranoia, our MAGA friends claim to see Commies under every bed and Red-leaning infiltrators in “the “Deep State.” Their leaders get political mileage out of these memes. Sen. Ted Cruz regularly Tweets things like: “Communism is vicious. Marxism is evil.” Last month Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-High School Massacre Harasser), called the producers of Curb Your Enthusiasm “the nasty Commies from Hollywood” for making fun of Georgia’s law criminalizing the act of giving water to people waiting in line to vote.

MAGA’s Dear Leader, of course, has been redbaiting since he sailed down the golden escalator in 2015. He blathered on about the communist menace in speeches at the U.N. while President. But the fantasy of domestic Reds really fires him up. Running for re-election in 2020, in one of countless examples, he warned a rally in Vandalia, Ohio, “The choice in November is going to be very simple. There’s never been a time when there’s been such a difference. One is probably communism. I don’t know. They keep saying socialism. I think they’ve gone over that one. That one’s passed already.”

Now that he’s running from the law and for the Presidency at the same time, commies play a starring role in a Manichean campaign. Last summer, after he was arraigned on federal charges related to the insurrection, he accused Biden and the DOJ of being run by communists who were soon going to come after the rest of America. “If the communists get away with this, it won’t stop with me,” he said after entering a not guilty plea. Stumping in Ohio shortly after, he doubled down, positioning himself as the great crusader. “At the end of the day, communists win and destroy America, or you destroy the communists.”

Yard sign in MAGA Pennsylvania. Note the care taken stenciling the hammer and sickle symbol of a nation that no longer exists.

These are cartoonish bleats, laughable. Cruz even accused Barbie of being a communist. Right-wing influencers toss around the word “commie” as an online epithet aimed at journalists whose facts they don’t like, and anyone supporting the least whiff of egalitarianism. It is all idiotic - but also profoundly disturbing, shameful, derelict leadership, when the nation is facing profound real challenges with unchecked AI, epic political corruption, foreign wars, wealth inequality, and climate change.

I recently watched A Spy Among Friends, the streaming series based on Ben MacIntyre’s book about British double agent Kim Philby. Philby was the most damaging of five British men who spied for the KGB, all upper-crust Cambridge men, who at some point in their younger days, had become enamored of Marx. The so-called Cambridge 5 worked secretly for the KGB for decades, as true communist ideologues who believed in the promise of the Russian Revolution. Their activities caused countless deaths among collaborators with the capitalist West. They damaged the integrity and stability of the intelligence services. American counterintelligence chief James Jesus Angleton, a notorious Anglophile who fell hook line and sinker for Philby’s cool aristocratic facade, spent the rest of his life in a state of profound paranoia, operating with malign effect at the top levels of the CIA.

Now there were some commies!

When they’re not flinging around the “commies” epithet at anyone who gets under their skin (I’ve been called a commie journalist on Xitter) they are obsessing over a related specter they call “cultural Marxism.”

At the influential conservative Heritage Foundation in DC, for example, both the President, Kevin Roberts, and the policy Mandate that is part of the notorious Project 2025, use the term regularly. Heritage has published papers on the threat of cultural Marxism in American institutions, including one by Katie Gorka. (If the name rings bell, it’s because she’s married to short-tempered, Nazi-adjacent MAGA goon Seb Gorka.) Mrs. Gorka co-wrote her paper with Heritage “senior fellow” Mike Gonzalez, who has since made a personal cottage industry off the topic. Last year he published a book called “BLM: The Making of a New Marxist Revolution” which, according to its press, “demonstrates how [BLM’s] top leaders are avowed Marxists who want to dismantle our Constitution, our social institutions, and our very way of life. In pursuit of these aims, they and their willing fellow activists make savvy use of social media to spread their message and organize marches, sit-ins, statue-tumblings, and riots.”

The concept of “cultural Marxism” was popularized in the early 1990s, coined by a paleoconservative, William Lind, and then picked up by men like Paul Weyrich, the Catholic extremist, white nationalist founder of the Heritage Foundation as well as the the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), the Moral Majority, the Council for National Policy and the Free Congress Foundation. His claque consisted of some of the flintiest, wackiest rich white men America has ever produced. Barking mad steel heir Richard Mellon Scaife staked Heritage Foundation with almost a million dollars, and poured his inherited pelf into an array of winger operations (especially targeting Hillary Clinton) until he staggered off the mortal coil in 2014. He once responded to a reporter who asked him about his right wing contributions, “You fucking Communist cunt, get out of here.”

Today, the right uses “cultural Marxism” broadly to refer to gay marriage, women’s reproductive rights, trans rights, and pretty much any American history courses that mention enslaved Africans.

The weird furor over “commies” and “cultural Marxism” in America exists in parallel with a trend on the right toward adulation of foreign capitalist autocrats. Hungary, for example, a country most Americans associate with goulash and Zsa Zsa Gabor has come to play a significant role in our national politics. Trump recently met with Hungary’s autocrat Viktor Orban, a man who has achieved hero status on the American right for his nativism, his claim to be a white Christian bulwark on the edge of the Asiatic East with its hordes of migrants moving toward the EU, and his anti-gay and forced birth positions. The EU has declared his government an electoral autocracy - defined as having elections but with speech and association repression that undermines the very notion of democracy.

The Hungarian people, of course, do have in their national memory the experience of being violently invaded by a nominally communist country, the former USSR. Billions of people in China live in a nominally communist country that operates like a capitalist autocracy. But as former CIA covert agent John Sipher pointed out yesterday in a hilarious Tweet, most of the commie-obsessed Americans have no idea what the word “communism” even means. The Oxford English dictionary definition of communism is: a political theory derived from Karl Marx, advocating class war and leading to a society in which all property is publicly owned and each person works and is paid according to their abilities and needs.

Other than our national parks and BLM lands, most U.S. property is privately owned. We’ve never had a class war. Workers most definitely are not paid according to their abilities and needs. Americans have never experienced communism and likely never will. The far greater and more imminent threat to our democracy and way of life is the autocracy that MAGA yearns for.