Walzing with Lenin

The Hail Mary Pass of Red-Baiting

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“Remember when I said we will become a communist country? And I meant it,” Donald Trump said at a rally in Montana last week, to wolf whistles and cheers. “Except I was wrong. We didn’t become socialist, we’re going beyond socialism. We’ve become a full-blown communist country!” 

Desperate men, desperate times, desperate lies. 

Communists and Marxists are here, there, everywhere. Trump is not the only member of his party Red-Scaring the base. The C-word has been a GOP messaging crutch for a while now. Can’t think of anything to say? Write the C-word on your hand in ink. 

“Democrats, who are the Communist Party of the United States of America,” Georgia Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene likes to say.

“Communism” and “Marxism”— like “freedom” and “liberty” — are words the right has drained of original meaning. Let’s consult the Kids’ Britannica for a definition: “Communism is a type of government as well as an economic system (a way of creating and sharing wealth). In a Communist system, individual people do not own land, factories, or machinery. Instead, the government or the whole community owns these things. Everyone is supposed to share the wealth that they create.”

The GOP has MAGA’d itself backward into the GREAT AGAIN of the Cold War, that happy time when good Americans were supposed to keep an eye out for reds under the beds. Whether any of them believe what they’re saying or not is hard to tell. But it’s the messaging they’ve chosen in the absence of effective political ammo against the surging appeal of Kamala Harris and Tim Walz. 

Listening to Trump and his MAGA acolytes in the Party, one might wonder if America is in the throes of its own Bolshevik revolution. That cataclysm, one of the great events of the 20th Century, did create a communist state. After centuries of Czarist abuse of a massive peasant class, the people suffering economic hardship and food shortages rose up, killed the royals, sent the rich they didn’t kill packing, abolished private property, and eventually became the Soviet Union. 

Russians did seize the means of production and they did put the workers in charge of the farms and factories, the essence of Marxism. And for decades to come, that’s how it worked behind the Iron Curtain. 

You can look far and wide in America today and be hard-pressed to find community ownership of any business. If workers are taking over factories, if farmworkers are seizing tractors and land, we haven’t heard of it. 

Across our country, there certainly are a lot of “individual people who do not own land, factories or machinery” - the Kids’ Britannica defining element of communism. But neither the revolutionary masses nor the U.S. government took those things away from them.

Trump has been flinging around Communist / Marxist labels like Mardi Gras beads since he sailed down the golden escalator. But he ratcheted it up in the last year, timed to his criminal indictments. It’s always effective with some political consumers. “Red-baiting is as American as apple pie in political communications,” Tanner Mirrlees, a political scientist at Ontario Tech University in Canada told PBS last year, as Trump and the GOP started going all in on the label. 

New York Magazine columnist Edd Kilgore has suggested a counter-intuitive explanation, that the label is actually an effective outreach to recent immigrants – from the party that wants to wall them out. “Perhaps Republicans rely on so much anachronistic name-calling because they are reaching out to immigrant constituencies with recent experience of actual communism (like Cubans) or authoritarian societies utilizing socialist rhetoric (like Venezuelans).”

The “Marxist” label is messaging filler, lazy shtick on Fox. Right-wing pundits and Murdoch’s anchors and commentators toss around the terms because they’ve run out of coherent Trump sound bites. Rachel Campos-Duffy, a former MTV reality star and Fox fembot, uses the terms Marxist, communist, and socialist “probably more than anyone on the network,” says Decoding Fox creator Juliet Jeske, a hero of our time who watches and logs hours of Fox content every week. 

“Pretty much every day you see a segment talking about cultural Marxism,” Jeske told me. “Trump has used the terms Marxist, communist, and socialist in his speeches for a while now.  Fox regularly misuses the terms socialist, Marxist, and communist. They call anything slightly left-of-center communist or socialist. They used to shy away from the term Cultural Marxism but in the past year or so multiple hosts have openly used it. Sen. Ted Cruz wrote a book about it, and since his book came out they've been less hesitant to use the term Cultural Marxism.” 

Some of these people appear to be true believers. Maybe Cuban-American Cruz is among them. Over at the Heritage Foundation, one of the Project 2025 writers is Mike Gonzalez, who once teamed up with former Heritage fellow Katie Gorka (wife of Trump bully Seb Gorka) to decry the scourge of “cultural Marxism.” Gonzalez - whose contribution to Project 2025 is a proposal to completely defund and un-license the Corporation for Public Broadcasting - has published an entire book around the premise that “Marxists” built the Black Lives Matter movement. “Cloaking their goals under the pretense of social justice, they now seek to dismantle the foundations of the American republic by rewriting history; reintroducing racism; creating privileged classes; and determining what can be said in public discourse, the military, and houses of worship.” he warns. “Unless Marxist thought is defeated again, today’s cultural Marxists will achieve what the Soviet Union never could: the subjugation of the United States to a totalitarian, soul-destroying ideology. 

The Southern Poverty Law Center calls “cultural Marxism” a conspiracy theory with a dog whistle of anti-Semitism. “In a nutshell, the theory posits that a tiny group of Jewish philosophers who fled Germany in the 1930s and set up shop at Columbia University in New York City devised an unorthodox form of ‘Marxism’ that took aim at American society's culture, rather than its economic system,” SPLC researchers wrote. “The theory holds that these self-interested Jews — the so-called ‘Frankfurt School’ of philosophers — planned to try to convince mainstream Americans that white ethnic pride is bad, that sexual liberation is good, and that supposedly traditional American values — Christianity, ‘family values,’ and so on — are reactionary and bigoted.”

Actual economists take issue with the labels. 

“This is just baseless name-calling, as usual,” says Larry Mishel, a DC-based economist and former president of the Economic Policy Institute. “What policies make them 'communist’? Ones that Trump doesn't support? Social Security, Medicare? Collective Bargaining? Taxing the rich? They'll never, ever be specific because they can't and because such policies are very popular.”

Thomas Ferguson is Research Director at the Institute for New Economic Thinking, which advocates for a more equitable economic system. “The Democratic Party as a bunch of communists? Hilarious, really,” he says. “After three weeks of exuberance from literally hundreds of venture capitalists cheering the new Democratic nominee, who could possibly take it seriously?”

Ferguson continued: “Donald Trump uses the term ‘socialism’ to denounce people who think that somebody should do something about wildfires and extreme heat, the steady U.S. drop in life expectancy compared to other developed nations, and surging inequalities in wealth and income. Or who doubts that another round of tax cuts is the answer to most of the problems of the world. I recall many years ago a student drawing my attention to a prominent Florida banker comparing out-of-state bankers' efforts to do business in the state to communists. It's just a term of objurgation, about as realistic as, well.... pro wrestling.”’

It’s easy to make fun of the people who fall for this stuff or laugh it off as ignorance and paranoia. The Daily Show recently ran a segment joking about MAGA’s reliance on the label. At “Commie de central,” they talked about how Progressive insurance pitch-woman Flo must be a communist because “she is progressive and her name is Flo.” And Peppa Pig must be a communist “because she teaches kids about sharing.” And Donald Trump is probably Commie Donny, since “he has married two Eastern Europeans, he handed out free money during Covid, and he’s friends with Putin.”

We laugh. 

But it is also a serious lie. 

The truth is the post-Reagan decades have been disastrous for middle and working-class Americans. Huge tax cuts for the wealthiest, deregulated markets, the endless attempts to peddle discredited “trickle down” economics, and the assault on labor unions - most of it from the Republican Party - left swathes of the population in dire straits that no new tax cuts or drill baby drill will get them out of. 

Economist and former Labor Secretary Robert Reich has been writing about these problems cogently for years. In a recent column, he explained how we got here. 

Over the last 40 years, the “free market” has been rigged and power has shifted upward to corporate executives and investors who engage in organized bribery — bankrolling lawmakers who change laws and regulations to their benefit. 

This has allowed the powerful to monopolize industries, bash unions, pay lower taxes, make big financial bets on Wall Street and get bailed out when the bets go sour, outsource jobs abroad, and pretend they’re job creators who deserve all this power.

Biden’s economic policies have been, on paper, extremely successful. Unemployment is down, stock market is up. But month after month, those good numbers come with reporting about how regular Americans don’t feel it. What they feel is that they are being crushed by high food and housing costs. 

There’s a reason for this. It’s not cultural Marxism or communism. It’s corporate greed and monopolies.

Four mega-companies control most American food industries. “There’s little to no competition across the entire food supply chain,” Reich wrote recently. “This has allowed big corporations to engage in a price gouging free-for-all … allowing them to coordinate prices instead of compete on the basis of lower prices.”

The high cost of housing is also a private greed problem. After the market-caused housing bubble and crash and recession of 2008, after Wall Street got a government bailout (from W, not Obama), private equity stepped into the wreckage and started buying up cheap homes, especially in poor neighborhoods, and turning them into rental units. The resulting lack of affordable supply is the biggest reason home prices and rents have soared. 

Incredibly, private equity is also buying up whole trailer parks so they can suck up the fixed incomes of people on disability, social security or other public aid. Please take a moment and try to get your head around the colossal venality of super-rich people padding their incomes with trailer park money. 

At the current pace, Robert Reich estimates, by 2030 years Wall Street will own 40 percent of the private American homes. 

Government should do something about this. Last year, Democrats sponsored a bill to force hedge funds to divest from housing over a ten-year period, called the End Hedge Fund Control of American Homes Act of 2023. “You have created a situation where ordinary Americans aren’t bidding against other families, they’re bidding against the billionaires of America for these houses,” Sen. Jeff Merkley (D- Oregon), who introduced the bill with Rep. Adam Smith (D-Washington), told the New York Times. “And it’s driving up rents and it’s driving up the home prices.”

It is quite possible the Republican party’s paymasters really do think it is “communism” to deny them the right to slurp up trailer park and single-family home rents to profit off serfs on Social Security or who work at McDonald's. But it’s a lot more likely the red scare is just a cynical strategy political sharps like Trump campaign directors Chris “Swift Boat” LaCivita and Susie Wiles bet will trigger a certain low information voter to deliver for Donald in November. 

The GOP paymasters and strategists are hoping they can keep the doddering Great Showman on his feet and on message long enough to deliver what they need most from him: persuading the persuadable that the root of their problems is the ghost of “communism” manifest in Walz and Harris, and not capitalism run amok.