Red baiting is back!
And the ghost of Joe McCarthy approves.
Photo: Bettmann/Fine Art America
Communism, the political ideology that calls for public ownership of productive resources and the means of producing, has never been particularly popular in the US. So it’s no wonder that one of the standard tactics of Republicans is to accuse their Democratic opponents — without evidence, of course — of having communist sympathies.
This political strategy began in the 1950s, when an unscrupulous and little-known senator from Wisconsin named Joe McCarthy (pictured above) started claiming the federal government was infested with commies. Eventually his fellow senators tired of his unfounded allegations and censured him. McCarthy died a few years later from complications of alcoholism, but his legacy lived on in the GOP.
Before becoming president, Ronald Reagan fearmongered in 1961 that programs like Medicare were laying the groundwork for socialism (Republicans think socialism and communism are the same). Campaigning in 1992, George H. W. Bush implied that Bill Clinton was some kind of agent for communist Russia because he once visited there as a young man. When John Kerry was the Democratic nominee in 2004, the GOP insisted he also was a closet communist.
Republicans spent years pushing absurd conspiracy theories that President Barack Obama was a secret socialist. Exhibit A was the Affordable Care Act, which they described as a government takeover of healthcare. And in the 2024 election cycle, Donald Trump claimed Vice President Kamala Harris (”Comrade Kamala”) “wants this country to go communist.”
Now, with the election of Democratic Socialist Zohran Mamdani as mayor of New York — along with primary wins for progressives around the country who want to end government corruption, break up monopolies and protect workers — right-wing red baiting back in style.
Naturally, non-stop insult generator Trump is leading the pack. Turning to his failing Truth Social platform, he declared there are “many Communists running in badly failing Blue States” and vowed that “America the Beautiful will NEVER be a Communist Country!!!”
At last week’s Faith & Freedom Coalition conference, he warned, “We have to stop this, this horrible thread of cancer that’s permeating our country called communism.” And claimed Democrats are “becoming a communist party.” He went on to inform the assembled Christian nationalists, “They will close your churches in this country if they go communist...They will kill your people...They want to end religion.” Oh, he also called DC’s Democratic nominee for mayor a communist.
The problem with Trump’s overwrought pronouncements is that, after years of such attacks from the conservative right, people no longer take them seriously. And if every person Republicans don’t like is a communist, we’re back to the days of Joe McCarthy.