Commentary | Republicans reignite the red scare in service of Trump – By Heather Digby Parton (Salon) / June 28, 2023
Why the right has suddenly returned to screaming about communism
Conservatives have been screaming about socialists scheming to destroy everything Real Americans hold dear for as long as anyone alive can remember. Going back more than a hundred years to the first Red Scare in 1919, when the government rounded up thousands of socialists, anarchists and communists during the Palmer raids, there have been periodic paroxysms of outrage aimed at this perennial boogeyman.
In the 1920s and 30s, it was evoked to oppose the labor movement and the policies of President Franklin Roosevelt as he tried to bring the country back from the Great Depression. After World War II, anti-Communism became the official foreign policy of both parties and the Republicans began to use it as a cudgel to beat the Democratic Party politically. Throughout the 1940s and 50s, the GOP focused as much on “the enemy within” as America’s cold war adversaries. The House UnAmerican Activities Committee “investigated” anyone who had once been associated with the American Communist Party, gradually expanding their probe into anyone they suspected of being insufficiently patriotic or whose political influence they believed was harmful to American culture. Then along came Joseph McCarthy, who waved around supposed lists of names of Soviet spies or “fellow travelers” he said had infiltrated the U.S. government and military. This went on for years and years, ruining the lives of untold numbers of people.
The fever finally broke after more than a decade of non-stop witchhunts and the “communist” accusation fell out of favor even as anti-communism remained very potent politically among hawks of both parties. But the bipartisan consensus broke around the Vietnam War, which finally shook the nation’s belief in any existential struggle. Nixon went to China and it was only a few years later that the Berlin Wall came down.
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