Communism is back, the US president argued – a resurgent menace and mortal threat to American liberty.
He linked the fight against communism to the upcoming midterm elections in November. Trump’s Republican party is presently on course to lose at least one and possibly both houses of Congress. Meanwhile, the president’s personal job approval ratings continue to plummet.
This attack on communism might seem so ludicrous as to be easy to dismiss. It is partly a response to the success of Zohran Mamdani, who was elected last year as the mayor of New York on a Democratic Socialists of America ticket.
Neither Mamdani nor any of his Democratic Socialists colleagues are remotely close to being communists. But Trump has clearly decided that the best strategy for the midterm elections is to whip up a new Red Scare.
He may well be right. Anti-communism has huge appeal within American political culture – particularly for the generation of voters who, like Trump, grew up on a diet of cold war propaganda.
Ironically, given the connections Trump has regularly made between communism and immigration, it also appeals to some voters from immigrant communities. For much of the Latin American diaspora in the US, particularly from places such as Cuba and Venezuela, anti-communism is even more politically powerful than it is for the rest of the country.
When we think about the history of anti-communism, we probably think first about McCarthyism and America’s last major Red Scare in the 1950s. But anti-communism was not limited to the US or the cold war. It was one of the most powerful global political projects of the 20th century.
Anti-communism drove Britain and its allies to invade Russia 1919, and provoked a rightwing backlash against the rise of the Labour party in the 1920s. It fuelled Christian politics and parties in the interwar period, particularly in the Vatican.
Anti-communism also underpinned the rise and popular appeal of fascism throughout Europe in the 1920s and ’30s. It drove Britain’s murderous fight against Malaysian independence in the 1950s, caused up to 1 million deaths in the Indonesian genocide of the 1960s, and was used to justify mass torture and disappearances during the Latin American dictatorships of the 1970s.
It also underpinned many features of 20th-century politics that are widely regarded as progressive. The UK’s welfare state, for example, was built to encourage the working classes to resist the siren call of communism. Social democratic parties existed to offer a reformist alternative to revolutionary parties to their left. Many trade unions, in Britain and elsewhere, pursued the fight against communist rivals with even greater urgency than the fight against their bosses.
Anti-communism, in short, was a far more persistent and powerful force in 20th-century history than anti-fascism.
Manufacturing an ‘enemy within’
There are three reasons why anti-communism was, and remains, such a powerful project. The first is the ease with which hatred or fear of communism can be yoked to hatred or fear of other outsider groups.
For Trump, the link is between communists and illegal immigrants. For the Nazis, it was between communists and Jews. Hitler’s deranged obsession with “Judeo-Bolshevism” culminated in the Holocaust.
The second reason is the ability of anti-communism to unite people across the political spectrum, from traditional conservatives to the wildest fringes of fascism.
In the Spanish civil war, fear of communism proved a more powerful ideological glue for Franco’s supporters than fear of fascism did for the fractured Republican side. And throughout history, there have been plenty of examples of liberals and social democrats who, when push came to shove, chose to line up on the side of the fascists when the threat of communism loomed.
The third reason is that anti-communism doesn’t require the existence of actual communists to retain its power.
Many of those being tarred with the brush of communism, like Mamdani, are no more than moderate social democrats by historical standards. Similarly, most of those killed in the anti-communist massacres in Indonesia and Latin America weren’t card-carrying party members. And while there were plenty of Jewish communists and socialists in early 20th-century Europe, the idea that all Jews were communists was nothing more than an antisemitic fever dream.
We can see all of this at play in the rise of the global far right over recent decades. Former Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro declared at his first inauguration that Brazil’s flag would never be red. Colombia’s president-elect, Abelardo de la Espriella, denounced his reformist opponent as a “radical left Marxist”.
Even mainstream UK conservatives such as Suella Braverman are prone to sharing “cultural Marxism” conspiracy theories.
For all these reasons, it’s important not to be blinded by the seeming absurdity of Trump’s anti-communist rhetoric. Anti-communism is back – indeed, it never went away.
It survived the end of the cold war, embedded itself within some of the most extreme ideological currents of the far right, and is now reemerging as a central plank of global politics. It is powerful, persuasive and dangerous, and we need to take it seriously.
David Brydan, Senior Lecturer in the Modern History of International Relations, King's College London
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.