Look, comrades, I grew up at a time in this country when the thing we kids were taught to fear more than anything else in our little Midwestern lives was COMMUNISM!

Communist Russia — the USSR — was the big, scary enemy, a country led by authoritarian leaders like Nikita Khrushchev and Leonid Brezhnev, who were attempting to take over the world and destroy democracy and the American way of life. They were the commies, the pinkos, the red menace — a nuclear-armed adversary who was also our rival in space, with their cursed Sputnik satellites. The Russians were so bold they even propped up Fidel Castro in a communist state 90 miles away from Miami. Russia, we were told by our teachers and parents, was determined to force everyone in the world to live in a commune and toil under communism, a fate presumably worse than death.

In our schools, we had two kinds of drills: fire drills, in which at the sound of a long bell, every student high-tailed it “single file” down the stairs and out the doors onto the schoolyard lawn, goose-assing and laughing all the way. (If you were lucky, you attended a school that had one of those cool fire-escape slides out a third-story window, which livened up the process.) But the real serious stuff took place during the air-raid drills, where, at the sound of a keening siren, we had to “duck and cover” under our desks, which, as everyone knows, will protect you against nuclear holocaust. Mainly, of course, it just scared the crap out of us and traumatized a couple generations.

This went on through the 1980s, at which point, President Reagan had turned standing up to Russia into performance art (“Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!”). It turned out to be a surprisingly effective gambit, or at the worst, Reagan’s timing was spot-on. The Soviet Union’s economy was collapsing during the 1980s, leading to the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, and lending a measure of stature to Reagan’s latter years in office.

If there was one benefit of this strange, decades-long international game of Russian roulette, it was the fact that we were actually taught what communism is. We learned most of Karl Marx’s greatest one-liners, including the scariest one: “From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs,” which we Americans were taught to see as the mantra of a system that destroyed ambition and the drive to succeed that American capitalism was built upon. I think that’s simplistic, but it’s also mostly true. Living on the dole is living on the dole. All communism does is narrow economic opportunity to oligarchs. Everyone else? Pass the beans and borscht and keep your head down, comrade.

The fact is that communism has proven to be a horrible system of government, one that concentrates power under an authoritarian rule, censors books and newspapers, offers only rudimentary education for the poor, discriminates on the basis of gender and race, and controls healthcare. In communist countries, posters of the authoritarian Dear Leader are plastered on every open space. Flags with his image are flown in every public square.

That’s why it seems so absurd to me to hear MAGA types — and Donald Trump himself — call Kamala Harris and Democrats “communists.” It sounds like you’re being tough when you call someone a communist, but they literally appear to have no idea what a communist is.

Think of the two major American political parties: When it comes to a cult of personality, one that features posters of Dear Leader, flags, religious iconography, clothes, and even tattoos, which party comes to mind? Which party has come out in support of banning books? Which party wants to give public tax dollars to private schools? Which party openly demonizes LGBTQ Americans and people of color? Which party wants to centralize power and give it to an authoritarian who will “be a dictator on day one”? Which party wants to control the healthcare decisions of the country’s females? Which party literally rejected democracy in 2020?

If your answer to those questions is anything other than the Republican Party, you’ve gone down into a scary rabbit hole, a place where the light of the obvious won’t penetrate. It’s like you’re in a permanent duck-and-cover drill.

“Non-liquid gold. You know where it was? Iowa. It’s called corn. They have, it’s non-liquid, that’s my thing, you have more NON-LIQUID gold. They said what is that? I said corn, we love that idea, you know it’s a pretty cool thought isn’t it? That’s a nickname in its own way, but we came up with a new word, a new couple of words, for corn.”

This was part of a speech Donald Trump gave in New Hampshire last week, just after he’d won the Iowa primary. He went on for more than an hour, free-styling, feeling the flow, singing the song of himself, like Walt Whitman on Adderall: “We’re going to place strong protections to stop banks and regulators from trying to debank you from your — your political beliefs, what they do. They want to debank you. We’re going to debank — think of this — they want to take away your country. Electric cars!”

They want to debank your electric cars! Or something! Wake up, Sheeple! Also, “non-liquid gold”? Isn’t there a name for that already? Like, um, gold?

According to news reports, people began edging out of the room after 40 minutes, leaving The Donald to wander on unescorted through the echo chambers of his brain for another half hour. In a speech four days later, he repeatedly confused GOP opponent Nikki Haley with former Speaker Nancy Pelosi. If your elderly uncle were talking like this, you’d recognize that he’s tired and sundowning and that you needed to get him back to his assisted-living facility. Trump’s people? Not so much. They understand all too well that Trump babbling incoherently is like Trump shooting a man on Fifth Avenue. His hardcore base will lap it up and still follow him anywhere. They’re like Deadheads, only stupid.

Look, fatigue can get to anyone. Trump had just spent a week in frigid Iowa, putting in long days of shaking hands, schmoozing, and speechifying. He’d also made an appearance in New York at his rape/defamation trial, where he muttered and scowled and ticked off the judge. Then he’d traveled to Florida to attend his mother-in-law’s funeral, before then flying to New Hampshire to shake hands, schmooze, and speechify some more. That kind of schedule would exhaust any normal human, much less an out-of-shape 77-year-old facing four looming court dates and 91 felony charges while trying to run for president in his spare time.

It’s all so absurd. Iowa’s primary is essentially meaningless. So is New Hampshire’s. Here are a few numbers to consider: Iowa has 2.1 million registered voters, including 631,689 Democrats and 718,901 Republicans. Around 110,000 Republican voters participated in the caucuses. Trump won 56,260 votes — 51 percent of Republicans who voted — or a whopping 2.6 percent of Iowa’s registered voters.

Here are some of the next day’s Big Media headlines: “Trump Gets Blowout Win in Iowa!” “Record Winning Margin for Trump!” “Trump Trounces Rivals!”

We’re being played, my friends — hustled for clicks, views, engagement. The Iowa Republicans who caucused are 98 percent white. Fifty percent were older than 65. Fifty-one percent were born-again Christians or evangelicals, and two-thirds (66 percent) believed Joe Biden did not legitimately win the 2020 presidential contest. Sixty percent favored a nationwide ban on abortions.

The Iowa caucuses are not a “barometer” of anything except what a tiny handful of old, white, rural Midwesterners want. Don’t believe me? Just ask President Cruz, who won Iowa in 2016, or President Santorum (2012), or President Huckabee (2008).

And New Hampshire is just more of the same — 94 percent white, mostly rural, and with even fewer voters than Iowa. But the national media will have spent countless hours of airtime and created millions of words of reportage, conjecture, and spin on this meaningless ritual by the time you read this. President Bernie Sanders would like a word.

It would all be comic opera, if it weren’t so terrifying. A presidential candidate from one of the two major political parties is clearly morally and mentally unqualified to hold the office, and the national media treat the situation as though it were politics as usual. If Trump is reelected, an entire administration, an entire country, and the rest of the world, will all be trying to do a work-around, pretending like Trump’s impulsive blather is coherent and meaningful.

“Yes, Mr. President, we’ve informed the British prime minister and his wife that we’ll be serving the president’s favorite dish — non-liquid gold on the cob.”