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COMMIES EVERYWHERE!
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Harold Meyerson
July 7, 2026
The American Prospect
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_ Can you generate a red scare absent actual reds? _
The New York City Democratic Socialists of America hold a “Tax the
Rich” rally, November 16, 2025, in New York., Credit: Neil
Constantine/NurPhoto via AP
It’s getting so I almost miss Joe McCarthy.
Liar, drunk, fabricator of conspiracies so absurd that he accused U.S.
Army leaders of communist sympathies, McCarthy shared with the young
Donald Trump a consigliere—Roy Cohn—who counseled both never to be
held back by mere facts, nor to apologize for any outrage they had
committed.
But at least there was an actually existing communist power, with a
small number of American adherents, when McCarthy was raving. There
was the Soviet Union, headed by a paranoid monster named Stalin.
You wouldn’t know it if you listened to the dregs who constitute
today’s Republican legions, raving as they are about the communists
among us, but there is no such communist power today.
There’s China, a Leninist-verging-on-tech-infused-Stalinist state
capitalist power, but it boasts no virtually ideological adherents
either in the States or abroad, and certainly not within the
Democratic Socialists of America. It does have spies, and thugs who
intimidate dissidents in the Chinese diaspora, but it lacks any
support within the actual American left. To be sure, China’s rise to
economic world power was fueled by offshoring American companies, but
they went to China at the prompting of Wall Street as a way to boost
their profit margins, Chinese labor then being dirt cheap. In other
words, it was our leading capitalists, rather than any American
socialists or communists, who sold out the industrial Midwest.
There’s also a small number of lesser communist states—Vietnam,
North Korea, Cuba—but again, none of these are models for the young
people who dominate our new New Left, though you could assemble a
small retirement community of Castro nostalgiacs. And it’s the same
crop of American corporate CEOs who flocked to China for its low wages
who are now relocating factories to Vietnam (though any low-wage South
Asian nation, apparently, will do).
In light of all this, the most preposterous recent diatribe against
the revived American left was the _Wall Street Journal_ op-ed
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last week by former New York City Councilman Andrew Stein and pollster
Mark Penn, who famously counseled Bill Clinton in the mid-’90s to
move as far to the right as Grover Cleveland (which counsel Clinton
only took in smallish doses). In their column, they wrote,
“Lawmakers, law-enforcement agencies and journalists should
investigate the DSA to see if it is being funded by foreign
governments and interests.”
The absence from this charge of any particular foreign governments
that might be funneling cash to DSA is telling. To the extent that DSA
has focused on a “foreign” cause, it’s that of the Palestinians,
which really has become a signature cause of American young people
much as Vietnam was the signature cause of my generation when we were
young. But just as neither Moscow nor Beijing nor Hanoi gold was
funding the massive anti-war demonstrations of the ’60s and ’70s,
neither Hamas nor Fatah nor Hezbollah nor Iranian gold is behind the
growing support for Palestinians nor the waning support for Israel’s
wretched government, which has managed to alienate not just the
American left, but much of the American center and right.
To be sure, America’s leading socialists have foreign models to
which they point: the social democracies of Scandinavia. Listen to
Bernie or AOC or Zohran, and the policies they promote—universal
free child care and college tuition, affordable social housing, and
the like—are the policies of Sweden, Norway, Denmark, and Finland,
whose citizens, by the evidence of repeated global polling, are the
world’s happiest. In the two speeches in which he defined his
ideology—those in 2015 and 2019, on the eve of his two presidential
campaigns—Sanders positioned himself as fulfilling those portions of
the New Deal that never moved beyond the blueprint stage, citing the
Economic Bill of Rights that Franklin Roosevelt proposed in 1944 as
the promise he sought to deliver.
The move by Trump and his sewer-mates to resurrect the communist
canard is partly the result of his—for lack of a better
term—geriatric instincts. It’s of a piece with his affinity for
coal and for the demographics and power distribution of 1950 America,
before the civil rights revolution of the 1960s and the feminist and
other causes it spawned began to erode the supremacy of white men.
I suspect that Trump is misunderstanding the advice that Roy Cohn gave
him. Cohn told him that lying is not just fine but also that big lies
work better than small ones if sufficiently repeated. But Cohn surely
did not tell him to repeat the same lies that Joe McCarthy told, since
there really was a worldwide communist movement then, subservient to
the needs of the Soviet Union and Joe Stalin. It didn’t follow that
once Stalin, the Soviet Union, and the worldwide movement were gone,
Trump could continue to weave the very same tales of subversion that
McCarthy had spun. He’d need to find other targets.
Instead, Trump, the garden variety of Republican electeds, and Rupert
Murdoch’s minions of misinformation apparently believe that what
worked in 1950 will work today. If they’re at all right, we’re in
even worse shape than I had thought.
_Harold Meyerson is editor at large of The American Prospect._
* Anti-Communistm
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