The Red Scare Returns to America

This time, though, it is pure farce.

With their party’s popularity in freefall, leading Republicans have identified a new message to unite around. The Democrats, according to House Speaker Mike Johnson, will lead America down “the dark road of death to communism.” President Donald Trump, Vice President JD Vance, and Secretary of State Marco Rubio, along with religious right leaders such as Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s spiritual leader Doug Wilson, have made equally histrionic claims. The Red Scare has returned to America, only this time it is pure farce. Still, this is dangerous stuff and will appeal to some voters. The pro-democracy coalition must confront it directly and forcefully.

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Definitions of “communism” are a bit like definitions of pornography: hard to pin down but everyone is pretty sure they know when they see it. For the Republicans echoing this new midterm strategy, communism just means Democrats. For the donors who fund Trump and the MAGA movement, communism means anything that hints that the gargantuan fortunes they have acquired are anything less than the righteous reward for their genius. For the MAGA faithful, communism happens whenever some big-city or brown progressive says something critical about wealth inequality or Papa Trump. For many immigrants from formerly communist regimes, along with those whose political identities were forged by the Cold War, it means rule by thuggish authoritarians claiming to represent “the people.” Because the term is such a vague catch-all for “everything that scares me,” it proves useful for the demagogues who now control the Republican Party.

The history of Red Scares is grim. In the scare of 1918-1920, the federal government under President Woodrow Wilson criminalized political dissent, engaged in warrantless searches as a matter of policy, and put thousands of individuals, many of them immigrants, under detention without due process. (Does any of this sound familiar?) In the 1950s, too, red-baiting deprived thousands of individuals of their civil rights and careers. More than that, Red Scares were used to undermine American movements for civil rights and labor rights, allowing reactionaries to sideline and silence opponents without having to engage with the facts.

The Red Scares of earlier times always came wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross. It is no accident that they often invoked the language of religious authoritarianism. If God is on our side, according to the paranoid style of American politics, then the other side should have no rights at all. The presence of religious supremacy combined with a rejection of pluralism and equality — a Christian nationalist ethos — was always a sure indicator of profoundly anti-democratic intent.

In comparison with previous iterations, the present version of the Red Scare might at first seem like a bad joke — a case of history laughing at itself. This time the red-baiters can’t point to the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 or the Cold War as an excuse for their excesses. The alleged “communists” in the Democratic Party aren’t advocating for a global proletarian revolution, and the tiny number of Americans who self-identify as communist tend to focus their ire on the Democratic Party just as often as the GOP. For the most part, the Democrats being smeared as “communists” are proposing forms of universal healthcare, investments in public education, voting rights, higher taxes on the wealthy, and other “crazy” schemes that people in Canada, the UK, and Europe think of as Western civilization.

Republicans point to the candidates affiliated with the Democratic Socialists of America who have won their races — never mind that others have failed. Notwithstanding the presence of some noisy individuals on the fringes whose years-old tweets have received extraordinary amounts of attention, the politics of the Democratic Party remain, on balance, closer to the center than even those modest proposals.

But words matter, even when they come from a deranged president and his corrupt cronies. Republicans are using the Red Scare tactics now for the same reasons as before. It’s not about promoting democratic debate (should the wealthy be exempt from taxation?); it’s about distracting from the current administration’s corruption and incompetence, criminalizing dissent, and laying the groundwork for authoritarianism.

As writer Bradley Onishi noted, the framing of the present Red Scare matches the wording of one of Trump’s more outrageous (I know — how to choose?) executive orders. Last year, the president attempted to criminalize the belief system of a non-existent group supposedly called “Antifa.” The beliefs were characterized as “anti-Christian,” “terrorist,” and anti-family. These imaginary miscreants, Trump said, would be prosecuted under federal law. The order was unconstitutional in both spirit and letter. Yet the equally fictitious “communists” that have allegedly infiltrated the Democratic Party are now described in precisely the same language.

What to do? This is no time for Democrats, progressives, and others in the pro-democracy coalition to return to the familiar defensive crouch. Rather, they must blow the whistle on this effort to distract from the failures and corruption of the worst administration in American history.

The next step is to reverse the charges. What people rightly abhor about the communist states of the past is that they used the label as cover for kleptocratic regimes run of, by, and for a party elite. Welcome to Trump’s America! We are now a country where dear leader and his friends use every lever of government to direct money away from you and into their pockets.

The other thing that has given communist regimes a bad name is that they involve a merger of corporate power with state power. Well, nobody does that better than Trump. In America today, we have a Cabinet, with a collective net worth around $7.5 billion, making policy for the benefit of billionaires; we have major AI investors “regulating” AI; and defense contractors overseeing defense contracts (especially when one of the president’s sons is involved). And we have sectors of the corporate world supplying Trump with free legal services, ballrooms, and whatever else he craves at any given moment. The difference between this and state socialism is that, under the Trump administration, profits are privatized while the costs are spread out among the population.

Finally, Democrats must own an element of the attack that has a grain of truth. Yes, there is a major internal debate about the future direction of the party. On the whole, that’s a good thing; this is the noise that democracy makes. Yes, some people in the party are advocating major changes in the economic system. That’s a good thing, too. Universal healthcare isn’t “communism” any more than public roads are communism. Rolling back the supposedly “beautiful” No-Billionaire-Left-Behind tax giveaway isn’t “communism” either. Affordable housing and a living wage aren’t extreme ideas. But these proposals involve change — and change can be scary, especially for today’s beneficiaries of wealth concentration at the tippy top of the economic ladder. The fear that powers the Red Scare is just the fear that American might one day become the free, fair, and democratic society that it has always promised to become.

Katherine Stewart is an award-winning author and journalist who has covered politics, religion, and the rise of the anti-democratic movement, for over 17 years. Her New York Times bestselling book Money, Lies, and God is on Foreign Affairs’s list of Best Books 2025.

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