I was going to put this in GQ because I do want a factual answer but Politics is good enough.
Is there something concrete that happened in the US that the right is suddenly calling out communism in the US? Is it something Mamdami did?
I can understand calling us Socialists but…Communists?
I realize there’s a good chance that it is really just something someone said once a week or so ago and now it’s the new “on fleek” catchphrase for the right, but I can’t figure out why it would have come up in the first place.
The DSA has had some recent successes in elections:
Trump can’t distinguish between Communism, Socialism, Social Democracy, and Democratic Socialism. Neither can his MAGA base.
Trump’s mentor was also Roy Cohn, so Trump grew up with this particular scare tactic:
The primary campaign tactic that Trump has at this point (really, generally) is fear and demagoguery – painting the other side as an existential threat to anything and everything “we” hold dear.
As @DavidNRockies said, this is the premier tactic of MAGA and their allies, both foreign and domestic. I believe they spend hours coming up with these snarl terms, which they have employed from the beginning to great results. It’s the whole point of Faux “News”, One America Network, Sinclair News, Truth Social, META, Epoch Times and all the other players contributing to active disinformation campaigns.
Think back and you’ll remember how Trump and his allies manipulated us with “birtherism”, “DEI”, “illegals”, “Benghazi”, “unmasking” and on and on and on. They try out a snarl term and if it looks like it might be effective, they go with it. All the various helpers, including Russia, China, Iran, North Korea and others get their troll farms cranked up, and they disburse this garbage in social media and regular tee vee programming. It quickly seeps into the day-to-day narrative.
It’s been going on since 2015 at least, very much helping Trump to win his election in 2016, and ever since. “Communist” is just the most recent iteration of this phenomenon.
Ever since the Civil Rights era, liberal Democrats have always been called “pinko communists” or something to that effect. And to state the obvious, communists are commonly held to be on the left fringe, so by extension ‘communist’ is a popular left-directed smear. Hell, even Bill Clinton, notorious for center-triangulation, was routinely called a communist or a socialist or other left-punching smears.
I think there’s always been an ebb-and-flow around this, and since a few leftist and left-adjacent parties and politicians have had a bit of success lately, and the right wing is otherwise in an election-year panic, it’s not surprising that we’re in more of a flow than an ebb at the moment.
Because Republicans have found all their other issues are not working.
Economy? Promised better prices, but nope, inflation as bad as ever.
War? No more forever wars, except this new one started for vague reasons.
Immigrants? Deport violent gangs? Oops, murdering more people, arresting nuns.
Pedophiles? Release all the files? Ha, still covering up for the perps.
Transgender? Yeah, everyone loves the government telling us how to live our lives.
Back to the golden oldies from the 1950s: Communists! Doing evil stuff like paying decent wages and providing healthcare, that’ll convince people.
Republicans know they are in serious electoral trouble. Their president can’t focus on anything that anyone else actually cares about. All they can do is throw mud and see what sticks. Expect more flailing.
Yeah I get the gist of the “throw out a scare word and see if it sticks” aspect of it. I was just wondering if there was something specific that happened that seemed vaguely communistic that they are pointing to.
No, I don’t think so, either. It’s just another attempt to find a narrative that will bend votes their way in November. And it’s always worked up to now. They believe it will work again.
With the SCOTUS clearing the way for them to spend unlimited amounts of dark money in the upcoming campaign, they may be right.
Just days before the 2022 midterm elections, as Democratic candidates were drastically outspending JD Vance and other Republicans running for the Senate, the future vice president and the Senate G.O.P. campaign arm filed a lawsuit to try to change the rules of the game.
They knew it was too late to affect that year’s elections. The lawsuit was part of a longer-term gambit to tilt the financial playing field in future elections in the Republican Party’s favor. The goal was to unshackle political parties from existing limits on what they could spend in coordination with the candidates they were supporting.
The plan paid off on Tuesday, when the Supreme Court rolled back decades-old restrictions on political party spending, further expanding the power of big money in American politics.
It couldn’t have come at a better time for Republicans: Their party committees are flush with cash, and they can start spending that money immediately on midterm battlegrounds that will determine control of Congress.
This is what I was going to post-- I bet trump, desperately searching for a new boogeyman to distract the populace anew, reached into the recesses of his decaying brain and remembered his old mentor, and how well his old mentor’s former mentee did, for awhile, by crying ‘Commie!’. It’s a blast from the past; an oldie but a baddie.
I think this is a part of it. Popular politicians and popular policies have been called socialist for a while (even though they aren’t really). “Raising the minimum wage? That’s socialist! Making college affordable?? Socialist!!” And, so people are saying, well, if that’s what socialist means, then I guess I’m a socialist.
The more interesting question to me is why did “communist” as a slur ever fall out of favor in the first place. I think that after the collapse of the USSR, it stopped being such a boogeyman, then in 2001 it was replaced by radical Islam, then Obama was the boogeyman because, well, you know.
Now that those things have largely surged and receded, and younger people are legitimately getting more vocally socialism-curious, it seems like ripe timing for communism to be a scare word again.
People always tar folks on the opposite side of the spectrum as being further-left or further-right than they actually are.
That being said, I have known a few leftist folks in the USA who genuinely do endorse Communism. They flat-out argue that every example of Communism having failed in history was because it wasn’t “true” communism, or because of Western sanctions, or that it was actually was a success and was being smeared by the right as a failure.
I don’t think it’s any more complicated than another label being in the dog whistle rotation. Illegals. Radical Left. Trans. Whatever perks up the ears of the Faithful.
There has always been an attempt to conflate socialism with communism. For a while there, the term socialist was enough to imply communist. If anything as changed, it might be that people are realizing socialism doesn’t sound so horrible.
On the other front: why the accusation of communism may have died down more: it’s hard to both act like Russia is still communist and attack libs and lefties for being communist if you are defending Russia.
el donald’s cult goes for conspiracy theories. It’s an attempt to dust off an old one from the '50’s and '60’s. Many of the people who remember it from the last time around are gone now.
they’ve been trying to pin what they feel are insulting labels to the left for decades. In the 90s and 2000s, the word ‘liberal’ was supposed to be a bad word. I remember when Kerry ran in 2004 some agency found a way to make Kerry and Edwards the 1st and 3rd most ‘liberal’ members of the senate.
Now that liberal isnt as much of an insult, they’re using communist. Despite the fact that most people under age 50 have no real conscious memories of the USSR.
Also as was mentioned by @DavidNRockies these people don’t know the difference between communism, socialism, democratic socialism, and social democracy. Most people they label ‘communists’ are really social democrats. They’re poitical movements in Europe, not the USSR or Maoist China. The dream society is more like Germany or a Scandanavian nation, not China under Mao.
However I think a big part is that so many americans have seen what a disappointment predatory capitalism is in the US. It has led to wage stagnation, income inequality, massive bribery in politics, unaffordable housing, unaffordable healthcare, the inability to afford a family, lack of job security, billionaires buying politicians and media outlets, gig jobs replacing full time jobs with benefits, etc. When that is what you get in a ‘capitalist’ nation, alternatives start sounding better.
They also felt abolishing child labor was communism. Ending racial segregation was communism. Universal health care is communism.
Meanwhile actual communists in the US during that period were forming labor unions, fighting for an 8 hour workday, fighting for weekends off and providing legal support for black people in the south being railroaded for false rape allegations against white women.