Some years back, I was watching the British puppet comedy Spitting Image on a local Canadian channel we used to get back then. And from one joke in a skit, apparently the British public thinks Americans are guilty of modern-day McCarthyism when it comes to Communism. But if we have any Brits on the boards, I just have to tell them what we do to Communists is far worse than that: we just ignore them!
Think about it. If we persecuted Commuists like we apparently did in the 1950s (I wasn’t there, but it’s common knowledge), we’d really be helping them. People would feel sorry for them. And furthermore, communism would become the “forbidden fruit”. That might even draw some people to them. Now they’re just laughable–who even cares, some might say.
My question is simple, how did it come to this point, esp. after the 50s? And I assume it is common knowledge support for the communist party is at its lowest point in history. If you need a cite, I once read in the early 80s, when the American Communist Party was still on the ballot, they only got 8000 votes (infinitessimal for a country of several hundred million). After the early 80s, as I understand it, they didn’t even get enough votes to remain on the ballot–national, at least.
And my second question, is it an accident? Could the laughable status of Communists in the US be part of a conspiracy in itself? Hey, you never know.
It isn’t a joke here. It was the cornerstone of our foreign policy up until the end of the 1980s, and some of the biggest accusations directed at Obama is that he is a Marxist or a socialist (most tea party types don’t know the difference).
For most people who never grew up under fear of communism (most everyone under 30) it is probably more irrelevant than anything. But for the older crowd it is still a potent boogeyman. If it weren’t, then ‘government takeover of health care’ wouldn’t have been the rallying cry against health reform. ‘government takeover’ is considered to be a communist dog whistle term here (again, tea party types generally can’t tell the difference between statism, authoritarianism, communism, etc). So 20 years after the berlin wall fell you can still use communism as the rallying cry to scare people about policy regarding health care, education, media, etc.
The underpinnings of philosophical communism, namely class warfare and a desire to prevent an exploitive plutocracy, are becoming more popular here. But we don’t call them communism. Even the right wing tea party, which is very anti-communist, has a strong anti-plutocracy strain in it (although others are pro-plutocracy).
We were primarily worried about the Soviet Union. When that collapsed, the fear was gone. We don’t even identify China, N Korea, Vietnam, or Cuba as Communist countries anymore.
I think it has a lot to do the the USSR.
For a time we were terrified of them, perhaps rightly.
Once it “collapsed” there was a tendency to breath a big sigh if relief and think “you’re not so tough”. The next step from a schoolboy mentality is mocking.
Now we’ll just have to see what happens in China. They may be able to strike a balance between very strong central control and enough freedom/capitalism to continue to grow the economy effectively, then
it might not be too funny for long. My personal opinion is that in 20-30 years “communism” in China will bear little resemblance to what we think of as communism today.
As to the OP - we won the Cold War. The US economy lapped the USSR’s, the information technology explosion left more closed societies choking on our dust, and people who are paying attention realized that what worked and what didn’t.
Yeah, it seems pretty straight forward to me. During my lifetime the Soviets were the big bad Red Menace that was going to conquer the world. They were all 10 feet tall with curly blond hair.
And then they fell apart and communism was seen for what it really was…a colossal failure. The USSR failed. China changed horses in mid-stream and put in enough measures to keep their economy from collapse by taking ideas from capitalism. And the rest of the communist countries out there became increasingly irrelevant as the support propping them up was removed and they quasi-failed as well.
So, today, it’s not even a joke…it’s irrelevant. A failed system that was all smoke and mirrors…but smoke and mirrors that cost millions of lives. It’s rightfully been relegated to the ash heap of history in the US.
Even then, most of us did not fear living under Communism, but a nuclear war with the USSR. Think The Day After, not Red Dawn or Amerika. Of course, when a “fear” is something that has been part of life as long as you can remember and it seems no more or less threatening today than yesterday, it becomes rather an abstract fear, like the Apocalypse.
We don’t identify Cuba as a Communist Bloc country, and that makes all the difference. Whatever Castro and Chavez have got goin’ on, it is not at all the same thing. No superpowers involved.
It is because Communist politics got a greater foothold among the general public there than here. There are “Communists” – using that name, whatever it means now – elected to the French National Assembly and many others. There are also “Socialists” and they get far more representation. In the U.S., Communist and Socialist parties are . . . websites.
American political culture is uniquely antistatist, individualist and libertarian, even compared with other English-speaking countries.
Leaving out the systematic submergence of certain ethnic and racial groups, there has never been a rigid social (as distinct from economic) class system in the United States, such as characterized the societies of Marx’s Europe.
Unlike their counterparts in Western Europe and elsewhere, American socialists of the late 19th and early 20th centuries failed to build a power base in the labor unions, which were mostly concerned with bread-and-butter issues like wages, hours and working conditions.
Unlike their foreign counterparts, American socialists failed to build alliances with traditional religious believers, and in fact alienated them, to the point where the American Catholic clergy became openly hostile to socialism.
In the early 19th century, European socialists got their foot in the door, and established their political presence as defenders of the people, by campaigning for such things as press freedom and universal suffrage. Although these were radical ideas in Europe at the time, they were well established (at least press freedom and universal white male suffrage were established) in the United States from earliest decades of the republic, which deprived American socialists of the opportunity to fight for them here and reap political benefits thereby.
The winner-take-all, first-past-the-post system marginalized American socialists, compared with other countries that had proportional-representation systems. This systemic barrier, however, has marginalized all American third parties of all ideologies.
The American federal system prevents Congress, if it ever had a socialist majority, from enacting any thoroughgoing program of socialism on a national scale. However, this cuts both ways: The federal system also provided socialists with more opportunities to contest and win elections at the state and local levels. (See below.)
Although American socialists won important offices at the state and local level in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and even controlled the governments of some cities, socialist leaders at the national level failed to build on these achievements. In fact, such non-revolutionary municipal reforms local socialist leaders were able to achieve were dismissed and derided as “sewer socialism” by national party leaders.
Compared with more practical and compromise-oriented socialists in other countries, American socialists were unfortunately given over to extremism, sectarianism, and splitting over minor points of doctrine. (It’s an American thing and runs all through our history. Once you have a cause you have to be extreme and self-righteous about it, like the New England Puritans splitting into smaller sects and exiling the losers.)
The ethnically diverse character of the American working class led American workers to identify with their ethnic group before their class, inhibiting the development of “class consciousness” here. White American proles, for instance, have never wanted to think of themselves as being in the same social class as the blacks.
The Socialist Party made the crucial mistake of opposing U.S. entry into World War I. This made the party much more popular among German-Americans, but it also drove a lot of Anglo-Saxons out of the party, especially in the Midwest.
For some reason, Marks and Lipset end their analysis with the 1930s and '40s – the period when much of the Socialist Party’s agenda was co-opted by Roosevelt in the New Deal; the party became even more marginalized by sectarianism; many of the Communist Party members, on Stalin’s orders, hid their party affiliation while they sought positions of influence in government and the labor unions, and indeed went so far underground that those who escaped the McCarthy-era purges got caught up in their new careers gradually lost interest in being Communists at all; and the Cold War taught Americans to identify the idea of socialism with treason.
But nothing at all is said about the political upheavals of the '60s and ‘70s. Apparently, in Marks’ and Lipset’s view, those apparently do not even merit discussion as lost opportunities for socialism in America.
I’d try not to derive any real-world opinions from Spitting Image. It was hilarious, but it’s 20+ years old and not grounded in realism in the slightest.
Just an aside, the US doesn’t have any truly national elections. We have a defined Election Day, and vote for President every 4 years, but all of the elections are handled individually by the 50 States. Who gets on the ballot is defined by the State’s rules, and each state can have a different set of people running for president. When the votes are counted, each state sends a fixed number of “electors” to vote for the candidate(s) who earned the state’s votes.
A large part of the answer to that question is that Western Europe and Japan lived under America’s military umbrella for decades after the Second World War. They didn’t take communism seriously because they didn’t have to take communism seriously. The United States was doing the heavy lifting for them. If Western Europe had had to face Stalin by themselves without massive American support, most likely they would not have taken communism so lightly.
In addition, for obvious reasons the atrocities of the Nazis received far more attention than the atrocities of the communists and left a large scar on the European psyche. The Euros were so fixated on the horrors of the Nazi regime that the horrors of communist regimes paled almost to insignificance.
:rolleyes: Nonsense. Of course they did. Not only was it just over the border, rather than a remote, theoretical thing like in America, but there were actual Communist movements in Western Europe in that period, some of them violent, and making the Symbionese Liberation Army look like the joke it was. Look up the Red Brigade and the Bader-Meinhof gang. Western Europe is where the whole thing got started; Marx was a German who spent some of his life in France and some of it in Belgium and the rest of it in Britain; it is where the Paris Commune had its brief existence and the Spanish Revolution was tried; and the tradition has never died out. It is preposterous to say the American people took Communism any “more seriously” just because they had to pay taxes to fund the American military establishment.
Not to mention that, in France, for instance, the Communists formed a lot of the French Underground and fought against the Nazis. So they had a bit of cred once WWII was over.
Contrast that with the behavior of the American Communists, who were pretty obviously flip-flopping on their attitude towards Hitler based on instructions from Moscow. Hard to be taken seriously after that.
Nitpick: The French Communists also flip-flopped on Hitler according to the line from Moscow. All big-C Communists (i.e., Stalinist as opposed to Trotskyist) worldwide, all whose parties were Comintern members, did. (Orwell wrote a lot of insightful material about that.) Socialists were outside that whole mess and were always against Hitler. So were Trotskyists.
By ‘identify’ I meant the popular conception of Cuba. Most people would first consider it a dictatorship or totalitarian regime, and consider the major problem to be Castro, not the political system.
There was a time when its political system as such was considered a threat – not only because it represented a Soviet-Bloc presence in the Western Hemisphere, but because Cuba was a source of revolutionary intervention in other countries, such as Bolivia and Angola.
That’s all over and done with now. Castro is no threat to anyone beyond his own shores. The Zapatista rebels in Mexico don’t even bother to call themselves Marxists – if their rebellion had started 20 or even 10 years earlier they would have, but the name has lost its power to conjure. Whatever Chavez means by “Bolivarian,” it ain’t as scary and implies no claim to universality – means nothing outside South America, really.
