If Republicans get their way, McCarthyism will be back—and here to stay.
Leading the race to the soggiest pits of ethical crud, as usual, President Trump repeatedly calls Democratic Socialists of America-affiliated primary winners “hardcore, godless communists” after DSAers swept the New York elections last month.
Ideologically, New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani and his fellow “democratic socialists” are barely distinguishable from such mainstream liberals as Vice President Hubert Humphrey in 1968 and Senator George McGovern in 1972. Republicans, apparently, are counting on Americans’ ignorance of history and the dwindling number of people over age 75 who remember the Cold War yet have forgotten its principal lesson: the Russians really were not coming.
Never wanting to be left out of whatever moral depravity Trump comes up with, Speaker Mike Johnson and other GOP leaders, including Steve Scalise, warn darkly that “radical communists” and “barbarians inside the gate” are taking over the Democratic Party.
Right-wingers want to revive a 1954 law that banned the Communist Party—ruled unconstitutional—while Trump praises his closeted former lawyer Roy Cohn, infamous for his role as a fascist harpy during the Army-McCarthy hearings at the height of the Red Scare.
Now the State Department has released one of those official artifacts that historians of the future will quote incredulously to highlight the hysterical propaganda of a benighted era. “For nearly seven decades, the Cuban regime has waged a sustained campaign of subversion against the United States,” it ludicrously claims.
The new report, commissioned by Marco Rubio, draws heavily from the distant past, distorts timelines and invents facts out of whole cloth in an effort to frame Cuba as the center of some sort of ongoing international communist conspiracy that threatens to overthrow the U.S. government: “The Cubans devoted themselves to recruiting, cultivating and mobilizing a global coalition of activists, intellectuals, and political groups around this cause, building a sprawling revolutionary network that shaped a disproportionate share of America’s most famous and influential extremist movements, from the Black Panthers and the Weather Underground through to antifa [sic],” the report claims.
It refers to movements that ended more than 50 years ago—and which had little if anything to do with the socialist Caribbean island. “Today, that network continues to maintain ties to powerful leftist nonprofits [sic], anti-ICE collectives [sic], socialist groups, and Marxist militant organizations [sic] across the United States.”
There are, sadly, zero Marxist militant organizations in the United States. Nor are there any powerful leftist nonprofit organizations. To the extent that organized left-of-center politics exist in the United States, Cuba is not now, nor has it ever been, a locus.
Why, then, are Republicans indulging in retrograde fever dreams?
Though the rhetoric may be new in a very old-fashioned way, Republicans are continuing the strategy that got Trump and his acolytes elected in 2016 and reelected in 2024: energizing the right-wing base.
It certainly isn’t—and can’t be—about trying to attract undecided voters or seduce current Democrats into crossing party lines. Surprisingly, after decades of rising income inequality and capitalism’s failure to provide something as basic as high-speed rail and universal healthcare, socialism is popular. Gallup has consistently found that 40% of Americans of voting age have a favorable view of socialism.
The rising tendency among young people to view Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels as intellectual lodestars rather than historical villains is especially pronounced. Sixty-two percent of adults under 30 view socialism favorably. Fifty-three percent of Americans aged 18 to 39 want a democratic socialist candidate to win the 2028 presidential election. Twenty-five percent of Americans under 30 say socialism is the philosophy that can deliver the American Dream, compared with 14% who choose capitalism. (Centrism came in last, at 8%.)
Unless capitalism steps up its game—and there’s no sign of that—approval of socialism and communism will only increase as the young people of today become the middle-aged voters of tomorrow. If Republicans were interested in preparing their party for the future, they’d shut up about socialism or maybe even say a few nice things about it.
Older voters over 50 lean Republican or are evenly split, while turning out at much higher rates in midterms. Younger voters tilt Democratic and see Scandinavian social-welfare states, rather than old-school authoritarian regimes like Mao’s China and the Soviet Union, as the models of socialism in practice. Republicans are aware of this, which is why they focus on terms like “communism” and “Marxism” rather than “socialism.”
Will red-baiting the Democrats work this November? Just because it always has doesn’t mean it always will.
I suspect this strategy will prove either ineffective or counterproductive. Nothing says “old and out of touch” like the old rich white men who start wars and line their pockets, while the rest of us starve, telling us to worry about commies under the bed.
If Republicans run against socialism/communism and get their clocks cleaned—which at this point looks likely—it will make politics that used to seem extreme left in the United States look safe. Godlessness help us all! We may soon live in a country where arguing that “all men are created equal” is an ideal America should work toward.
(Ted Rall, the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, is the author of “Never Mind the Democrats. Here’s What’s Left.” Subscribe: tedrall.Substack.com. He is co-host of the podcast “DeProgram with Ted Rall and Jamarl Thomas.”)
