This past week, after Democratic socialists swept a slate of primaries in New York City, Republicans launched a rerun of one of their most well-worn lines of attack: communism.
President Donald Trump turned to Truth Social to insist that “many Communists running in badly failing Blue States” and that “America the Beautiful will NEVER be a Communist Country!!!”
No one running in the New York elections ran as a communist. They ran as progressives, largely opposed to the disastrous policies put in place by Republicans, like an abusive anti-immigrant regime, social safety net cuts, and tax cuts for the wealthy.
The attack was boringly familiar to anyone who’s paid attention to U.S. politics for the last 60-plus years. Conveniently for the right, whoever is in charge of the Democratic Party or is an influential voice within the party is one of the Four Horsemen of communism or socialism.
In the 2024 election cycle, Trump alleged that former Vice President Kamala Harris—and by extension, former President Joe Biden—was a Marxist. This would have been news to anyone living on planet Earth during her time in office, because not a thing that she or Biden did could even remotely be considered communist in nature.
But maybe their economic stimulus package that revived the country after Trump’s first term was considered socialist? Or perhaps the decision to spend infrastructure funds—that Trump failed to secure—to repair roads, bridges, and other systems was somehow socialist?
Before that, Republicans spent years pushing an absurd number of conspiracy theories to “prove” that former President Barack Obama was a socialist in a moderate’s clothing.
Obama’s signature policy, the Affordable Care Act, was described as a government takeover of healthcare—which is probably news to all of the private health insurers who had billions directed their way under the healthcare plan that’s still in place today, among other policy initiatives.
When former Secretary of State John Kerry was the Democratic nominee in 2004, the right also insisted that he was a secret communist, which is especially jarring as Kerry is a military veteran who fought against communist forces during the Vietnam War. Nevertheless, figures like extremist right-wing radio host Michael Savage ran with it.
“You can expect a completely socialized medical and dental world if Kerry wins,” Savage said.
Bullet dodged.
Massive economic growth and expansion are what’s most often affiliated with former President Bill Clinton’s tenure in office, but when he was campaigning in 1992, then-President George H. W. Bush implied that Clinton had been operating as some kind of agent for communist Russia when he visited there as a young man.
Apparently presiding over the smashing of multiple Dow Jones Industrial Average records was the true communist plot all along.
Conservatives have been on this trail of lies for decades. Before he was elected president, Ronald Reagan fearmongered in 1961 that plans for programs like Medicare were about laying the groundwork for socialism.
Needless to say, President Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society never led to the hammer and sickle fluttering on a flag above the White House.
What has happened is that millions of Americans have lived through decades of policies tilted heavily in favor of the ultrawealthy. Trump is the latest in a long line of Republicans who’ve twisted the political and legal system in favor of these elites, who have recently been dubbed “the Epstein class” for the sex trafficker so many of them palled around with.
Even more ironically, it’s Republicans like Trump who have followed the more extreme path affiliated with socialism, such as using public funds to take control of significant portions of private companies like Intel. It was Trump who did that—not Obama or Biden or Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont. Trump.
Seeing all of this excess while the poor and middle class continues to be squeezed—the federal minimum wage has barely budged—has led to rising popular support for socialist ideas.
Key leaders like New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani rode a wave of popular support based on his embrace of these ideas, like the apparently radical notion that government can work for everyone—not just the billionaire donors sitting in Trump’s Cabinet.
While some Democrats fret over the populist movement, others are embracing it. And attacks like Trump’s are losing their potency on a public that’s heard the right cry wolf one too many times.
Socialism and communism just simply aren’t imminent if everyone from Al Gore and Bill Clinton to Kamala Harris to Zohran Mamdani are all supposedly on the same far-left page. The attack is nothing more than background noise, especially as more and more people turn against failed right-wing policies.
When everyone is supposedly a socialist, no one is.
Published with permission of Daily Kos
