FEAR FACTOR

How the Red Scare reshaped American politics.

- BY BEVERLY GAGE

When, exactly, was America great? For as long as Donald Trump has touted the MAGA slogan, he has been cagey about the answer. But recent weeks have suggested a few possibilities. One is the Gilded Age of the late nineteenth century, when tariffs, crony capitalism, and hard-and-fast racial hierarchies were the stuff of American politics. Another is the postwar Red Scare, when the federal government was weaponized against the American left.

Trump has long vowed to root out “radical left lunatics” and “Marxist equity” from the bowels of the state. Most members of his Administration now seem to share that commitment. The DOGE overlord Elon Musk proclaimed that U.S.A.I.D. is—or was?—“a viper’s nest of radical-left marxists” and deserved to be destroyed. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has similarly promised to rid the U.S. military of its “cultural Marxism.” An update on the old Judeo-Bolshevik myth, “cultural Marxism” is now the term favored by the right to get around the obvious fact that there are vanishingly few doctrinaire Marxists, much less a vigorous Communist Party, in the United States today. Unlike actual Marxism, “cultural Marxism” includes almost any form of progressive multiculturalism or egalitarianism. Thus the war against diversity-equity-and-inclusion initiatives, campus protesters, and the Green New Deal is, in fact, the good old war against Communism.