Of Men and Boogeymen: DeSantis, Trump, and the New Anti-Communist Movement 

A new era of anti-communist hysteria is taking root in America. It brings with it the very real threat of extreme political repression and fomenting of anti-intellectualism and suppression of all dissent. After the American bravado in “winning” the Cold War (that is to say, the capitulation of the USSR in 1992), the nation has never fully exorcised explanations of communism – its favorite boogeyman. This is easily explained. Anti-communist alarmism is, after all, a time-tested trope the far right uses in America and beyond – to galvanize popular support for otherwise unpopular individuals and policies. Today the popular depiction of communism remains an omnipresent, looming threat against American culture and institutions. It effectively complements the jingoistic, socially conservative ballyhoo of the latter-day forebearers of capitalism, the MAGA movement. 

On April 17, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis escalated his strain of anti-communist rhetoric from a Culture War talking point to institutional policy. He signed new legislation to mandate anti-communist teaching and coursework in schools throughout the state. 

“The truth will set us free,” said Governor Ron DeSantis. “We will not allow our students to live in ignorance, nor be indoctrinated by Communist apologists in schools. To the contrary, we will ensure students in Florida are taught the truth about the evils and dangers of Communism.”

Governor DeSantis signs legislation further enhancing Florida’s education standards on the evils of communism. (2024, April 17).

Florida Senate Bill 1274, is based on the premise that institutions of higher learning are veritable factories of indoctrination. Bill 1274 therefore mandates the teaching of anti-communist curricula from kindergarten through high school. The bill provided by the Governor’s office contains the following key provisions of the law:  

• • [SB 1274] Adds to existing Communist history standards with instruction on the history of Communism in the United States and the tactics of Communist movements.
  • Authorizes the newly-established Institute for Freedom in the Americas at Miami Dade College to promote the importance of economic and individual freedoms as a means to advance human progress—specifically in Latin America and the Caribbean.
    • This institute will partner with the Adam Smith Center for Economic Freedom at Florida International University.
  • Enables the Florida Department of State, in collaboration with the Florida Department of Education, to recommend to the Legislature the creation of a Florida-based museum on the history of Communism.
  • Prepares students to withstand indoctrination on Communism at colleges and universities.
    Ibid.

Just as any boogeyman – real or imagined – the very concept of communism evokes feelings of fear and uncertainty, as well as disruption and change. This is, of course, the product of many decades of rabid and vitriolic anti-communist sentiment and policy.

The insecurities of America’s ruling class and institutions are always laid bare in the face of progressive challenges, from the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s to anti-war movements and, most recently, the Black Lives Matter movement. 

Is communism a real threat to injustice and disparity? By virtue of its fundamental principles of liberty, equality, and fraternity, the answer is a resounding “yes.” Even Milovan Djilas, the former Deputy Prime Minister of Yugoslavia who turned his back on the world communist movement following his imprisonment by Josip Broz Tito, refused to condemn the fundamental premises of communism in his 1957 book The New Class:

I consider it superfluous to criticize Communism as an idea. The ideas of equality and brotherhood among men, which have existed in varying forms since human society began—and which contemporary Communism accepts in word—are principles to which fighters for progress and freedom will always aspire. It would be wrong to criticize these basic ideas, as well as vain and foolish. The struggle to achieve them is part of human society.

Djilas, M. (1958). The New Class: An Analysis of the Communist System. By Milovan Djilas. New York: Frederick A. Praeger [Toronto: Burns & MacEachern]. 1957.

However, is communism – or even socialism – at present an organized, concerted threat to the American system? No, it is not. The reasons for this are various and sundry. But at its very core, the anti-communist rhetoric is, at the present, more of a fantasy born of right-wing fear-mongering.

This return to the strategies of the “Red Scare” of the 1920s and the McCarthyism of the 1950s has been decidedly slow-moving. Throughout the decades following Joseph McCarthy’s downfall, the prevailing American narrative was shame and revulsion towards the red-baiter and his tactics. Consider, for example, this assessment of McCarthy from a 1970s history textbook used in American high schools:

The Cold War… had some harsh results in American political life. The American people had thought that the end of World War II would bring a better world. Instead, by 1952 the Russians were masters of Eastern Europe and had the atomic bomb. Mainland China was a communist nation. Americans were dying in Korea and paying huge military bills. Angry and frustrated, many Americans decided that they had been cheated and betrayed…

Such feelings divided Americans deeply and set the stage for the rampage of Senator Joseph McCarthy  through national life from 1950 to 1954. McCarthy’s specialty was wild accusations of communism against both obscure bureaucrats and highly respected government officials like General Marshall. For a time McCarthy’s unfounded attacks met with much popular support. In 1954 he even went so far as to insult some of his fellow Senators and to question the army’s patriotism. He was then censured (severely criticized in a public vote) by his fellow Senators and thereafter ignored.

Weisberger, B. A. (1976). The Impact of Our Past: a History of the United States. P. 758

A more recent evaluation of McCarthy and his legacy was even more blunt:

“[McCarthy] was a liar and a drunk — and for a few years, he was one of the most powerful men in America. In February 1950, Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin gave a speech in West Virginia. In the speech, McCarthy said he had a list of 205 known communists working in the State Department. It was nonsense, but it made national headlines, and McCarthy repeated it and similar charges over the next four years.

McCarthy, who claimed to have been a tail gunner who saw lots of action during World War II, actually had never seen any combat. But he was a formidable opponent in the commie-hunting field. He ripped even General George Marshall and President Eisenhower. Every time he made a charge that proved to be untrue, McCarthy simply made a new charge. The tactic became known as “McCarthyism.”

By the summer of 1954, however, McCarthy’s antics were wearing thin. When he began a series of attacks on the Army for “coddling” communists during congressional hearings, they were televised. Many Americans got their first look at McCarthy in action and were repulsed. In December 1954, the Senate censured him. He died in obscurity three years later of problems related to alcoholism.”
Wiegand, S. (2019).

U.S. history for dummies. John Wiley & Sons. p. 283

Shortly after, a disdain for McCarthy and red-baiting was woven into American popular culture through the decades following McCarthy’s demise. A 1979 episode of the TV series M*A*S*H, set in an American army hospital on the front lines of the Korean War, featured a conflict between one of the show’s main characters and a Congressional aide bent on exposing communist sympathizers in the military. The aide threatens to bring the protagonist – a ranking army nurse – before a government committee (presumably HUAC) unless she divulges details about a former college acquaintance who had founded a left-leaning campus group. 

The huge cultural phenomenon Seinfeld also featured references and plot devices referencing McCarthyism and the Red Scares. One included a 1989 episode entitled “The Race” in which a female protagonist becomes romantically involved with a purported communist before inadvertently getting him “blacklisted” from his favorite restaurant. The restaurant accuses the female protagonist of “naming names,” referring to the occasional practice of HUAC witnesses fingering other alleged communist sympathizers during HUAC testimony. In a subplot, another key character is fired from his job as a department store Santa when communist pamphlets are found in his Santa suit.

The 2001 big box office film Majestic featured an account of a screenwriter whose career was derailed at the height of McCarthyite hysteria after he is named as a possible communist sympathizer for attending an antiwar rally to impress a girl while in college. The writer ultimately testifies before a “government committee” (i.e. HUAC), offering a rousing speech on American ideals. He learns that the person who had reported him to the committee was the woman who he’d attended the rally with years before.

To be sure, far-right idealogues like Fulton Sheen and Phyllis Schlafly remained keepers of the McCarthyite flame well after the former Senator’s passing. But the incremental rehabilitation of McCarthy and McCarthyism took flight with the revelation that populist icon Ronald Reagan, was a government informant during the McCarthy era.

“Ronald Reagan’s acting career hit a lull in the late 1940s. Despite parts in minor films such as The Voice of the Turtle and That Hagen Girl, he became increasingly preoccupied with his more important role during Hollywood’s “Red Scare” as head of the Screen Actors Guild. It was revealed … that the future President played another role as well: as a secret FBI informant, code name T-10. According to an article published in the San Jose Mercury News, documents obtained through the Freedom of Information Act indicate that Reagan and his first wife, Actress Jane Wyman, provided federal agents with the names of actors they believed were Communist sympathizers.”

Time Magazine. “Hollywood: Unmasking Informant T-10,” Sept. 09, 1985.

Reagan himself testified against fellow actors before HUAC in 1947. His role in the Second Red Scare was not a political liability despite the prevailing narrative that McCarthyism was a tragic and embarrassing period in American history. Rather, Reagan’s agenda as a politician was consistent with that of being an informant:

“Conservatives routinely condemned such programs as steps down the road to a terrifying, dystopian order. In 1961 Ronald Reagan, then an actor and corporate spokesman, recorded a warning about the consequences of enacting the proposal that would become Medicare. “Behind it,” he predicted, “will come other federal programs that will invade every area of freedom as we have known it in this country. Until, one day … we will awake to find that we have socialism.” A year earlier, Reagan wrote in the same vein to Richard Nixon about John F. Kennedy, his rival in the 1960 presidential campaign: “Shouldn’t someone tag Mr. Kennedy’s bold new imaginative program with its proper age? Under the tousled boyish haircut is still old Karl Marx—first launched a century ago.” But when Reagan became president in 1981, he kept Medicare intact. He knew that it had become one of the most popular—as well as expensive—federal initiatives in history.”

“American Socialism” by Michael Kazin; Kruse, K. M., & Zelizer, J. E. (2023). Myth America: Historians Take On the Biggest Legends and Lies About Our Past. Hachette UK. P. 117, 124-125

Regan also persecuted left-leaning college professors in California during the 1960s. Infamously he compelled the administration of UCLA to fire Professor Angela Davis due to her affiliation with the Communist Party of the United States of America.

“In justifying their decision to fire Professor Davis, the regents reached all the way back to a 1940 resolution, reaffirmed in 1949, that bars Communist Party members from the faculty. Under Governor Ronald Reagan’s leadership, they chose to overlook more recent rulings by both the California and U.S. Supreme Courts holding that mere membership in the Communist Party does not disqualify a professor from teaching in a state university; specific intent to carry out the party’s unlawful aims must be shown.”

Academic freedom: the case of Angela the Red. (1969, October 17). TIME.com.

Fifteen years after the passing of Joseph McCarthy, Ronald Reagan still found the strategy and tactics of that discredited anti-communist to be an effective means of attacking institutions and individuals. That methodology ultimately propelled him to the highest office in America, to become the world’s predominant opposition to communism as both ideology and system. Reagan’s legacy to American politicians is one of equal reverence by Republicans and Democrats to this day. 

Former Nixon Speechwriter Pat Buchanan, who ran for president in 1992 and 2000, evoked McCarthy in his 1992 autobiography ‘Right from the Beginning.’ There he discussed his family’s longtime relationship with the late Senator and explicitly advocated for McCarthy’s political resurrection”

“Dead now these thirty years. Senator McCarthy is probably the most loathed political figure in America’s twentieth century. In the demonology of liberalism, no man is more reviled. Joe McCarthy, it is said, ran rampant through our civil liberties, imputed treason to some of the greatest patriots America ever produced, and created a climate of suspicion and fear that poisoned American politics, long after his deserved political demise…

And yet, today’s near-universal fear and loathing leaves much unexplained. If McCarthy was so great a menace if this was a time of national “hysteria,” why does not a single Gallup Poll of that era show even 1 percent of Americans viewing McCarthyism or witch-hunting or anti-Communist extremism as a significant national problem? If Joe McCarthy was a genuinely evil and malevolent force, why did the first family of American politics so warmly embrace him? Old Joe Kennedy was a friend, admirer, and supporter; the Kennedy girls dated Joe; Bobby worked for him: Teddy played touch football with him at Hyannis Port; JFK walked out of a Harvard dinner in 1954, when a speaker expressed approval that the college had produced neither a Joe McCarthy nor an Alger Hiss. “How dare you couple the name of a great American patriot with that of a traitor!” roared Jack Kennedy, storming out into the night.

If Joe was so horrific, why, after years of charges and countercharges, of hearings and headlines, of incessant warfare with the American establishment, Republican and Democrat, did he yet enjoy such public support? There was truth in the song title of the period, “Nobody Loves Joe, but the People.” In January of 1954, four years after the famous speech in Wheeling, West Virginia, Joe McCarthy had a Gallup approval rating of 50 percent positive and only 29 percent negative, numbers any presidential candidate today might envy.”

Buchanan, Patrick J. Right from the Beginning. Regnery Publishing, 1990. P. 90

Buchanan concluded his political testimony and de facto eulogy (which also included sympathetic reminiscences of General Francisco Franco) with an absolution of right-wing authoritarianism at its most murderous:

“We have a different sense of what is truly morally evil. What, after all, is McCarthy’s bullying of witnesses compared with Harry Truman’s coercive “repatriation” of two million Russian POWs to the tender mercy of Joseph Stalin in Operation Keelhaul — one of the bloodiest and greatest crimes with which this country has ever been associated? We have a different sense as well of what truly threatens what we cherish most: family, faith, and country. It is not Botha or Marcos or Pinochet; it is the Soviet Union and its genuinely evil ideology.”

Ibid. 90.

Now, it is Donald Trump who has embraced and appropriated anti-communism as a means of accumulating political capitalism in a time of political schism in America. 

 “America will never be a socialist country,” declared Donald Trump in his 2019 State of the Union Address, given to a joint session of Congress. The president clearly believed that a fear of such a radical transformation would help him win reelection against a Democratic Party in which socialists like Bernie Sanders were growing in numbers and influence.”

Kazin, 124-125

His rhetoric increased throughout the hotly contested 2020 election cycle, including a denunciation of then-vice-presidential candidate Kamala Harris. She is an established neoliberal, former prosecutor and elected U.S. Senator – but not, as Trump called her,  “a communist” in a live television interview.

“… I don’t think you could get worse. And totally unlikable. She’s a Communist. She’s left of (Senator) Bernie (Sanders). She’s rated left of Bernie by everybody. She’s a Communist,” Trump told Fox News in an interview on Thursday.

“We’re going to have a Communist. Look, I sit next to Joe and I looked at Joe. Joe’s not lasting two months as president. That’s my opinion. He’s not going to be lasting two months,” Trump said…

[…]

“She is a Communist. She’s not a Socialist. She’s well beyond a socialist. Take a look at her views. She wants to open up the borders to allow killers and murderers and rapists to pour into our country,” Trump said in his sharpest attack against Harris.”

If Biden Wins, “Communist” Kamala Will Take Over In A Month: Donald Trump. (n.d.). NDTV.com.

It is laughably absurd at some level to consider Trump’s assertion on its face. But it is also evident that in the United States, denouncing someone as a “communist” is the pinnacle of combat in American politics. But it is also apparent that Trump has more insidious intentions when it comes to how he will attack so-called “socialists” and “communists” in his next administration. Trump has already stated he will bar “Marxists” from entering America and he has suggested additional legislations for Americans who identify as such – or, ostensibly, those who are denounced as communists.

“Those who come to enjoy our country must love our country,” Trump said during a speech at the Faith and Freedom Coalition’s conference in Washington, adding, “We’re going to keep foreign, Christian-hating communists, Marxists and socialists out of America.”

He also said there needs to be a “new law” to address communists and Marxists who grew up in America, but didn’t elaborate on what it would include.

Trump’s proposal also raised questions about whether a decades-old law could actually be used to ban all communist and Marxist immigrants to the U.S., how it would work, and why Trump is so focused on these political theories in a country where few residents support them.”

Santana, R., & Swenson, A. (2023, June 28). Trump wants to keep “communists” and ‘Marxists’ out of the US. Here’s what the law says | AP News.

Conventional interpretations of the U.S. Constitution might have relegated Trump’s aspirations to the realm of the unattainable in decades past. Yet the Supreme Court’s (SCOTUS) pending considerations of the limitations of executive power show the possibility that a future Trump Administration could deploy the vast resources of federal, state, and local governments to suppress, incarcerate, and deport political opponents, including communists. The New Republic, a liberal yet mainstream press outlet, is sounding the alarm. It states that the matter before SCOTUS:

“…increases the already high chances that the United States ends up with a dictator who will attempt to rapidly disassemble democracy in pursuit of becoming President for Life. It simultaneously increases the chances that yes, he will go ahead and violate the civil and human rights of political opponents and classes of people he calls Communists, Marxists, and fascists. People forget that the first German concentration camp (Dachau) was built in 1933 to hold members of the Communist and Social Democratic Parties, and Trump has made it clear that he’s building enough camps to process a minimum of 11 million people (migrants, at least for starters).”

Tannehill, B. (2024, April 26). The court just sealed everyone’s fate, including its own. The New Republic.

Despite America’s much-vaulted guarantees of civil liberties and protections for free speech, the limits of tolerance for dissent are sure to be tested in the coming months and years, and anyone standing in opposition to the new political order once again runs a palpable risk of falling victim to the machinations of anti-communism.