They Red-Bait So Hard Because They Are Fascists

Anti-Marxism Has a Life of its Own in Their World View

I recently let myself get quick-read spoofed by a satirical New York Times column in which the writer humorously imagined a Donald Trump spokesperson calling Joe Biden a “Marxist-Leninist-Maoist.”

The “Maoist” addition was the giveaway I should have recognized. No Trump messenger would have known to throw that in.

Still, there’s a reason I fell for it. It’s not actually all that hard to imagine Trump or someone in his campaign saying that.

After the New York felony verdicts came down on Trump, the top neo-fascist Trump spokesperson and policy wonk Stephen Miller went on Fatherland/FOX News to call for Republicans to to pull out all the stops “to go toe to toe with Marxism and beat these communists.”

Which communists? The militantly capitalist and imperialist Biden Democrats? The respectable New York state prosecutor Alvin Bragg, an effective enforcer of bourgeois law with no hint of radical aspirations? The twelve ordinary New York jurors who found the malignant orange-hued Hitler fan Trump guilty of 34 white collar felony counts?

Communists? Marxists? Seriously? So the bourgeois Dems and Bragg and the jurors are calling for a mass revolutionary movement to radically replace the capitalist mode of production and political superstructure with revolutionary socialism on the path to the liberation of humanity from all oppression and exploitation?

It’s not just a Miller thing. Trump has been railing against “Marxism,” “socialism,” and “communism” throughout this election cycle, falsely conflating the distinctly non- and anti-revolutionary Democrats with the “radical left,” claiming that US higher education is under Marxist domination, and generally talking in wild red-baiting language seemingly from another era.

After his arraignment on federal charges last year, Trump lashed out at Biden and Democrats by claiming that he was “being persecuted by Marxists and communists.”

After pleading not guilty in federal court in June of 2023, Trump told his supporters that Biden, “together with a band of his closest thugs, misfits and Marxists, tried to destroy American democracy.”

He added, “If the communists get away with this, it won’t stop with me.”

Just days later he told Iowa voters “Biden’s America” was on the verge of becoming a “third world Marxist regime” and “a tyrannical Marxist nation.”

“Other Republicans,” the Associated Press (AP) reported, “piled on with similar messaging. Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene …took to Twitter to lambast…the …COMMUNISTS DEMOCRAT CONTROLLED DOJ.’ Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis… has argued the U.S. risks falling victim to ‘woke’ ideology, which he has defined in interviews as a form of ‘cultural Marxism.’”

(Never mind that actual Marxism and “woke ideology” are fundamentally opposed to one another).

Republicans, the AP noted, “now…falsely claim Marxists are U.S. society’s ruling class.”

Trump has since channeled Hitler by promising to clear “Marxist vermin” out of the country, threatening to deport “Marxists, socialists and communists,” even those born in the USA (no birthright citizenship for commies!)

What’s it all about — this bizarre and false claim that one of the nation’s two dominant capitalist-imperialist parties is “Marxist” and even “communist”?

In my observation, the false conflation rarely merits explanation or even really mention in the mainstream media.

The AP report one year ago was an exception. According to “experts” cited by AP correspondent Ali Swenson, the communist Democrats’ narrative is:

·        an “attempt…to demonize an entire party with a description that has long been associated with America’s enemies.”

·        the reflection of “a long history of U.S. politicians calling opponents Marxist or communist without evidence — perhaps most infamously Sen. Joseph McCarthy, who led efforts to blacklist accused communists in the 1950s” — and thus “as American as apple pie in political communications.”

·        “carefully constructed to hit voters emotionally,” a reflection of how “Republicans’ message to the gut” while Democrats “message to the part of the brain that is about reason and empirical evidence.”

·        an attempt to cultivate support from Hispanics who have fled “socialist” governments in Cuba, Venezuela, and Nicaragua.

·        the decision “to pick an adjective that most people think describes something bad and try to associate it with the person you are denigrating.”

I suppose there’s something to be said for these “expert” opinions but how much?

The Cold War has been over for more than three decades and the notion that the USA faces a great Marxist/communist enemy does not resonate with much of the US electorate.

I doubt that “most [American] people” have any idea what Marxism and communism are about or how or why they are supposedly “bad.”

It seems doubtful that the “McCarthyite” messaging hits many US voters “in the gut.”

Extreme “red-baiting” of one of the nation’s two dominant political parties is hardly a continuous and consistent thread in American history. Presidents Reagan, George HW Bush, and George W Bush and their followers and message-makers did not accuse the Democrats of being communists and Marxists out to “destroy America.”

I suppose the “Hispanic voter” angle makes some sense but hardly enough to explain the extent to which the nation’s rightmost party has gone down the red-baiting path.

The AP report rightly quoted a former US Democratic Congressman to the effect that “railing against communists and Marxists” is politically ineffective. “That’s because it doesn’t easily sway moderate and independent voters who don’t see evidence that ties Democrats to those ideologies….Moderate voters may succumb to the Republican argument that Democrats are for more spending, but they’re not going to fall for the argument that Democrats are Marxists,” the Congressman said, adding that “The Republicans are overplaying their hand.”

I think something else is going on — something that the mainstream US capitalist media is not keen to report and reflect upon as it tries to induce mass mesmerization with the latest quadrennial two party presidential horse race.

This something else is that the Republican Party is basically a fascist party — classically so to a “shocking” degree’ — in the age of the Hitler fan Trump, whose top political advisers include flat out fascists like Miller and Steve Bannon. I’ve been documenting this transformation for years. The Republi-fascist Party of Trump checks off all the boxes: embrace of political violence; cult of personality; palingenetic ultra-nationalism; white supremacism; fake populism; Social Darwinism; conspiratorialism; anti-intellectualism; anti-urbanism/anti-cosmopolitanism/anti-globalism; sexual hysteria; militant patriarchy; a fierce commitment to “traditional values;” extreme border obsession; a rejection of previously normative bourgeois democracy, rule of law, and parliamentarianism; and ….one more classic fascist box that deserved but did not get a chapter of its own in Jason Stanley’s important study How Fascism Works: anti-Marxism.

Read Hitler’s autobiography Mein Kampf, Hitlers’ speech, and the propaganda of the Nazi Party from its birth in Weimar Germany through the rise and fall of the Third Reich. The Nazis, their Dear Leader, and their allies within and beyond Germany were literally obsessed with hatred for Marxism. We know that Donald “Vermin” Trump read many of Hitler’s speeches from the 1930s — speeches loaded with virulent anti-Marxism. Despite his general dislike for reading, he kept a book of Hitler’s speeches in his bedside table long ago.

This vicious anti-Marxism has a life of its own in the fascistic brains of Trump and top Trumpists like Miller and Bannon. The facts that the Democrats are anything but Marxists, that Marxism and communism are incredibly weak in the US and abroad right now, and that railing against Marxists and communists isn’t really effective in normal electoral US politics is all beside the point. Hatred of Marxism and communism and a determination to paint one’s political enemies as Marxists and communists or tools of “the radical left” is a critical part of the fascist world view. And while seemingly bizarre, preposterous, and “overplayed” anti-communism/-Marxism might not help Trump win voters this fall, it can certainly help motivate white nationalist Amerikaner thugs to use physical force to try to impact the election outcome in extra-electoral ways this and next year.